Modern Construction series retraces a decade of boundary-pushing Canadian filmmaking, at The Cinematheque to April 1
From the “Downtown Eastside Trilogy” to Anne at 13,000 Ft., bold yet naturalistic visions from the cutting edge
The Cinematheque presents Modern Construction: An MDFF Retrospective to April 1
WHAT EXACTLY DOES an MDFF film look like? It’s unmistakable and yet hard to describe—and that’s precisely what makes the Toronto art movie house so fascinating. Founded in 2009, the company whose full name is Medium Density Fibreboard Films produces and distributes some of the most cutting-edge cinema happening in the country—and at the same time, giving a new voice to Canadian cinema. Its films are low-budget yet formally innovative, borrowing some of the naturalistic style of vérité documentary, but also playing with narrative form.
Now The Cinematheque is saluting the company’s oeuvre with Modern Construction: An MDFF Retrospective—a virtual rendition of a cinema series it was forced to postpone last spring.
Amid the 12 titles on view, the big Vancouver connection comes in Paris-born director and UBC film professor Antoine Bourges’s extraordinary, boundary-pushing “Downtown Eastside Trilogy”. The short trio of films could not be more relevant: with poverty and addiction hitting new lows during the pandemic, the works’ look at the holes in the social safety net are essential viewing for anyone guilty of turning a blind eye.
The standout is the stark and slyly edited “East Hastings Pharmacy”, from 2012, which captures both the monotony and surreal, bureaucratic ritual of a methadone clinic, but also the relationships and social divide between the pharmacist who dispenses and the addict who receives the substance. Provocatively mixing fact and fiction, Bourges shoots real methadone users coming to gulp their prescriptions on one side of the glass barrier, and on the other side, an actor (Shauna Hansen) playing the patient yet privileged white pharmacist. She must measure out the Kool-Aid coloured liquid, pour it into a Dixie cup, then watch the client swallow it—or sometimes negotiate with those who want to carry it out.
Elsewhere on the program, you won’t want to miss director Kazik Radwanski’s beautifully fragmented and empathetic Anne at 13,000 Ft., 2017’s story of a young daycare worker who’s struggling with an anxiety disorder. Deragh Campbell hands in an unforgettable performance as Anne becomes more and more erratic. You’ll see her elsewhere in this program, on the other side of the mental-health system in Bourge’s taut and studied Fail to Appear, as an ill-equipped T.O. caseworker struggling to support a client. And make sure to watch Campbell’s work as a young woman numbed by loss, in the hands of another MDFF talent, Sofia Bohdanowicz. The latter’s short film “Point and Line to Plane” is a poetic meditation on grief and the art of Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky, integrating Campbell’s understated voice-over with dramatized and real location footage of galleries and street- and ocean-scapes.
There's much more to make time for on a program that somehow captures the looping ennui, alienation, and quiet desperation of pandemic times.
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