http://halifax.infomonkey.net/nova.scotia.news.events.php?e=finding-lost-song-a-classic
Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival opens with Lost Song
Submitted by Ron Foley Macdonald on 03.25.09 at 10:22am.
The Halifax Independent Filmmakers' Festival (HIFF) begins Monday night with the showing of New Brunswick-based director Rodrigue Jean’s Lost Song.The festival is dedicated to the exhibition of film and video as art, in a noncompetitive festival setting free from commercial and industry agendas.
Focusing on the short film as a form of expression and on Canadian artists, HIFF takes place over four evenings as Spring arrives.
For the complete schedule of events got to:
http://afcoop.ca/civicrm/event/ical?rese..
New Brunswick-based director Rodrigue Jean’s third feature,Lost Song, has already captured two major Canadian Film Awards. Lauded with a prize at last year’s Toronto Festival, it also managed to cop a place on this country’s Top Ten Films of 2008.
Film Fanatics who couldn’t catch the Atlantic Film Festival screening last September will get another chance to see the Quebec-shot Francophone domestic drama at AFCOOP’s Monday Night Movies on March 30th at 7:00 pm at the Park Lane Theatre.
An apt choice for kicking off the the latest installment of the Halifax Independent Film Festival - which will feature the filmmaker giving a noontime director’s talk at the NSCAD Film School the next day - Lost Song is an intense and unflinching examination of post-partum depression.
With its tight cast of singer Suzie LeBlanc and Patrick Goyette as a contemporary couple retreating to a lakeside rural redoubt after the birth of their first child, Lost Song reaches back to an even older story, Medea, to examine how the presumed permanance in domesticity can dissolve into paralyzing anxiety and, ultimately, murder.
While the small scale and tight focus of the film recall Ingmar Bergman’s existential mid-period flicks such as Through A Glass Darkly and Persona, Lost Song is driven by a rich lyricism and sheer ferocity that gives it an entirely original outlook all its own.
Midway through the film there’s a sex scene so frank and brutal that some viewers may want to cover their eyes. Audiences unfamiliar with Rodrigue Jean’s previous features Full Blast and Yellowknife should be aware that his trio of full-length films may be the most fearless triad of Canadian films ever committed to the big screen.
Lost Song’s lack of dialogue and reliance on a rich, even suffocating visual palette of natural imagery links the film back some of the primal ideas about Canada’s relationship with the wilderness, articulated so profoundly in Margaret Atwood’s thematic book on the subject, Survival.
Moving away from many Quebecois filmmaker’s concerns with urban living and landscapes, Rodrigue Jean’s Lost Song charts out a unique and deeply unnerving view of some of the most basic and elemental bonds that hold families together.
Lost Song rates a 10 out of 10. Don’t miss it; it’s playing one show only!
Lost Song, directed by Rodrigue Jean, Transmar Films, Canada, 2008, 104 minutes.
