blame canada! classic and contemporary cinema from the north country April 14 - May 4, 2000 photo: kitchen party

program notes This program has been curated by Kent Jones and Kathleen Murphy. For many supposedly sophisticated New Yorkers, the image of Canada remains a stereotype: a land filled with lumberjacks in ear muffs, trudging around the frozen tundra on their snowshoes, humming Gordon Lightfoot songs. But if you take a close look at the steady output of fine movies being made north of the border, the view changes: Canada is and has been just as much a nation in a state of permanent, dynamic, sometimes traumatic transition as the sprawling land mass immediately below. This series looks beyond widely known Canadian filmmakers--Cronenberg, Egoyan, Rozema and Maddin (although their work is represented in the program) to first-rank directors whose movies are rarely seen south of the border: John Greyson, Léa Pool, Robert Lepage, John Paisz, Paul Almond. Blame Canada! mixes the new-including Allan (Pump Up the Volume) Moyle's rollicking blast from Cape Breton NEW WATERFORD GIRL, Paisz' hilarious sci-fi parody TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN and several terrific recent documentaries--with classics and older works, some of which have remained unseen in these parts for too many years: Jean Beaudin's lovely J. A. MARTIN, PHOTOGRAPHE, Michael Snow's avant-garde epic LA RÉGION CENTRALE, Denys Arcand's hard-hitting RÉJEANNE PADOVANI, Léa (Emporte-Moi) Pool's ferocious LA DEMOISELLE SAUVAGE / SAVAGE WOMAN and the late Claude Jutra's extraordinary MON ONCLE ANTOINE. We'll also feature two films from the man who shot Jutra's classic, the great Michel Brault--POUR LA SUITE DU MONDE, the magnificent 1963 documentary he made in collaboration with Pierre Perrault, and his brand-new film THE LONG WINTER, a years-in-the-making historical epic. And we've also thrown in a healthy sampling of shorts, a form at which Canada has long excelled. Why are we blaming Canada? Because we think the allusion to the title of one of the great songs in the hilariously anarchic 1999 musical, South Park, Bigger, Longer and Uncut, evokes Canadian filmmaking in all of its idiosyncratic quirkiness, sly humor and potent independence. And also because Canada's made so many great movies!

mon oncle antoine the grey fox

program: NEW WATERFORD GIRL Allan Moyle, 1999, 97m Allan Moyle has powered more than one of his anarchic films with teenage energy, and NEW WATERFORD GIRL hits a groove so right and true that it makes most other adolescent movies feel condescending. The time is "that disaster of a decade, the 70s," in the indelicate words of the Atlantic Film Festival catalogue. The place is the glorious metropolis of New Waterford on Cape Breton Isle, which consists of a road, a store, a few bars, and a handful of restless teenagers who spend their time drinking, getting pregnant and passing out-not necessarily in that order. It's the kind of place that's bound to drive its brighter and more ambitious inhabitants, like 16-year old Moonie (Liane Balaban), out of their skulls. She gets a little support from a sympathetic teacher (Andrew McCarthy) but finds a kindred spirit when the Bronx's own Lou (Tara Spencer-Nairn) blows into town with her mambo-dancing mother Midge (Cathy Moriarty). The story is nothing new, but the execution and the performances, especially those of the two leads, are filled with freshness, empathy and combustible spontaneity. With Phil Touches Flo (1998; 7m): David Birdsell's award-winning film takes the simple action of a man tying his dog to a tree and its "aftermath," and builds a strange, multilayered, miniature "epic." Friday April 14: 6:30 Saturday April 15: 4:30 & 9 TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN John Paizs, 1999, 99m "In [this] exceptionally entertaining comedy, Paizs pays homage in equal parts to Ed Wood, David Lynch and 'Leave It to Beaver.' " -- Liz Czach, Toronto International Film Festival If you recall with guilty pleasure 50s sci-fi creature features such as Them!, The Mole People, and The Blob, you won't be able to resist the inspired silliness of TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN, John Paizs's brilliant spoof on an already demented genre. Something Very Strange is happening in Exceptional Vista, practically an economic ghost town since the nut-and-bolt factory closed down: folks are disappearing, leaving behind bodies that look like bloody leftovers from a pretty bizarre meal! Paizs populates this insanity with a pipe-smoking, pompously optimistic atomic scientist (super-hilarious Campbell Scott), a voluptuous heroine with a yen for the visiting brainiac and a curiously close relationship with her slow-witted brother, a police chief who composes and performs his own TV cop-show theme while on duty.... This is the caliber of humanity that has to go up against alien monsters in order to save the world! Known for Crime Wave (1985), the cult classic that satirized making it big in the movies, Paizs outdoes himself in this very bent take on a Canadian invasion of the body snackers. With Springtime in Greenland (1981; 24m): "Canada's first (take a breath) postmodern film" (Mark Peranson, Take One). A blast on nuttiness from one of the foremost members of the Winnepeg Film Group. Fri April 14: 8:45 Sat April 15: 6:45 KITCHEN PARTY Gary Burns, 1997; 87m "Scathingly funny satire...