Monday, March 14, 2011

UWO Film Studies and WUFS Presents DUST with Academy Award Nominated Director Milcho Manchevski in Attendance 18 March

Film Studies and Western Undergraduate Film Society Present
DUST (2001)
Friday March 18 @ 4:30 PM in UC 84

Admission Free—All Welcome

Q&A with Milcho Manchevski* following
the screening


*Other credits include Before the Rain (1994): nominated for the Academy Award
for Best Foreign Language Film; winner of over 30 international awards including
the Golden Lion for Best Film in Venice.

Critical Commentarty on Dust
 In Dust's key sequences of storytelling, Manchevski presents one of the most critical reconstructions of a Balkan historical narrative in film. Here, Manchevski subverts the "Western genre" in the Balkan context through the confrontation of Eastern and Western histories: the Wild West collides with the "Wild East" of early 20th century Balkan warfare. Manchevski's innovative technique critically engages with the dual heritage of East-West heroism, patriotism, and "mythmaking" in genre film. This "exile of the genre" hints as well at a counter-hegemonic potential of creative reinterpretations and reconstructions of both Eastern and Western film traditions in a post-global cinema yet to come. 
Vojislava Filipcevic in Film Criticism http://filmcriticism.allegheny.edu/archives29_2.htm


Bio--
Milcho Manchevski wrote and directed the feature films "BEFORE THE RAIN" (1994), "DUST" (2001), "SHADOWS" (2007) and "MOTHERS" (2011).

"BEFORE THE RAIN" won an Academy-Award nomination and thirty awards, including Golden Lion for Best Film in Venice, Independent Spirit, FIPRESCI, UNESCO, best film of the year in Argentina, Italy, Sweden, Turkey, and other awards in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Poland, Puerto Rico, Russia, etc.

The New York Times included "BEFORE THE RAIN" on its list of the best 1,000 films ever made.

"DUST" was the opening-night film of the Venice Film Festival. Both "SHADOWS" and “MOTHERS” were the Macedonian Academy Awards entries, with “MOTHERS” screening in the Panorama section of Berlinale 2011.

Manchevski's films have screened at more than a hundred festivals, and have been distributed in close to 50 countries (theatrically, TV, cable and video).

His films are part of the curricula at numerous universities worldwide, and have been discoursed at a number of conferences. The University of Leipzig (Germany) and the European University Institute in Florence (Italy) hosted academic conferences dedicated, respectively, to "BEFORE THE RAIN" and "DUST."

Manchevski won awards for best experimental film (for "1.73") and best MTV video (for "TENNESSEE", which The Rolling Stone placed on the list of the 100 best videos ever).

He has published fiction, essays and op-ed pieces in New American Writing, La Repubblica, Corriere Della Sera, Sineast, The Guardian, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Pravda, etc.

Manchevski has staged performance art with the group 1AM and by himself.

He authored a (very small) book of fiction, "THE GHOST OF MY MOTHER" and two books of photographs "STREET" (1999) and “FIVE DROPS OF DREAM” (2010) which accompany the two photo exhibitions.

He has lectured at a number of universities, cinematheques, art museums and art institutes, most notably as a Head of the Directing Studies at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts' Graduate Film program.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Film Studies and English Present Margaret Atwood in Ron Mann's IN THE WAKE OF THE FLOOD

The Departments of Film Studies and English Present
Margaret Atwood in
IN THE WAKE OF THE FLOOD
A FILM BY RON MANN

Friday 21 January with director Ron Mann in Attendance
4:00 pm in UC 84
Admission Free—All Welcome
Watch the Trailer at: http://sphinxproductions.com/films/flood/


 “Taking us behind the curtain of Margaret Atwood’s travelling medicine show, ‘In the wake of the Flood' offers a candid, revealing portrait of the author as activist oracle — Atwood is the ultimate camp counseller, mounting a pageant to save the planet with a birdsong in her heart and a silent spring in her step.” - Brian D. Johnson
Synopsis
On the eve of her 70th birthday, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood set out on an international tour criss-crossing the British Isles and North America to celebrate the publication of her new dystopian novel, The Year of the Flood. Rather than mount a traditional tour to promote a book’s publication, Atwood conceived and executed something far more ambitious and revelatory—a theatrical version of her novel. Along the way she reinvented what a book tour could (and maybe should) be. But Atwood wasn't selling books as much as advocating an idea: how humanity must respond to the consequences of an environmentally compromised planet before her work of speculative fiction transforms into prophesy.


In each community she visited, Atwood joined volunteer performers in a loose-knit, grass roots production drawn from the text of her novel. With its mystical, Blakean overtones, Atwood’s theatrical dusplay acts as a neo-pagan ritual that seeks to shake the human race into an awareness of the fragile natural world and our vital connection to it. To bring her novel into a live setting, Atwood collaborated with Los Angeles composer Orville Stoeber to write a new style of devotional music influenced by the related genres of country ballads, gospel, jazz and folk. Each performance included a cast of local readers and singers taking the roles of different characters in key scenes from the novel. The events were primarily staged in cathedrals, adding a grand visual element to the proceedings and a layer of ceremonial gravitas.

From Edinburgh and London to New York City, Toronto and Vancouver, Atwood emerges as an earthy sentinel whose rare sensibility is always in the foreground: a life and art coalesced into a unity of medium and message.


Atwood's odyssey is now captured in Ron Mann's new film, In The Wake of the Flood. Rendered as a fly-on-the-wall cinéma vérité, In The Wake of the Flood mixes new footage, archival materials and evocative animation in featuring Atwood on the road and at home as an aging but buoyant literary rock star spreading a message of warning and hope as she staged and participated in the novel production.

For a recent interview with Margaret Atwood about her work and the film conducted by Melania Daniel: http://www.thelondoner.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2924255