A play! MARION BRIDGE – May 9th to 13th

Cinema CNC is proud to present, in conjunction with POCKET THEATRE, MARION BRIDGE, May 9th to 13th, in room 1-306 at CNC.

MARION BRIDGE will be presented in SUPER 3-D [some people call this a "play", including playwright, Daniel MacIvor]. Come see a show so real it will astonish you that such technology exists in the world... and you can chat with the characters afterwards! The cutting edge in interactivity, brought to you by Pocket Theatre and Cinema CNC.

Nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Drama, MARION BRIDGE tells the story of three sisters who have come together in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, to hold a vigil over their dying mother while simultaneously dealing with their shared and separate pasts and presents. Alternately poignant and funny, the play shows the range of their sibling issues, while they try to forge a new path. Holding it all together is that, in spite of some of the words they throw around, Agnes, Theresa, and Louise truly care for one another.

Starring: Katherine Trepanier as Agnes, Sandra Clermont as Theresa, and Krista Dunlop at Louise. Produced by Allison Haley. Directed by Peter Maides.

The play runs from May 9th to 13th in room 1-306 at the College of New Caledonia. Showtime: 8 pm.

Tickets: $20 - regular; $15 - student, senior, unemployed. Available at Books and Company and at the door.

About the playwright: Daniel MacIvor

A prolific playwright, dynamic performer, producer and artistic director, Daniel MacIvor has been creating original Canadian theatre since 1986 when he founded the highly acclaimed theatre company da da kamera, which has won a Chalmers Award for Innovation in Theatre (1998). MacIvor is also a successful filmmaker. His projects include the award winning short film The Fairy Who Didn’t Want to Be a Fairy Anymore



About the play:

  An intimate, swiftly moving family drama … a sparkling crisp script, beautifully structured, with snappy, funny lines that dart in and out quickly like swallows, not interrupting the emotional drama of the story.”
— Halifax Chronicle-Herald

“This moving drama, which tiptoes toward sentimentality without ever reaching it, is the most surprising play that [MacIvor’s] ever written. When was the last time you saw a drama about three distinct, complex women that had nothing to do with their relationships with men?”
— New York Times

May 3rd - HELLO DESTROYER

March 4th, 2017: 7 pm    Hello Destroyer
Director: Kevan Funk
CANADA, 2016 English 110 minutes
Cast: Sara Canning, Jared Abrahamson, Ian Tracey

FILMED IN PRINCE GEORGE!

2016 TIFF Rising Star Jared Abrahamson stars in this uncompromising first feature from Vancouver director Kevan Funk, about a young minor-league hockey player who discovers the unforgiving nature of his sporting life. Hello Destroyer raises deeply troubling questions about how we teach boys to become adults, particularly within the context of Canada’s national obsession.

A new recruit for the Prince George Warriors, Tyson Burr is an enforcer whose primary tasks are digging the puck out of corners and protecting more skilled team- mates. Tyson is painfully shy and inarticulate, the result of growing up with a dismissive and impatient father — and being raised in a world that places little value on emotional development.

The lone articulate character in Tyson’s world is his coach, Dale Milbury (Kurt Max Runte), who spews forth an endless string of asinine clichés, coercing evermore aggression from his players. Spurred on by Milbury, Tyson inadvertently injures an opposing player, and soon finds out that the “family” he has grown up in is a lot more self-serving than he thought.

Shot in tight close-ups that brilliantly mirror Tyson’s confused and constantly anxious head space, Hello Destroyer is driven by Abrahamson’s amazing performance and director Funk’s fearlessness. Few Canadian artists have had the courage to question our assumptions about our national game, and fewer still have mounted such a forceful cri- tique of an athletics system that forges young boys into weapons and then abandons them when they become inconvenient.

THE TRAILER:

The Film Festival TV Commercial 2017

The 21st Annual Cinema CNC Film Festival television commercial, produced by CKPG!

THE FILM FESTIVAL - MARCH 3RD TO 5TH!

The 21st Annual Cinema CNC Film Festival takes place March 3rd to 5th at the Prince George Playhouse. Come out for 8 screenings of the best of Canadian film!

We have something for every taste in cinema: our opening film KONELINE is a powerful documentary [AND the filmmaker, Nettie Wild will be here!]; WEIRDOs is a beautifully filmed coming-of-age story by veteran moviemaker Bruce McDonald; our final film, JEAN OF THE JONESES, is helmed by first-timer Stella Meghie; Ann Marie Fleming's WINDOW HORSES is an animated feature; IT'S ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD is a family drama by fest-favourite Xavier Dolan; with MEAN DREAMS, Nathan Morlando brings his second feature to the screen; in Zacharias Kunuk's MALIGLUTIT takes us on an adventure in Canada's North; and, last but not least, HELLO DESTROYER is Kevan Funk's hockey drama, significantly featuring Prince George and many of its citizens!


