Available Light Cinema by Yukon Film Society

AVA I L A B L E LIGHT CINEMA

YUKON FILM SOCIE T Y E VENTS S E P TEM B ER – DECEM B ER 2011

Available Light Cinema All screenings at the Yukon Arts Centre $10 YFS members and YAC Art Lover’s passholders $11 Non-members $5 Youth (under 16) www.yukontickets.com Yukon Arts Centre Box Office Arts Underground (305 Main St., downstairs)

Firehall Films and Workshops Venues, ticket prices, and workshop fees are listed next to the events on pages 8-11 of this program. The winter program for YFS events will be published in November, covering the schedule of events between January and May 2012. Information and updates for all YFS programs and activities: www.yukonfilmsociety.com.

Yukon Film Society Memberships YFS memberships are annual and require renewal by March 31. Exhibition membership $5 • Ticket discounts on film screenings and media art exhibition • Email updates on YFS events and opportunities Production membership $30 • Access to equipment and facilities: film and video cameras, sound, lighting and post-production equipment and facilities • Technical support • Discount on workshops • Email updates on YFS events and opportunities 2

QUEEN OF THE SUN

Welcome to Available Light Cinema Dear cinema-lovers. Your suffering is over. Yukon Film Society and Yukon Arts Centre have teamed up to create what this city has needed for a few years now. A place to see new release films and cinema classics that has comfortable seating, state-of-the-art projection and excellent sound on the biggest screen in the Yukon. We’ll present a full day of cinema at least one Sunday a month from September through May. At the afternoon matinee you’ll find film classics and family-friendly films. In the evening, you can catch a new feature documentary at the early screening. The second screening will bounce between new release ‘arthouse’ features from around the world, cinema classics for an adult audience, or even a second feature documentary. In addition to fall Available Light Cinema screenings, this guide also provides information on other YFS events; Firehall Films, co-presentations (pg 8), workshops and salons (pg 10). Breaking news on attending directors, added screenings and schedule updates can be found at alff.ca. This is where you’ll also find updates about the 10th anniversary Available Light Film Festival (Feb 6 to 12, 2012). Planning for anniversary programming is already underway. Available Light flickers brightly at the Yukon Arts Centre every month this fall and winter for your movie enjoyment. Thanks for supporting this new series! Andrew Connors, Programmer for Yukon Film Society 3

Sun, Sept 11

2 pm // Singin’ in the Rain DIR. STANLEY DONEN AND GENE KELLY, USA, 1952, 103MIN

This comedy musical starring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds is set in Hollywood during the transition from the silent era to the ‘talkies’ era. Although it was not a big hit when first released, Singin’ in the Rain is now frequently described as one of the best musicals ever made, topping the American Film Institute’s ‘100 Years of Musicals’ list.

6 pm // Louder Than a Bomb DIR. GREG JACOBS AND JON SISKEL, USA, 2010, 99MIN

This exhilarating doc about the 2009 Chicago high school slam poetry contest follows a handful of the 600 teenagers who participate in this annual event, as they begin working towards the competition, crafting their poems and their performances. From the beginning of the year, the preparation is intense. Each poet has something to prove. To witness these teenagers embrace the grace and power of words is a revelation. As you watch the poets work with their fellow writers, workshopping their poems in a collective, cooperative process, this riveting film pushes you to reassess what words can do, and more critically what young people can do. Winner of many ‘Audience Favourite’ awards at recent film festivals.

8 pm // The Tree of Life DIR. TERRENCE MALICK, USA, 2011, 138MIN

Hailed by critics the world over as the cinema event of the year. Cinema icon Terrence Malick’s existential epic has polarized critics and audiences with its fragmented, nonlinear narrative style. Speculated to be autobiographical,Tree of Life is a family drama, starring Sean Penn and Brad Pitt, that chronicles the origins and meaning of life by way of a middle-aged man’s childhood memories of his family living in 1950s Texas, interspersed with imagery of the origins of the universe and the inception of life on Earth. From the director of the iconic films: Days of Heaven, Badlands, and Thin Red Line. Winner of 2011 Palme D’or at Cannes.

Wed, Sept 14 7:30 pm // The Tree of Life ENCORE PRESENTATION

Sun, Oct 30

2 pm // Ghostbusters DIR. IVAN REITMAN, USA, 1984, 105MIN

Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, and Harold Ramis star in the 1984 science fiction comedy classic. Three eccentric New York City parapsychologists-turned-ghost capturers start their own paranormal exterminator service. Their first challenging gig is at the haunted apartment of a woman (Weaver) who soon becomes possessed by the demonic spirit in her home. Thereafter, the Ghostbusters’ office is visited by the EPA who arrests the team for supposedly housing dangerous chemicals in their basement and orders their ghost containment deactivated, unleashing hundreds of ghosts on the city.

4 pm // Get Animated! 2011 – Family Program VARIOUS, CANADA, 2011, 50MIN (ADMISSION BY DONATION)

NFB program of new outstanding animated films from across the country.

