Your handy one-stop-shop for film news, interviews, articles, and videos from the week that was.
Before he was a mainstay at Cannes, Xavier Dolan had himself a side hustle: voicing the character of Stan for the Quebec version of South Park. A decade on, he’s returning to world of episodic storytelling with The Night Logan Woke Up, an adaptation of Michel Marc Bouchard’s theatre production. Dolan will write and direct all five episodes.
Never satisfied to restrict himself to one medium, Chris Marker tried his skilful hand at a range of creative pursuits. As Isabel Ochoa Gold details for Criterion, “He made dozens of films, but he also produced photo books, articles of journalism, travelogues, novels, an AI chatbot, a Second Life island, and this CD-ROM.” “This” CD-ROM would be Immemory, which Gold revisits in the article while addressing just how vulnerable digital media is to obsolescence and extinction.
On the subject of groundbreaking work, Jason Sanders examines Christopher Kahunahana’s Waikiki for Filmmaker Magazine. The first feature by a Kanaka Maoli filmmaker, it lays waste to the idea of Hawaii being a paradise. In explaining his approach to storytelling, Kahunahana shares, “The literal translation of the Hawaiian word makawalu is ‘eight eyes.’ This is a major simplification but essentially, makawalu speaks to the need to look at things from at least eight different perspectives. These perspectives arenʻt limited to humans but include the concepts of time, or even the natural elements of the planet. Our Hawaiian stories and legends don’t always fit into simple A-B-C structure.”
With our neighbours to the south celebrating Thanksgiving weekend, Indiewire takes the opportunity to compile “21 Reasons Film and TV Lovers Should Be Thankful in 2020”. Given the challenges this year has presented, it’s easy to lose sight of its highlights which range from Parasite becoming the first foreign-language film to take home the Best Picture Oscar (yes, that was actually this year) to The Queen’s Gambit doing for chess what Stranger Things did for Dungeons & Dragons to Borat humiliating Rudy Giuliani (giving him a brief break from doing that himself).
And, just in case you’d ever wondered what Vancouver might look like during a pandemic… Erm… Anyway… The trailer has just dropped for Chad Hartigan’s Little Fish, a sci-fi romance about an outbreak resulting in memory loss. Apparently, the virus doesn’t erase any traces of Vancouver from the background of scenes.
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