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Guidelines by Jean-François Caissy
This post is the second in a series on Hot Docs 2014 films that reorganize and reimagine the limits of documentary. This quiet, patient NFB-produced film by Quebec visual artist and filmmaker Jean-François Caissy watches adolescents in and around a high school in rural Quebec. The film is stitched together as a series of observant…
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The Measure of All Things by Sam Green
This post is the first in a series on Hot Docs 2014 films that reorganize and reimagine the limits of documentary. The Measure of All Things is not so much a screening as a feature-length “live documentary” enacted at the Isabel Bader Theatre early in the festival’s run. U.S. filmmaker Sam Green, best known for his Academy Award-nominated The…
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Really Seeing: An Interview with Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer about All The Broken Things
SP: In your remarkable and moving All The Broken Things, Toronto’s CNE, bear-wrestling, Agent Orange, and Bo’s family life and history all work together to filter sadness, rage, love, regret, guilt, and joy to a pure and human core. What was the writing process like? Did you ever find a tension between the documentary facts…
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We Can Never Tell the Entire Story of Slavery: In Conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip
M. NourbeSe Philip is an Afrosporic Caribbean writer/poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist known for her dedication to social justice, as well as for her experiments with literary form, particularly her well known 1989 text, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. In all of her work she examines themes of gender, race, colonialism, and the…
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Rereading Fear of Flying: On Not Being Pregnant in Mid-Air With Isadora Wing
“One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you’d opened your old diary…” –Anne Fadiman, “On Rereading” The…
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The Razor’s Edge: The Erratic Brilliance of Martin Scorsese
It all begins in a bloody bathroom. A young man shaves at a mirror, his body arched over a porcelain sink. With each new stroke, a torrent of blood gushes down his cheeks, streaking across the tiles in a crimson cascade. A romantic ballad floats over the soundtrack and the young man’s gaze is as…
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Portrait of a Record Store: Soundscapes
Soundscapes (572 College Street) is for all intents an art gallery that treats cover-art like Pollocks and Mirós. Step through the ever open front door (10AM-11PM daily) and notice how books, records and CDs are stacked vertically so your neck doesn’t tire from looking down. Observe the two kinds of light, the fluorescent rectangles across…
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Maritime Life at Fredericton’s Westminster Books
Westminster Books, 445 King St, Fredericton, New Brunswick Westminster Books, Fredericton’s only independent bookstore that focuses on new books, has been a community staple for over thirty years. The brother-in-law of the current owner, Janet North, opened the store in 1975. He ran it for two years before moving back to Ontario and selling the…
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Hidden in Plain Sight: The Dedalus Book of Lithuanian Literature
Reviewed in this essay: The Dedalus Book of Lithuanian Literature, edited by Almantas Samalavičius (Dedalus, 2013) If Alice Munro’s recent Nobel win demonstrates that writing about small places can illuminate the human condition internationally, then the same can be said of writers working in languages whose speakers are not numerous. The literatures of small countries…
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Tijuana’s Borderline Personality: A Review of Tijuana Dreaming
Reviewed in this essay: Tijuana Dreaming, edited by Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo (Duke, 2012). Over the last few decades, Tijuana has mutated more than any other city in Mexico. No longer the family-friendly day-trip it was in the 60s, and no longer the international art hotspot it was in the 90s, the city has…
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A Bibliotherapist’s Apothecary: The Novel Cure from A to Z
Reviewed in this essay: The Novel Cure by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin (Canongate, 2013) As 2014 commences and with it our lists of things to do and things to do better, here is a self-help book of a different sort. Berthoud and Elderkin have compiled a medical handbook for those who prefer to ease their aches and pains with…
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CanLit Canon Review #19: Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that have shaped this country. Leonard Cohen’s second and final novel, Beautiful Losers, published in 1966, is experimental and difficult. It is also mesmerizing, though, because of its swoon-worthy writing and enthusiasm for filth. You get this: “Come…