Lisa Moore
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A legendary songwriter and performer restored
In Bird on a Wire, British director Tony Palmer (Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels) documents Leonard Cohen’s 1972 European concert tour. A version of the film saw an original limited release in 1974, and from there was thought to have disappeared forever in the dustbin of history.
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It feels like watching something dying
Kevin McMahon’s Waterlife is a wonderful, if bittersweet, film.
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Works of painstaking wonder
As part of the National Film Board’s Get Animated! festival, the Winnipeg Film Group has assembled a collection of recent work by students in the Red River College Digital Arts Program, the Communication Multimedia Program at Collège St. Boniface and several fresh pieces from individual Winnipeg animators as well.
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An ode to rural life and love
Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan is billed as a love story, but it’s far from a typical onscreen romance. The Tulpan of the movie’s title is a young woman whose love is pursued by Dvortsevoy’s protagonist, a young Khazak sailor named Asa, but the film’s focus is not their courtship, but Asa’s life as a would-be shepherd. Tulpan is more of a love letter to agricultural life on Kazakhstan’s steppes than a story of human passion.
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Punk’s powerful influence, from Canada to Indonesia and back again
Douglas Crawford’s documentary The Punks Are Alright traces the influence of punk music around the world, from Ontario to Jakarta, Indonesia. The film opens with Hamilton’s Forgotten Rebels, part of punk’s original wave in the late 1970s, and brings us to unlikely places thousands of kilometers and decades away.
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Mothers&Daughters
I have to confess that I initially rolled my eyes at the premise of Carl Bessai’s Mothers&Daughters.
