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THIS IS NOT A MEAL!
Documentary, El Bulli: Cooking in Process;
Gereon Wetzel, Filmmaker.
by Simone Keiran
♫ A law was made a distant moon ago here:
♪ July and August cannot be too hot. ♫
Overlooking a half-moon cove called Cala Montjoi, near Roses, along Spain’s lush Costa Brava, there was once a restaurant open only six months of the year. They accepted reservations one single day out of the entire year and, yet, filled every available space. The white-washed adobe building with floor-to-ceiling windows floated cloud-like under towering arbutus on a cliff with stunning views of the warbly mermaid-filled Mediterranean.
A WILD CSÀRDÀS OF REVENGE
Calgary International Film Festival’s Presentation of
A Halába Tábcoltatott Leány (The Maiden Danced to Death)
Laszlo Zsolt (Gyula Udvaros) and Bea Melkvi (Mari) on the Banks of the Danube.
Hungarian and Slovenian folk dances are so intricate, it takes years of practice to acquire the necessary precision and dexterity before the dancers can proceed at the breakneck speed of a professional company. One misstep, one forgotten element of movement, one careless moment of distraction and a Rube Goldberg’s progression of disasters unspins. When everything goes perfectly, however, the dance leaves viewers breathless, pulses racing like the dancers themselves.
Sunday, 25th September, 2011
Globe Theatre Upstairs
By Simone Keiran and Aidie Keiran-Arney
A collective theme runs through the short movies crafted by young filmmakers for the 2011 Youth by Youth Film Competition, an annual feature of the Calgary International Film Festival: the problems they perceive are apocalyptic in nature, overwhelming in scope, and hopes are fragile and tenuous. Even at the elementary school level, they are anxious to reach out and overcome the experience of alienation between people. The most innocuous and lighthearted of the films had philosophical inquiry at their core, not to mention crushing social critiques and violent explosions. These young filmmakers have wrestled and wrangled the monstrous scale of these problems into scenes and stories small enough to fit through the camera iris. The results were surprisingly elegant and well-realized.
Published in Avenue Magazine, Citizen Feature, June 2004.
Screenplays often sell at meetings that last no longer than the time needed to make a good first impression. For aspiring movie moguls, the trick is getting the meeting. Now, a local filmmaker has come up with a way of making that easier.
Photo: Brent Mykytyshyn
Signe Olynyk, Executive Producer, The Great Canadian Pitchfest