[with] dialogue...so dead-on it convinces you that contemporary suburbia just might be a sprawling, sterile anteroom to hell itself." --Stephen Holden, The New York Times Scott's mother vacuums her livingroom rug into patterns and forbids anyone to step on it, just one of the symptoms of her totally obsessive-compulsive personality. Scott's brother lives in the basement and socializes with no one. Happy Scott's leaving for college, so he decides to throw an unauthorized beer party for a few friends while his parents are visiting elsewhere. The festivities are undercut by the knowledge that any damage to the decor might doom Scott to a local university instead of an out-of-town campus, where he might have a chance to escape his monumentally dysfunctional family. Frightening and frightfully funny, Gary Burns' delightfully cynical second feature-the shadowside of Risky Business--leads you into a disquieting, nightmarish vision of middle-class suburbia. One of the faves in New Directors/New Films 1998. With Neighbors (1952; 8m): Two people get into a scuffle over who owns a flower in Norman McLaren's stop-motion classic. Sun April 16: 4:30 & 8:45 Mon May 1: 1 MON ONCLE ANTOINE Claude Jutra, 1971; 110m; a newly restored print Claude Jutra's now-legendary story of a boy named Benoit (Jacques Gagnon) who is forced to grow up overnight in 1940s northern Quebec. His early rite of passage comes one Christmas Eve, when he accompanies his uncle (Jean Duceppe) to a nearby farm to collect the body of a young boy. Jutra gets all the specifics of his story-a small asbestos mining-town where the general store is the center of the world, the hard-working uncle Antoine who wears many civic hats, including that of undertaker-with loving care, but there's no nostalgic glow here. Few movies have ever had such a powerful sense of winter-the feeling of cold creeping into your bones, the steady barrage of an unrelenting snowstorm that seems to be blinding the whole world. Shot by Michel Brault, MON ONCLE ANTOINE is a "memory" film of tremendous force, an experience that is as physical as it is emotional. Sun April 16: 6:30 RÉJEANNE PADOVANI Denys Arcand,1973; 90m Denys Arcand's ambitious, droll, deceptively languorous film is an early peak in the career of a very adventurous artist. Arcand takes us through an extended banquet thrown by construction magnate Vincent Padovani (Jean Lajeunesse), to celebrate the building of a new section of Quebec highway that begins the next morning. Padovani enjoys dinner with the mayor (René Caron) and other political luminaries as the persistent press is rebuffed by his assistant (Pierre Thériault). At the end of the evening, his estranged wife of five years, Réjeanne (Luce Guilbeault), turns up, eager to exchange a little confidential information for access to her children. The miracle of this movie, steeped in atmosphere and behavioral asides, is the way that it allows the local culture of patronage, in which gangsters, politicians and businessmen are indistinguishable, to slowly fade into view, like a developing photograph. A milestone in Canadian cinema. With Mindscape/Le Paysagiste (1976; 8m): Jacques Drouin uses the stunning pinscreen technique in this award-winning film about a painter who steps inside his own canvas. Mon April 17: 1 & 6 NÔ Robert Lepage, 1998; 85m Adapted from Lepage's controversial play The Seven Branches of the River Ota, NÔ is a raucous comedy filmed in black and white and color. Set in October 1977, NÔ intercuts the story of a young actress (longtime Lepage collaborator Anne-Marie Cadieux) playing in a cliché-ridden Feydeau farce at the 1970 Osaka World's Fair with that of her boyfriend, who is caught up in the events unfolding back home in Montreal, where French-Canadian separatists have kidnapped a British diplomat and a Quebec cabinet minister. Trying to fend off an amorous co-star isn't problem enough; Sophie discovers she is pregnant and tries to contact Michel, but he's so absorbed in unfolding political events her personal dilemma barely registers. Lepage's irreverent comedy soon begins to bubble with its own brand of frenetic farce, as the story jumps between East and West, working the contrasts between Japanese culture ("Noh theater, for instance) and Quebec's resistance--"No!"