Galen Johnson
2021Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton
Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson
Guided by the spirit of “The Cuadecuc Manifesto” (coined by co-director Evan Johnson and inspired by Pere Portabella’s 1970 experimental cult documentary, Cuadecuc, vampir), Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton is a strange, stirring behind-the-scenes look at Paul Gross’s new feature, Hyena Road. Shot on location at CFB Shilo near Brandon, Manitoba, and in Aqaba, Jordan, the film mixes deep contrast black-and-white expressionism with wry and raw western revisionism reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah, as it summons unwieldy, psychedelic energy from the main event. [TIFF]
Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton
Seances
Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson
Mathieu Amalric, Céline Bonnier
Seances, co-created with the National Film Board of Canada, presents a wholly new way of experiencing film narrative. By dynamically generating a series of film sequences in unique configurations, potentially hundreds of thousands of new stories are conjured by code. Each will exist only in the moment—no pausing, scrubbing, or sharing—offering the audience one chance to see the generated film. This project, co-created by the ever imaginative Guy Maddin, is a visual discourse on the impact of loss within film. All the sequences pay homage to lost silent films from the early day of cinema. Seances is nostalgic but it is also frequently hilarious. Part of the joy and sadness of Seances is that many possible narratives are created but they can be only viewed once before they disappear forever.
Seances
The Green Fog
Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson
A tribute to a fascinating film shot by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, and to the city of San Francisco, California, where the magic was created; but also a challenge: how to pay homage to a masterpiece without using its footage; how to do it simply by gathering images from various sources, all of them haunted by the curse of a mysterious green fog that seems to cause irrepressible vertigo…
The Green Fog
Accidence
Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson
Adam Brooks, Jon'Nathon Stebbe
A murder has been committed on a balcony. But it is only one of the many balconies attached to a large apartment block. Strange things are transpiring of each of them on loop. As the eye attempts to take them all in, the murder soon seems entirely unimportant.
Accidence
The Rabbit Hunters
Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson
Isabella Rossellini, Gilles Hebert
A deceased filmmaker experiences a posthumous dream in which he attempts to reunite with his wife. (Homage to Italian film director Federico Fellini in the year of the centennial celebration of his birth.)
The Rabbit Hunters
Thursday
Galen Johnson
Thursday shot from filmmaker Galen Johnson's high-rise apartment during COVID-19 “lockdown” in Winnipeg, captures people going about their daily routines in the city's eerily empty streets, yards and parking lots, on their balconies and on the riverbanks. The extreme distance and the diminutive scale of humans is paired with sound close-ups—a combination that embodies the strange, heightened intensity of feeling of the time, knowing an era-defining tragedy is happening yet being so physically removed.
Thursday