6 pm // Queen of the Sun DIR. TAGGART SIEGEL, USA, 2010, 82MIN

A documentary where beekeepers, philosophers, and scientists examine the global crisis of honeybees, who are the critical link in our agrian society. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us? is a pilgrimage around the world that unveils 10,000 years of beekeeping, highlighting how our historic and sacred relationship with bees has been lost due to highly mechanized industrial practices and effectively uncovering the problems and solutions in renewing a culture in balance with nature.

8 pm // Meek’s Cutoff DIR: KELLY REICHARDT, USA, 2010, 104MIN

Shot with stark, spare elegance, director Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy) brings us a slow-burn tone poem- following a group of lost pioneers in the barren desert of 1845 Oregon- that is enigmatic frontier cinema at its best. The stellar cast includes Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine and Brokeback Mountain) as a bonneted, tough-as-nails pilgrim, Rod Rondeaux as the silently impassive native man encountered and then captured by the group, and Bruce Greenwood as scruffy, McCabe-like blowhard Stephen Meek, whose disastrous trail misguiding is either plainly incompetent or purely malicious. 5

Sun, Nov 13

2 pm // Raiders of the Lost Ark DIR. STEVEN SPIELBERG, USA, 1981, 115MIN

One of the definitive action-adventure films of the modern era, Raiders is the first film in the Indiana Jones franchise. It pits Indiana, in Harrison Ford’s career defining role, against the Nazis, who search for the Ark of the Covenant (the biblical chest built by the Israelites to contain the fragments of the Ten Commandments), because Adolf Hitler believes it will make their army invincible. His quest takes him around the world into endless fantastic and life-threatening archaeological and political situations.

6 pm // Blank City DIR. CELINE DANHIER, USA, 2010, 94MIN

This documentary tells the long-overdue tale of renegade filmmakers who emerged from an economically bankrupt and dangerous moment in New York history. No Wave Cinema— from the late 1970s through the mid 1980s when the city was a wasteland of cheap rent and cheap drugs—was a movement that saw these directors craft daring works that would go on to influence independent film as we know it today. Featuring acclaimed directors Jim Jarmusch and John Waters, actorwriter-director Steve Buscemi, Blondie’s Debbie Harry, hiphop legend Fab 5 Freddy, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth & photographer Richard Kern. Fittingly, the soundtrack includes: Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell, and Sonic Youth.

8 pm // Down by Law DIR. JIM JARMUSCH, USA/GER, 1986, 107MIN

Jarmusch’s beautiful and groundbreaking 1986 feature is about the interaction between three convicts (Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni, John Lurie) in a Louisiana prison. Unemployed disc jockey Zack, played by the ever entertaining Tom Waits, and pimp Jack (John Lurie) end up in prison for being too laid-back to avoid being framed for crimes they didn’t commit. They end up sharing a cell with eccentric Italian tourist Roberto, whose limited command of the English language is both entertaining and infuriating. Filmed in crisp black and white, Down by Law evocatively captures the architecture of New Orleans and the Louisiana bayou to which the cellmates escape.

Sun, Dec 11

2 pm // Mon Oncle Antoine DIR. CLAUDE JUTRA, QUÉBEC, 1971, 104MIN

Jutra’s evocative portrait of a boy’s coming of age in wintry 1940s rural Québec has been consistently cited by critics and scholars as the greatest Canadian film of all time. Delicate, naturalistic, and tinged with a striking mix of nostalgia and menace, Mon Oncle Antoine follows Benoit, as he first encounters the twin terrors of sex and death, and his fellow villagers, who are living under the thumb of the local asbestos mine owner. Set during one ominous Christmas, this is a holiday film unlike any other, and an authentically detailed illustration of childhood’s twilight. In French with English subtitles.

6 pm // Project Nim DIR. JAMES MARSH, UK, 2011, 93MIN

From the Oscar-winning team behind Man on Wire comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who became the focus of a 1970s landmark experiment that aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. Following Nim’s extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, Project Nim is an unflinching biography of an animal we tried to make human. What we learn about his true nature—and indeed our own—is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling. Using extraordinary archival footage, James Marsh constructs a seamless narrative that twists and turns, and ultimately accrues the thematic and emotional arc of an epic. ~ Hot Docs

8 pm // The Future DIR. MIRANDA JULY, GERMANY, 2011, 91MIN

American Indie filmmaker and performance artist, Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know), writes, directors and stars in a film about LA couple Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) who, on deciding to adopt a stray cat, change their perspective on life radically; literally altering the course of time and space and testing their faith in each other and themselves. “The roots of July’s surreal sense of humour can be traced to the minimalist fables of Jim Jarmusch and Hal Hartley, but July puts her own distinctly modern imprint on the aesthetic, and the results are inspired.” ~ Montreal Gazette

Firehall Films and special programming Thurs, Oct 27

Old Firehall, 7:30pm

Art and Subversion: Films and Art Talk This evening of films and art talk is co-presented by the Yukon Arts Centre Gallery and the Yukon Film Society. The subjects of the films and talk are two women who began their work in the 1970s and whose artworks incorporated similar ideas and themes: dialogue with the self, history and fantasy, and female subjectivity in dream-like visual forms.