--to political assimilation. Liz Czach writes that "NÔ examines two very different worlds at the same moment in history, on both a political and intimate level. This compelling film explores the junction of languages, cultures and personal desires." With Sparklehorse (1999; 5m): Festival favorite Garoné Torrossian's latest film plays with sensuous layers of imagery to explore the mysterious arc between flatness and depth. Tues April 18: 1 Mon May 1: 3 THE GREY FOX Phillip Borsos, 1982; 90m Bookending Richard Farnsworth's award-winning 1999 performance in The Straight Story is this earlier jewel, a portrait of "gentleman bandit" Bill Miner. After a stellar career as a stagecoach robber sent him to the pen for a lengthy term, the well-seasoned Miner "emerges into the 20th century," as the foreword on this movie has it, and soon adapts to the new era--henceforth he robs trains! THE GREY FOX is a Western, you might say (actually Northwestern, set in spectacular terrain from Oregon to British Columbia), but its keynote is less action than reverie--a golden, autumnal tale as wise and essentially gentle as its protagonist. Breathtakingly photographed by Frank J. Tidy (The Duellists), it swept the 1983 Genies--Canada' s Oscars--and remains one of the dozen finest achievements of that nation's cinema. Tues April 18: 3 Wed April 19: 1 & 6:15 UNCUT John Greyson, 1997; 92m "Its combination of mind games, intellectual puzzles, secret codes and surrealistic imagery brings to mind a looser, lower-rent Peter Greenaway." -- Bob Graham, San Francisco Chronicle. UNCUT zealously covers the three "C's"--copyright, censorship and circumcision--with the fervor of an artistic crusade.... In what you might call UNCUT's oddball right brain, Michael Jackson's head is morphed onto the body of a Miss Nude World contestant, and there are on-camera interviews with a historian of gay erotica, an actress who impersonated Trudeau in a cross-dressing act and a painter who made an AIDS logo in the style of Robert Indiana's LOVE log and wanted people to steal it. The film's equally discombobulated left brain follows a bizarre love triangle among three young men in 1979 Ottawa. Freely drawing from a variety of film genres, including musicals, the sudsy melodramas and documentaries, and reconstructing them through a free-flowing anti-narrative fantasy and bright pop-art sensibility, this hard-hitting experimental romp packs a political wallop and also manages to culminate in an amazing, even tragic climax on the personal front, as Greyson's three Peters--a Pierre Trudeau groupie, a student and an artist--fall in love and land in jail. Thurs April 20: 1 & 6 J. A. MARTIN, PHOTOGRAPHE Jean Beaudin, 1976; 102m In turn of the century Quebec, Rose-Aimée Martin (Monique Mercure), mother of five, decides to do the unthinkable: abandon all of her domestic responsibilities and join her husband Joseph-Albert (Marcel Sabourin) on his yearly rounds as a travelling photographer. As they make their way through the countryside in their horse and carriage, visiting a factory, an itinerant hotel, a house in mourning or a celebration where Rose-Aimée breaks loose with singing and dancing, this couple find their way into a state of newfound conjugal harmony: this is the honeymoon they never had. Jean Beaudin's mid-70s classic is not only a marvelous portrait of a marriage, but a lyrical, delicately observant study of rural Québecois life. Thurs April 20: 3 & 8 QUAND JE SERAI PARTI..VOUS VIVREZ ENCORE / THE LONG WINTER Michel Brault, 1999; 120m Michel Brault's intimate epic of the Patriotes, who valiantly attempted to create a popular uprising in the "lower Canada" of 1838 after eighty years of British rule, attends to the small details of domesticity as carefully as it does to the grand sweep of history. Many years in gestation, Brault based his screenplay on actual diaries from the period: he puts historical conflict at the level of ordinary citizens, angry at having their dignity and their cultural identity stripped away by their occupiers-they're still smarting from the succesful revolt south of the border only 60 years before. Francis Reddy is very good as Everyman François-Xavier Bouchard, who unhesitatingly assumes the responsibility of upholding his heritage. But perhaps the real star of THE LONG WINTER is its look: rough, without the fussiness of most historical films, yet luminous, its imagery immersed in the small details of life in early 19th century French Canada, during one of the pivotal moments of its evolution. With filmmaker and actress Micheline Lanctot, and David Boutin as the leader of the uprising. Fri April 21: 1 & 6 Sat April 22: 6:30

cosmos la region centrale crash

