Monday, January 13, 2025
OFF TRACK
Cinémathèque québécoise
| 7:00 PM: | Twilight |
| (7:20 PM): | A Man Imagined |
| (8:30 PM): | Two Cuckolds Go Swimming |
The world is small within the confines of normalcy. But the fringe extends endlessly, requiring but an outstretched hand to venture therein, where one can discover the uncanny wonders lying on the other side of the tracks. In this program, dedicated to the art of reframing marginality, four filmmakers follow three singular characters (a hiker, a homeless man, and a porn star), who appear lost in hostile territories, which they actually navigate with ease. One is guided into these vaguely familiar, but wholly cathartic spaces, amidst concrete and nature, solitude and friendship, vagrancy and freedom, fantasy and domesticity, through a ghostly Korean forest, a hallucinated Montreal and a godforsaken Cape Breton, all of which become full-fledged characters, little pocket universes of their own.
- The screening will be followed by a conversation moderated by Ariel Esteban Cayer (Programming Director) with filmmakers Melanie Shatzky, Brian M. Cassidy and Winston DeGiobbi.
TRIPLE BILL
Twilight
Park Sye-young
17 minutes, South Korea, 2024
Korean, with English subtitles
International Premiere
A man and a dog walk to the tip of the mountain every evening. There is a light that shines at sunset. They are looking for it, but the sun has set and the forest is deep.
With Park Yoon-man, Sarangee
Festivals: Jeonju 2024
A Man Imagined
Melanie Shatzky, Brian M. Cassidy
62 minutes, Quebec, 2024
English, with French subtitles
Quebec Premiere
A Man Imagined is a bracingly intimate and hallucinatory portrait of a man with schizophrenia surviving amidst urban detritus and decay. Made in close collaboration with 67-year-old Lloyd, this immersive documentary follows the jagged path of a decades-long street survivor, across harsh winters and blistering summers, as he sells discarded items to motorists, sleeps in junkyards and lapses into near-psychedelic reveries. Melanie Shatzky and Brian M. Cassidy return with yet another masterwork redefining the possibilities of documentary filmmaking.
Festivals: IFFR 2024, DOXA 2024, Calgary International Film Festival 2024
- Filmmakers in attendance
Two Cuckolds Go Swimming
Winston DeGiobbi
82 minutes, Canada, 2025
Original English version
World Premiere
Adult film star Molly Chambers flies home to Cape Breton to visit her mom, a singer in a local band. The trip is immediately complicated by the presence of Sunshine, an embittered ex-boyfriend loitering in her childhood bedroom, as well as Bo, a 40-something guitarist in her mother’s band. Follows a parade of characters from her past that force her to examine her own attachments to home — most of all, a toxic generational pattern that threatens to repeat itself — in this fragmented drama told in a register at once inventively austere, angst-ridden and dreamy.
With Deragh Campbell, Stephen Melanson, Casey Spidle, Lindsay McMullin, Mickey Hogan
- Filmmaker in attendance
