Jean-Claude Lauzon’s highly praised film tells the strange story of Léolo, a young boy from Montréal. Told from Léolo’s point-of-view, the film depicts his family of lunatics and Léolo’s attempts to deal with them. Not one individual in the boy’s life is well adjusted. His brother, after being beaten up, spends the film bulking up on growth protein. The grandfather hires half-naked girls to bite off his toenails and, in a brutal rage, almost kills Léolo. As he witnesses his family decay around him, Léolo retreats into himself and the fantasy world he has constructed.
Category: Fantasy
This short, written and directed by Christine Parker (Channelling Baby) takes an allegorical look at the creative process. A writer has a korero with a trickster spirit guide Hinekaro (voiced by Rena Owen), and conjures worlds from the words she inks on a page. In her imaginative struggles she’s visited by a ruru owl and her younger self, and other creatures are brought strikingly to life via special effects (beetles from a book, an eel hiding in a toilet bowl). Hinekaro was adapted from a 1991 short story by Booker Prize-winner Keri Hulme.
Matacanes dies and goes to heaven just to discover that it was not as he expected, and everyone there is revolutionized lately. Peter explains that God was concerned about the progress of the world, and decided to send a second son to Earth. However, Jesus hears and does not agree, as they would have to rewrite history.
Etta is an elderly acrobat incarcerated in a care home. One night, a ghostly presence brings Etta into contact with Alice, a young night nurse. Etta discovers that Alice’s touch brings ecstatic, disturbing memories to life, but Alice has a morbid fear of physical contact.
TV adaptation of Bruce Jay Friedman’s off-Broadway play. Tandy, Merideth and assorted others unexpectedly wake up in a steambath with no easy exit. After spending some time there, it becomes clear that the steambath is a sort of Afterlife, where indifferent souls come to tell their stories to God who happens to be the attendant picking up the towels.
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.
The film tells about two brother doctors, one of whom operated on a boy, and the other assisted him. A blood transfusion was necessary and the surgeon poured the boy blood from the wrong group, as a result of which the boy died, and the brothers’ life changed. The first became a kerosene salesman, the second – the chairman of the City Council.