POUR LA SUITE DU MONDE Michel Brault & Pierre Perrault, 1963;120m Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault's epochal 1963 film about life on the Île aux coudres goes far beyond the level of an ordinary documentary. POUR LA SUITE DU MONDE is a celebration of a people and their own unique way of life that they guard with pride, their beautiful, mellifluous French dialect, their profound connection with the traditions of their ancestors, and their generations-old practice of deep-sea fishing, in which everything is governed by the tides and the waxing and waning of the moon. But what makes this film so special is that it moves to the rhythm of these people's lives, and is organized with a logic that seems intimately tied to the mysteries of their existence. It is also visually ravishing. POUR LA SUITE DU MONDE has been all too seldom seen here, and we're proud to be presenting it in its original version. Fri April 21: 3:30 & 8:30 PICTURE OF LIGHT Peter Mettler & Andreas Zust, 1994; 86m "[Peter Mettler's] fascinating, beautiful and evocative documentary...is a mixture of science and poetry...." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader "Like the final sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, only on ice." - Peter Goddard, The Toronto Star "Northern lights set the screen on fire in this luminous-and quirky-documentary." --Bill Brownstein, The Montreal Gazette A beautifully filmed, hallucinatory documentary about two filmmakers' journey to Canada's artic in search of the Northern Lights, a natural phenomenon interpreted variously as visions, prophecies, spirits.... Liz Braun of the Toronto Sun writes that "LIGHT is full of images of magical and spiritual nature, that it's part cerebral travelogue, part poetry and entirely painterly.... PICTURE OF LIGHT is weird and it's good and it's smart...the sort of movie that bounces around from the finite to notions of the infinite in a fashion that's a bit like the way dreams work." LIGHT reflects on the paradoxes involved in trying to capture the natural wonder of the Northern Lights on celluloid. The majesty and mystery of the Aurora Borealis lead the film to a most unexpected and haunting finale which considers the future of our relationship to technology and nature, in an increasingly artificial or "virtual" world. With Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968; 16m): Joyce Wieland's film about "a band of revolutionary gerbils [who] escape their cat jailors and journey up the Hudson...it has some hard-to-forget, singular images" (Manny Farber). Sat April 22: 4:15 & 9 Wed April 26: 2:45 LE SEXE DES ETOILES Paule Baillargeon, 1993; 90m Baillargeon played the art-gallery owner in Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing and wrote Denys Arcand's Scene from Elsewhere; here, in her sophomore film, she unreels a poignantly comic coming-of-age movie like none you've ever seen before. Edging into adolescence, Camille (Marianne Mercier) idolizes her departed father and typically casts her mother in the role of everyday drag. As if the sexual identity crises of adolescence weren't enough, Camille's boyfriend comes off more femme than she does, and when she tracks down her dad (Denis Mercier), he's changed gender entirely. Marianne Mercier shines as the frightened child who ruthlessly tries to force her father back into the role that makes her feel safest. As the transsexual dad, Denis Mercier is superb--he inhabits his womanly shape and clothes with considerable grace and good humor. The slightest misstep--in direction, in performance--could have reduced these slyly sensitive rites of passage (Camille's and her father's) to sniggering caricature or deadly serious polemic. But Baillargeon's film remains consistently sure-footed, arriving at funny and chilling conclusions about the power of the pictures we have of ourselves and lovingly impose on others. Tues April 25: 1 & 6:20 Thurs April 27: 1 COSMOS Dennis Villeneuve, Jennifer Alleyn, Arto Paragamian, Manon Briand, André Turpin, Marie-Julie Dallaire, 1998; 100m Six stories / six slices of Montreal life intersect, thanks to Cosmos, an engagingly philosophical Greek immigrant who makes his living driving a taxi. The stories range from dark to quirky to sad to surreal: a sinister loner carries a carefully wrapped bouquet of flowers; a young woman's convertible breaks down on a crucial day; a high-powered lawyer runs into her sweet old flame; a shy, over-caffeinated filmmaker preparing for an interview is sucked into a TV studio cum hair makeover cum "techno" madhouse; a lovely girl and a gallant old man spend a magical evening together; Cosmos' cab disappears from its parking place. These urban adventures unwind as short fictions full of hilarity, terror, sadness, lunacy, romance and beauty-all filmed in