HIFF Newsletter — June 9, 2023
HIFF returns for its 17th edition from June 21–24 in the Light House Arts Centre (1800 Argyle Street) in downtown Halifax. Features from around the world, shorts from around the country, two retrospectives, and intimate and interactive artist talks will pack your days and nights full of innovative independent cinema!
You can see it all with a HIFF Festival Pass ($40/$30 for AFCOOP members) or catch films with single tickets for $14 ($12 for AFCOOP members). Plus, all screenings are FREE for students (with a valid student ID)!
Here's a glance at what's screening on Day Two:
DAY TWO SCREENINGS
LEI LEI RETROSPECTIVE
US / 70 MINS
JUNE 22 at 6:30 PM @ LIGHT HOUSE ARTS CENTRE
HIFF Day Two begins with our Lei Lei Retrospective, a career-spanning shorts program featuring the diverse, endlessly imaginative work of LA-based animator Lei Lei.
The retrospective is a true showcase of Lei Lei's many handmade animation techniques and styles—ranging from intricate ballpoint pen illustrations, geometric collage, and studies in typography and pattern to imagined narratives borne of archival photographs and found celluloid.
From his independent work to his projects for major international brands, Lei Lei’s films unveil halcyon worlds that are at times of this planet and at times not, that are often melancholic and nostalgic but occasionally exuberantly irreverent and boisterous. Lei Lei’s work illuminates his precise mastery of form and his playful sensibility, imbued with an inextinguishable sense of wonder at the peculiar structures of society and the ephemerality of being.
HIFF FESTIVAL PASS $40/$30 for AFCOOP members
SINGLE TICKETS $14/$12 AFCOOP members
OUR HAPPIEST DAYS
DIR. SOL BERRUEZO PICHON-RIVIÉRE
ARGENTINA / 2021 / 100 MINS
JUNE 22 at 8 PM @ LIGHT HOUSE ARTS CENTRE
Up next on Day Two is Our Happiest Days, the dreamy sophomore family drama from HIFF alum Sol Berruezo Pichon-Riviére, who will join us in the Light House after the screening for an audience Q+A!
The day before Agathe’s 74th birthday, she wakes up in her eight-year-old body. Her estranged daughter Elisa returns home to assist her son, Leonides, in navigating the fantastical problem she finds herself in. The reversal of the parent and child relationship opens up the chance for the trio to heal old wounds. Our Happiest Days is a meditation on motherhood, love, and the adult child/parent relationship, employing magical realism to hit tender truths.
HIFF FESTIVAL PASS $40/$30 for AFCOOP members
SINGLE TICKETS $14/$12 AFCOOP members
Click below to view the trailer:
RESIDENCY
LATE-NIGHT SCREENING
DIR. WINNIE CHEUNGUSA / 2023 / 75 MINS
JUNE 22 at 10 PM @ LIGHT HOUSE ARTS CENTRE
Closing out Day Two of HIFF 2023 is a very special late-night presentation of Residency, the metafictional docu-horror first feature from New York-based filmmaker Winnie Cheung, who will join us for a post-screening Q+A.
Residency was filmed and created at The Locker Room, a femme-owned creative house in Brooklyn that hosts an annual artist residency granted to ten women of various creative disciplines. The artists’ passion and excitement devolve into destructive obsessions, each woman’s demise expertly rendered by Cheung’s rich and precise choices in sound, editing and direction. The film is a concise and concentrated evil diamond of a feature debut that feels like it could have been formed by the pressure and mania of a night at your local artist-run party house. Its genre (“A documentary about making a horror film, or a horror film about making a documentary?”) is as blurry and unattainable as memories from the final hours of one of those nights.
HIFF FESTIVAL PASS $40/$30 for AFCOOP members
SINGLE TICKETS $14/$12 AFCOOP members
Click below to view the trailer:
ATLANTIC AUTEURS CLOSE-UP
Where are you from?
Born in Toronto, planted roots in Prince Edward Island.
How did you get your start as a filmmaker?
By accident. With a Super 8 camera, a will to rove, and a feeling for the poetry of the everyday.
What was the inspiration for Evelyn?
Evelyn was made with the simplest and best kind of inspiration for a film—an extraordinary person who lived true to her path and philosophy. All we had to do was show up with a camera, there was no aim or message to the film, other than: anyone whose world is touched by the wisdom and light of Evelyn Christopher, is made better for it. Also perhaps there is an undercurrent of message, to be honest: in her simplest terms she pointed out the folly and madness of modern life based on our extractive and arrogant relationship to nature.
What's your favourite memory of making this film?
The privilege of entering into Evelyn's strange, magic, unique world... into the orb of her smile and confidence. I won't soon forget.
What films or filmmakers inspired you to make your own?
Too many to count—but the filmmaker that rises to the forefront when I think about how I'd like to make films these days, who approaches filmmaking in the way I sometimes wish I had the clarity of vision and purpose to do, is Jacqueline Mills. Geographies of Solitude moves me. In the Waves as well.
What are you working on next?
I'm working on the development of a feature film with the NFB. Exploring the minds, and hearts of artists whose work is inspired by the issues of ecological collapse and the climate crisis. How do we process the globally shared anticipation of the 'end of the world'? How do we move through denial and dread, to grief, acceptance, action, celebration and mourning? We must change the story of fatalistic end times, and I feel art and spirituality are the places this shift must start. Art has the ability to generate new ways of seeing.
Where are you from?
Iroquois Falls, in Northern Ontario, but I have moved around a bit.
How did you get your start as a filmmaker?
AFCOOP's One Minute Film Program—back in the day when it was done with 16mm film. Does that make me sound old or cool? It was my gateway to filmmaking.
What was the inspiration Big Agnes?
This film is inspired by the audio pareidolia that I experienced while attending the Handmade Film Insititute's Wilderness Film Expedition in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Audio pareidolia (a type of musical ear syndrome) is a phenomenon where the brain attempts to find a pattern of the sound it is hearing and attempts to fit this pattern with one that is already in its memory.
What was the most challenging part of making this film?
The original footage for this film was shot, developed, edited, contact printed, and screened in the Colorado Mountains at around 10,500 feet above sea level without any electricity and edited with a razor and press tapes. I think the most challenging part was backpacking all the gear up and down the mountain—a Bolex isn't that light.
What's your favourite memory of making the film?
There was a little marmot that had a large tooth sticking out of their mouth—we called the marmot Snaggle Tooth. The tooth wasn't set properly in Snaggle Tooth's gums and because of this, the tooth couldn't be filed down through normal chewing. A marmot's teeth are different than human teeth as they just keep growing; eventually this marmot would probably die because either the tooth would grow into the marmot's brain, or they would die of starvation not being able to feed themself any longer. After watching the marmots for a while, it was obvious Snaggle Tooth was ostracized from their community and was chased and bit by the other marmots when they got too close to the good food, and so was kind of a loner. Despite this Snaggle seemed to adapt other characteristics that allowed them to survive, like being friendlier to the humans so that they would give them food. Keep an eye out for Snaggle Tooth in the film!
What films or filmmakers inspired you to make your own?
This film was inspired by filmmaker Robert Schaller.
These films will screen along with a selection of others made by established and up-and-coming filmmakers from across the region in HIFF's Atlantic Auteurs shorts program at the Light House Arts Centre on June 23 at 8:30 p.m.
Learn more about the full program here.