Thursday, January 16, 2025
STILL LIFE
Cinéma Moderne
| 7:00 PM: | Base Station |
| (8:20 PM): | Sept promenades avec Mark Brown |
It’s hard to tackle environmental issues without claiming a symbiotic relationship between human beings and their ecosystem, not only as dwellers of the land, but as thinkers and artists within it. That is the objective of this program, which invites us on a long hike alongside nature’s refugees and admirers alike. Through a seemingly paradoxical form of digital organicity, the films’ mise-en-scene approaches flora as a living space of fickle, changing dispositions, at once a site for meditation and a vector of raging paranoia. Hence the program’s parallel forms of lyricism that apply simultaneously to the films’ protagonists and its subjects, to makers and their environment — the latter conceived here as a character onto itself, whether hindered by 5G or made glorious in the camera’s eye.
- The screening will be followed by a debate moderated by Naomie Décarie-Daigneault (artistic co-director for Tënk Canada) with filmmaker Matthew Wolkow, cartoonist Julie Delporte, film critic Thomas Filteau and Viva Paci, professor, co-director of labdoc (UQAM) and editor-in-chief at Cinémas magazine.
DOUBLE BILL
Base Station
Park Sye-young, Yeon Ye-ji
67 minutes, South Korea, 2024
Korean, with English subtitles
International Premiere
In the near future, hypochondriac siblings Eden and Hyunho have taken to the mountains to avoid all electromagnetic frequencies, which they believe to be harmful to their health. But when the young woman runs afoul of two engineers and a hunter hired to install a next-gen telecom relay in the forest at night, the film transforms from a slightly paranoid drama to a nail-biting horror thriller. Yeon Ye-ji and Twilight director Park Sye-young’s feature-length adaptation of their eponymous short film is a hypnotic lesson in claustrophobic staging and the evocative power of light itself.
With Yeon Ye-ji, Woo Yo-han, Lim Young-woo
Festivals: BIFAN 2024
Sept promenades avec Mark Brown
Pierre Creton, Vincent Barré
104 minutes, France, 2024
French, with English subtitles
Quebec Premiere
In this diptych documenting two projects at once, filmmakers Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré (L’Arc d’iris, souvenir d’un jardin; Un prince) reconnect with the world of plants and flowers by following the paleo-botanist Mark Brown in his ambition to recreate a primordial forest in Normandy. This film set diary of sorts is divided into seven walks where the filmmakers’ rich world is candidly captured, visible in their camaraderie with and love for their subject. All of this amounts to an unexpected suspense, a longing for the work being filmed before our eyes: Mark Brown’s primordial herbarium captured in sublime, sunny 16mm.
With Mark Brown, Antoine Pirotte, Sophie Roger, Pierre Creton, Vincent Barré
Festivals: FIDMarseille 2024, NYFF 2024