the most luscious black-and-white textures. A tour de force, much lauded in New Directors / New Films 1998. Tues April 25: 8:15 Thurs April 27: 3:15 JUST WATCH ME: TRUDEAU AND THE 70S GENERATION Catherine Annau,1999; 77m JUST WATCH ME is a milestone documentary about the impact of Pierre Trudeau's dream of a bilingual Canada on a whole generation. Sounds dry? Think again. The highly idiosyncratic and personable folks who testify to their experience of "language immersion" and opinions about French-Canadian separatism speak passionately of love, life and ideals; their experiences are funny, sweet, above all, real. The political issues of separation, unification, alienation take on flesh and blood, as these thirtysomethings describe how love affairs and other personal experiences were affected by or reflected Canada's psychic split. Writes Katherine Monk of the Vancouver Sun: "Imagine, a movie that can accomplish what no current leader, political pedant or self-satisfied mud-slinger...has ever achieved; a heartfelt debate...that doesn't leave you either numb from boredom or weary from overworked eloquence." Sun April 23: 4:15 & 9:20 Wed April 26: 1 LA RÉGION CENTRALE Michael Snow, 1971; 180m "You are here, the film is there. It is neither fascism nor entertainment." -- Michael Snow Michael Snow's extraordinary, vision-expanding exploration of an inhuman landscape in the northern woods, courtesy of a specially constructed device that allows his camera to stay in continuous, swirling, sometimes hypnotic motion: gravity falls away, the moon pirouettes, and time and space reveal themselves as in no other film before or since. A favorite of Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Virilio and many, many other independent minds, this movie could be called avant-garde or structuralist, but whatever you call it, LA RÉGION CENTRALE is a masterpiece. Manny Farber writes that "LA RÉGION CENTRALE looks at landscape from a viewpoint it hasn't been looked at before, so that it's completely primoridal.... In a movie, a scene is usually just a fraction of the event; a movement is just a fraction of [that]. In this movie, movement takes over the whole screen, the whole movie. It's seeing things inside the cyclical movement of feeling or existence.... It's being caught up in a whole force of vision." Sun April 23: 6 Tues April 25: 3

la demoiselle sauvage / savage woman the white room twilight of the ice nymphs

CRASH David Cronenberg, 1997; 100m "It felt like a brilliantly acted, hardcore version of Belle de Jour." -André Téchiné A scandal in Cannes, banned in England, the film that almost gave Ted Turner a heart attack is the gutsiest of David Cronenberg's career, and that's saying something indeed. The setting is Toronto, but it's really a very brave new world, housing a new breed of people--James Spader's James Ballard and his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), Holly Hunter's Helen, Elias Koteas' Vaughan, and Roseanna Arquette's Gabrielle--who give their existences over to the exquisite rush of metal on metal, and dissolve the barriers between themselves and the cars they drive into sweet oblivion. The fact that Cronenberg was able to make any kind of movie out of J.G. Ballard's very sketchy novel is a feat in and of itself. The fact that he was able to make this movie--erotic, brilliantly controlled, impressively sober yet alarmingly sensual--is something to marvel at. Far from an immoral shock-fest, CRASH is really about something very touching: people trying to break through to the sublime. With the Oscar-nominated When the Day Breaks (9 1/2 m) Wed April 26: 9 Tues May 2: 3 Thurs May 4: 1 LA DEMOISELLE SAUVAGE / SAVAGE WOMAN Léa Pool, 1991; 100m In Léa Pool's haunting yet fierce investigation of psychosexual mysteries, river rapids and the glassine surface of a dammed lake set among the magnificently stark Swiss Alps image the circular journey of an outcast soul. Having murdered her abusive lover, Pool's heroine (Patricia Tulasne) suicides by driving her car over a cliff into the river. Resurrected, but beyond the pale, she plays out a complex game of trust with a dam engineer (Matthias Habich) who offers love and shelter, for a time, to this magnetic woman on the run. Pool charts the man's slow but sure movement back into known, unroiled waters, his lowland life and family. Terminally estranged from the forms of civilized life, Pool's wild girl is reclaimed by cold, silent heights and the swift river, as though her brief attachment had been only a dying dream. Wonderfully challenging performances, consistent complexity, a delicate anatomy of love, commitment and betrayal. --Kathleen Murphy, Film Comment Fri April 28: 1 & 6 Sat April 29: 4:15 WHITE ROOM Patricia Rozema, 1990; 110m "A suburban gothic fairy tale, a work