Sum of its pArts DIR. KIRBY HAMMOND, MANITOBA, 2011, 22MIN

Nova Scotia-based artist Nancy Edell ‘corrupted’ the traditional craft of rug hooking with her own unique brand of kinky and subversive humour. Her untimely death and what she left behind is where this story begins. A legacy of artistic creation sits in limbo, gathering dust and raising questions about what should become of all our stuff when we are gone. Art Talk: Director and former Yukoner, Kirby Hammond, will be in attendance to also present 3 short animations made by Nancy Edell in the 1970s and participate in a post-screening panel discussion about art and subversion as it relates to the work of these two artists.

The Woodmans DIR C. SCOTT WILLIS, USA, 2010, 82MIN

A fascinating, unflinching portrait of the late photographer Francesca Woodman, told through the young artist’s work (including experimental videos and journal entries) and remarkably candid interviews with her artist parents Betty and George (a ceramic sculptor and painter/photographer), who have continued their own artistic practices while watching Francesca’s professional reputation eclipse their own. $10/$8 YFS members. Available at the door.

Nov 10 & 11

Old Firehall, 7:30pm

Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry A manual animation performance by Daniel Barrow Winnipeg-based artist and Sobey Award-winner Daniel Barrow’s newest animation magically combines overhead projection with video and music. The live narration tells the absurd story of a garbage man with a vision to create an independent phone book chronicling the lives of each person in his city. In the late hours of the night, he sifts through garbage, collecting personal information and then traces pictures of each citizen through the windows of their homes as they sleep. What he doesn’t yet realize is that a deranged killer is trailing him, murdering each citizen he includes in his book, thus rendering his cataloging efforts obsolete. Co-presented with the Yukon Arts Centre. Adults: $22 / 60+ and under 12: $17 / ArtRUSH Teen: $5 At YAC Box Office, www.yukontickets.com, Arts Underground

Thurs, Jan 20 Old Firehall, 7:30pm Careful DIR. GUY MADDIN, MANITOBA, 1992, 100MIN

Described as Twin Peaks directed by Erich von Stroheim, Careful is a tale of star crossed lovers, duels, and incestuous obsession in a 19th-century alpine village where the wary residents must speak softly and tread lightly lest they cause an avalanche. Filmed in the style of an early German sound film, complete with intertitles, deliberately crackly soundtrack and ‘hand-tinted’ colour effects. $10/ $8 YFS members. Available at the door. 9

Workshops and Salons Introduction to the Panasonic P2 HD Camera INSTRUCTOR: EDWARD WESTERHUIS

Focusing on camera basics, this course covers all of the manual capture settings as well as transcoding footage from P2 cards into Final Cut Pro. Prior camera experience an asset but not required. Date: Wednesday, Sept 28, 5-9pm Cost: $50/$40 YFS & NFVIA production members Location: TBD

Introduction to Final Cut Pro Editing INSTRUCTOR: RICHARD LAWRENCE

This beginner-level course covers the basics of Final Cut 7, including importing footage, creating timelines, cutting, and adding transitions and title effects. Dates: Cost: Location:

Monday, Oct 3 and Tuesday, Oct 4, 5-9pm $100/$80 YFS & NFVIA production members TBD

Introduction to Location Sound Recording INSTRUCTOR: KIRBY HAMMOND

A foundational intro to the uses of different microphones, and how to get the best recorded sound on an independent production shoot. Date: Saturday, Oct 22, 8am-5pm Cost: $100/$80 YFS & NFVIA production members Location: TBD To register, contact Edward Westerhuis. Call 393-3456 or email tech@yukonfilmsociety.com.

LOTTE REINIGER

Rewind: Media Art Salons Salon (sa-’län) n. 1. a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to increase the knowledge of the participants through conversation. Investigating familiar mediums in search of innovative ways to tell stories, each evening revolves around a theme, studying a few examples, learning about the techniques, and sharing insights into the work. These events are free of charge and open to the public. Pre-registration is required. To register, contact Edward Westerhuis. Call 393-3456 or email tech@yukonfilmsociety.com.

Shadow Play Juxtaposing the history of shadow puppet animation with contemporary trends and techniques. Date: Location:

Tuesday, Oct 11, 6-9pm YFS Offices, 212 Lambert St., 2nd floor

Soundscapes, Part I Evoking a sense of environment in both narrative and experimental sound. Date: Location:

Thursday, Nov 10, 6-9pm YFS Offices, 212 Lambert St., 2nd floor

Soundscapes, Part II Create your own piece of sound art and present it at this sonic show and tell. Work must be under five minutes and based on your interpretation of the term ‘soundscape.’ Equipment and software are available for rent from YFS. Date: Location:

Wednesday, Dec 7, 6-9pm YFS Offices, 212 Lambert St., 2nd floor

COVER IMAGES: QUEEN OF THE SUN

Y U KO N F I L M S O C I E T Y.CO M 12