Thursday September 1007:30PM VARSITY 8

Saturday September 1212:15PM SCOTIABANK THEATRE 1

http://www.tiff.net/filmsandschedules/films/yearofthecarnivore

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Date: Friday, September 25, 2009

Time: 1:30pm – 3:00pm

Location: SilverCity – 355 Barrydowne Rd. Sudbury, ON

http://www.cinefest.com/

Location: Park Lane 8 Halifax, NS

http://atlantic.bside.com/2009/films/yearofthecarnivore_atlantic2009

When: Wednesday, September 30 from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm

http://calgaryfilm.com/2009/schedule/film/1526/

Year of the Carnivore, a B.C.-filmed comedy about a grocery-store worker who blackmails shoplifters into having sex with her, is among six films vying for this year’s $15,000 Borsos prize for best new Canadian film at the Whistler Film Festival.

Director-writer Sook-Yin Lee’s film stars American Cristin Milioti alongside Vancouver’s Ali Liebert and Will Sasso. Also vying for the prize is Defendor, an Ontario-filmed comedy from writer-director Peter Stebbings starring Woody Harrelson as a guy who thinks he’s a superhero, alongside Sandra Oh and Kat Dennings.

Both films premiered at the Toronto film festival, but are making their B.C. debuts at Whistler.

Also in the mix:

• Quebec director Alexandre Franchi’s The Wild Hunt.
• Machotaildrop, from the B.C. filmmaking team of Corey Adams and Alex Craig.
• Quebec director Sophie Deraspe’s Les Signes Vitaux (The Living Rate).
• Skid Love, from Ontario’s Ryan Arnold.

The Borsos award, named for the late director Philip Borsos, goes to the film picked by a jury that this year included producer-director Ivan Reitman, producer Niv Fichman and actor Jessica Paré. This year’s festival runs from Dec. 3 to 6.

© Copyright (c) The Province

http://www.theprovince.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Flesh%20toned%20movie%20vies%20Borsos%20prize/2175387/story.html

Saturday, December 5^th, 2009

Location: Whistler Village 8 – Theatre 7

http://filmguide.whistlerfilmfestival.com/tixSYS/2009/filmguide/Title/YY

The exuberant film critic’s tremendous new documentary The First Movie records the triumph of imagination, even over war.

Not many critics also get to be accomplished film-makers, but one such is Mark Cousins, a brilliantly exuberant movie writer whose passionate, celebratory and sensual relationship with the cinema is, I think, a refreshing corrective to the over-snarky tendencies of Fleet Street criticism. Many will know him from the sadly defunct BBC series Scene by Scene, which ran from 1996 to 2001, from his excellent one-volume cinema history The Story of Film and also from his collaborative partnership with Oscar-winning actor Tilda Swinton. It was this partnership which gave birth to the Nairn film festival.

This was, and is, an ongoing experiment in reinventing cinema as a grassroots audience experience, a way of bringing the cinema to people without the intermediate commercial panoply of exhibitors and distributors. Cousins and Swinton created a travelling roadshow, which basically rigged up a white sheet for a screen and a projector, setting up a makeshift auditorium where they can and welcoming everyone inside the tent – as it were. It was a way of finding for the cinema what Peter Brook wanted for the theatre: an empty space, a clear arena in which the artistry of the big screen can be experienced afresh, with films outside the Hollywood canon that would otherwise be beyond most people’s experience.

Something of this approach lies behind Cousins’s tremendous new film, The First Movie, a title which may be a playful twist on Dennis Hopper’s 1971 cult classic The Last Movie. It gets its premiere at London’s ICA Cinema next Monday, followed by a Q&A with the director himself. It promises to be a great evening – particularly with Cousins’s in-the-flesh presence. He is an endlessly stimulating speaker and a great live turn. I have never had a conversation with him without coming away feeling I have learned something, or had new mental avenues opened up to me.

His film is part documentary, part essay, part contemporary memoir, recording his visit to Goptapa in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, which was the subject of a horrendous chemical assault in 1988, part of Saddam Hussein’s genocidal assault upon the Kurds.

Cousins’s mission was to film the region – and he has some stunning, poetic images – and also to talk to the adults and the children there. But not just that. Cousins does not regard these children as the passive object of his camera lens: the exotic and mysterious bearers of innocence, which is how they are so often seen.

On the contrary. He asks them to be discerning viewers and even makers of films. In the spirit of his Nairn event, Cousins settled them down to watch movies like Astrid Henning-Jensen’s Danish film Palle Alone in the World (1949), about a little boy who wakes up in the world without grown-ups, Mohammad-Ali Talebi’s The Boot (1992) about a little girl who loses one of her red wellington boots, Francesco Stefani’s The Singing Ringing Tree (1957) and Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extra Terrestrial (1982).

Then he hands out some digital video cameras to the children and asks them to make their own films. The children come back with some remarkable stuff. Some elicit powerful first-person testimony from their mothers and grandmothers about what happened during Saddam’s murderous chemical rain. Another child, using a continuously held camera shot, devises a fascinating and revealing fable of a boy who, without friends or toys, confides his hopes, dreams and thoughts to the mud.

These are, as it happens, children who have never before seen a film – incredible as that seems to western content-consumers who hoover up films on their TVs and iPhones as soon as they can gurgle.

And all this is interleaved with Cousins’s own thoughts about growing up himself in a war zone; Northern Ireland. He says that as meat is tenderised for being battered, so he believes that children need not be hardened by this – and that the life of the imagination is what is real, more real than war.

If all this sounds pseudy, I can only say that it isn’t. This is a terrifically enjoyable and engaging film: open-minded and open-hearted, and utterly unlike the material on regular commercial release. Next Monday night’s showing of The First Movie promises to be a tremendous, exhilarating event. We can always do with those.

By Peter Bradshaw

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/dec/10/mark-cousins-the-first-movie

The film is made with the support of Scottish Screen, More 4, Knowledge, ARTE, The Canadian Television Fund, The Shaw Rocket Fund and YLE.

Time:6:45PM  |  Location:ICA, London

http://www.ica.org.uk/The%20First%20Movie%20plus%20Mark%20Cousins%20Q%26A+22984.twl

http://www.channel4.com/tv-listings/daily/2009/12/19

Set on the beautiful West Coast of British Columbia, White Cloud, Blue Mountain is a moving and meditatively filmed half-hour drama that explores emotional isolation between fathers and sons. James, a withdrawn professional in his late thirties, tries to reconcile with his dying father but is forced to confront his inability to communicate with his family and his own young son. Graceful, evocative cinematography and compelling performances reveal a man’s poignant journey into his emotional relationships.

Festivals & Awards

Festivals

1998 Screenings

• Moving Pictures Traveling Film Festival – Cambridge, UK

1997 Screenings

• Toronto International Film Festival – Canada
• CBC Canadian Reflections
• Vancouver International Film Festival – Vancouver, BC
• Mill Valley Film Festival – Mill Valley, CA
• Olympia Film Festival – Olympia, WA
• Rendez-vous with Madness Film Festival – Toronto, ON

Financing

Canada Council Media Arts Section, BC Cultural Services, the National Film Board Filmmaker’s Assistance Program, Telefilm Canada, CBC’s “Canadian Reflections”, Placer Dome Inc. (Canada).

Sales Info

Screen Siren Pictures Inc
Suite 300, 291 East 2nd Avenue, Vancouver, BC, Canada V5T 1B8
Phone: (604) 687-7591 | Fax: (604) 687-4937
info@screensiren.ca