of dark, conflicted magic that might have been cut from Blue Velvet by Edward Scissorhands.... A lovely experiment aided by Kate Nelligan and Maurice Godin." - Rita Kempley, Washington Post Rozema killed with her first film, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (1986), a precious, undemanding exercise in kooky whimsy; unfortunately, her second, far more ambitious outing went almost unnoticed, though it looks forward to 1999's sharply realized Mansfield Park. Trying to make a break from over-protective parents who live in a perfect blue house, Norman Gentle (Godin) yearns to be a writer and, towards that end, becomes something of a Peeping Tom, "slipping into the darker side of curiosity." One night, he witnesses--impotently--the rape and murder of a famous singer (Margot Kidder); later, he takes up with her mysterious friend (Nelligan), owner of an overgrown garden and a strange, beautiful "white room." When their private idyll is threatened by public exposure, Rozema's modern urban fairy tale, lushly envisioned, turns dark and harrowing. WHITE ROOM examines the dangers of romanticising what one watches and obsession with celebrity; the film mirrors us all as voyeurs, complicit in the way fame and frames, media madness, can drain the life out of reality and relations. This is postmodern absurdity at its most mocking--and exhilarating. Fri April 28: 3:15 & 8:15 Sat April 29: 6:15 ISABEL Paul Almond, 1968; 108m Genevieve Bujold stars as a deeply conflicted young woman in this genuinely unnerving psychosexual rite of passage that ends in a very ambiguous catharsis. Returning to her parents' old homestead on the rugged Canadian coast, Isabel is haunted by ghosts and chilling images drawn from a familial history of madness, incest and violent death. The past seems to infect the present at every turn, and soon a young man bearing a strange resemblance to Isabel's deceased brother arrives from out of nowhere to court her. Paul Almond, Bujold's husband at the time, creates a terrific sense of charged landscape and seasonal change that reflect Isabel's uneasy state of mind, body and soul. A masterfully disturbing evocation of sexual repression and hysteria that recalls Repulsion, The Turn of the Screw, and Juliet of the Spirits. Sat April 29: 8:30 Sun April 30: 6:15 Wed May 3: 1 TWILIGHT OF THE ICE NYMPHS Guy Maddin, 1997; 91m The latest offering from Guy Maddin, Winnepeg's poet of decorous delirium, is set in the mythical land of Mandragora, where the sun refuses to go down. While political exile Peter Glahn is on his way back to his homeland, he falls in love with the bewitching Juliana (Pascale Bussières), and soon finds that his fellow Mandragorans have all fallen under a romantic spell: his sister Amelia (Shelley Duvall), who is ardently pursued by Cain Ball (Frank Gorshin), the handyman on her ostrich farm, longs for Dr. Solti (R.H. Thomson), a mesmerist, who lusts after Zephyr (Alice Krige), who has betrothed herself to the forest. A cult favorite around the world, Maddin weaves netherworlds out of the faded color and jumpy continuity that were a necessary condition of the battered prints of 30s films that he absorbed as a child. This is one of his loopiest and most beautiful films, somewhat like Bergman made over by Maxfield Parrish, and a touching resuscitation of Duvall, Krige and Gorshin, three great figures of the recent but seemingly distant past. With Odilon Redon (1995; 3m): Guy Maddin employs his customary "aesthetic of poverty" in this typically idiosyncratic tribute to the painter; and Hospital Fragment (1999; 4m): Another beautiful bit of celluloid from the maestro of Winnepeg, Guy Maddin--something about fish, muscled arms and sexual transformation, it's like a page ripped from Lewis Carroll. Sun April 30: 4:15 & 8:30; Tues May 2: 1 CALENDAR (Atom Egoyan, 1993; 75m) Ironically, Atom Egoyan's 1993 masterpiece is the most spontaneously generated of his features, one in which he plays the male lead--a petulant photographer whose marriage falls apart during an assignment to shoot a dozen historic Armenian churches for a calendar. CALENDAR basically oscillates between two time frames: in Armenia, and scenes in Canada afterward, in which the photographer repeatedly goes through the same romantic ritual with a number of other women. One of the best movies made anywhere about tribalism and its perils, this is at once hilarious and painful, fresh and beautiful--an apotheosis of Egoyan's preoccupations with identity, sex and representation--Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader. With A Portrait of Arshile (1995; 4m): Atom Egoyan's poem to his son Arshile, named after Arshile Gorki, over a letter read by the filmmaker and his wife Arsinée Khanjian. (April 19 only) Wed April 19: 3 & 8:15 Thurs May 4: 3:10