A juggler in a park opens his magic box and takes out 3 balls. The audience marvels at his dexterity, until one ball escapes. The mutinous ball takes on magical properties as it draws the juggler into a series of adventures with many levels of meaning: appearance, fantasy and love. Without words.
Tag: CANADA
In this offbeat thriller, Halley Fischer is a schoolteacher at an elementary school in Winnipeg where children have been disappearing under mysterious circumstances. Francis is a single father and classical pianist who supplements his income playing in cocktail lounges. Francis and Halley meet when his daughter is enrolled in her class, and Halley finds herself strongly attracted to the musician, even after learning of his unusual sexual tastes. But the more Halley finds out about Francis, the more she begins to wonder about both him and his highly domineering mother.
Rose Hindmarsh finds herself at the centre of a controversy when she meets author Sarah Maloney as she investigates the life of Mary Swann, an obscure poet who was brutally murdered in a small town in rural Ontario.
Wavelength is anything but simple, however, as Snow’s statement of intention suggests. He describes the film as “a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas.” The spine of the film is its famous zoom from a fixed camera position facing a wall with four tall sash windows. Over the course of the film, the angle of view narrows until the frame is filled with a black and white photograph of waves pinned up between the middle two windows. Other features of the room, in which four events involving people take place, are sloughed off. The spectator is led to concentrate on this central element, the photograph—it has been there all along—until the image is washed out and the film comes to an end.
Jo is a creative girl bound for art school who enjoys practicing her skills by reproducing famous paintings by Vincent van Gogh. While she’s working on one such picture in public, a stranger purchases some of her pieces. Initially overjoyed, Jo becomes distraught when she realizes her artwork is making millions on the black market. As Jo and her best pal, Felix, try to track down the pictures, they get some supernatural help from Van Gogh’s ghost.
Canadian poet Leonard Cohen who now resides on the island of Hydra in Greece, is shown in his native city of Montreal. The program explores Cohens childhood and his subsequent development as one of Canadas leading new writers. The film takes viewers to the house Cohen was brought up in as well as to the places of Montreal he enjoys frequenting his favorite bistro, a three dollar-a-day hotel, the public park, the exclusive section called Westmount, and a Greek grocery store. Cohen himself is shown at a recording session, at public readings of his poetry, displaying home movies of his childhood, and commenting on university life. He also reflects on his visit to Cuba, his girlfriend in Greece, his obsession with danger and his friends and their personalities.
Marie Chapdelaine leaves her rural Quebec village and travels to Montreal to find her estranged lumberjack father who disappeared seven years ago. She meets Armand St-Amour, a former friend of her father and the owner of a country-and-western bar called the Rodeo Club. Armand takes the opportunity to exploit the naive and innocent young girl and tells her that if she works for him as a topless singer he will put her in touch with her father’s mistress who will know where he is.
This documentary is a portrait of Point St. Charles, one of Montreal’s notoriously bleak neighbourhoods. Many of the residents are English-speaking and of Irish origin; many of them are also on welfare. Considered to be one of the toughest districts in all of Canada, Point St. Charles is poor in terms of community facilities, but still full of rich contrasts and high spirits – that is, most of the time.