More information – including descriptions, photos, and trailers – can be found in posts on this site →

Passes:

Festival: $48 [8 films]
Friday: $14 [2 films]
Saturday: $21 [3 films]
Sunday: $21 [3 films]
Available at Books and Co., the CNC Bookstore, and the UNBC Bookstore.

Single tickets: $8
Available at the door... AND, for the first time, a limited number of advanced-sale single tickets will be available from www.centralinteriortickets.com [a service fee applies]

JEAN OF THE JONESES - MARCH 5TH: 9:30 PM

March 5th, 2017: 9:30    Jean of the Joneses
Director: Stella Meghie
CANADA, 2016 English 82 minutes
Principal Cast: Taylour Paige, Erica Ash, Sherri Shepherd, Gloria Reuben

Writer-director Stella Meghie takes the family comedy into fresh new territory with this whip-smart tale about the twentysomething scion of an all-female Brooklyn clan wrestling with her literary aspirations, romantic mishaps, and the chaotic preparations for her estranged grandfather’s funeral.

Jean of the Joneses is a savvy comedy exploring three generations of vibrant and unforgettable women in the Jones family.

To say that Jean (Taylour Paige) is at a crossroads would be putting it kindly — she really doesn’t know which way she’s headed. A vista of unappealing career prospects opens before her, and her latest relationship has just unceremoniously ended. Chronically self-analyzing, she often hangs out with her two aunts, mother, and grandmother Daphne (Michelle Hurst, television’s Orange is the New Black, Frances Ha). The women’s routine of lively dinners at Daphne’s brownstone, is interrupted when the estranged patriarch of the family literally dies on their doorstep.

Ray (Mamoudou Athie, television’s The Get Down), the paramedic who responds to their 911 call, falls fast for the acerbic Jean. The feeling is more or less mutual, but their potential romance will have to take a back seat to the chaos leading up to the funeral. In a series of sometimes harsh, always-spirited discussions — fuelled by a complex family history, and occasionally a few drinks — the women will do their best to figure themselves out, and to understand each other.

Meghie’s feature debut takes the multi-generational family comedy into clever new territory. The Jones women are thoughtful, honest, and exceptionally funny, and Jean of the Joneses observes them all with infectious affection. Moving to a sprightly jazz soundtrack by pianist Robi Botos, and exhib- iting an irresistible energy, this is one of the best-written and most entertaining films of the year.

If Jean of the Joneses feels fresher than most multigenerational ensemble dramedies, credit not only the relative novelty of an all-black, mostly female cast, but also writer-director Stella Meghie’s
talent for suggesting the invisible bonds that unite her characters, despite their many disagreements and (in some cases) general disagreeability.
—Justin Chang, Variety

THE TRAILER:

MALIGLUTIT [Searchers] - MARCH 5TH: 7 PM

March 5th, 2017: 7 pm    Maliglutit (Searchers)
Director: Zacharias Kunuk
CANADA, 2016 Inuktitut, w/English subtitles 94 minutes
Principal Cast: Benjamin Kunuk, Karen Ivalu, Jonah Qunaq

Fifteen years after winning the prestigious Caméra d’Or for Best First Feature at Cannes for his debut Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk (The Journals of Knud Rassmussen) returns with this Arctic epic, inspired by the classic John Ford western The Searchers, in which a vengeful husband sets off in pursuit of the men who kidnapped his wife.

While Kunuk and his collaborator Natar Ungalaaq (The Journals of Knud Rassmussen, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner) hew closely to the basic scenario of the Ford original — wherein a white girl is abducted by members of the Comanche nation, sparking a seven-year search by her obsessed uncle — they have made a film that is very different in tone and feel. In the vast spaces of the Arctic, a family is torn apart when marauding men break into an igloo and abduct a young woman. When the woman’s husband returns to find his home ransacked and his wife vanished, he vows revenge.

Gathering together a band of maliglutit (“followers”), the man sets out to rescue the captives. During the arduous journey across the tundra, Kunuk slowly transforms his theme from justified retribution to self-examination, as the film questions whether these hunters, ostensibly the heroes, have begun to act like those who have violated their family.

As with Ford’s The Searchers, Maliglutit (Searchers) explores the repercussions of acts of violence within a community, and how righteous indignation can all too easily become wanton brutality in its own right. But Kunuk’s film goes beyond Ford’s as it forces us not only to interrogate the colonial ideology inherent to the western genre, but also to consider the very possibility of justice in a seemingly unjust world. With this tale as time-less as the landscape in which it is set, one of Canada’s foremost filmmakers has provided us with another classic.

THE TRAILER:

IT'S ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD [Juste la fin du monde] - MARCH 5TH: 2 PM

March 5th, 2017: 2 pm    It’s Only the End of the World [Juste la fin du monde]
Director: Xavier Dolan
French with English subtitles  95 minutes
Cast: Nathalie Baye, Vincent Cassel, Marion Cotillard, Léa Seydoux, Gaspard Ullliel

Following the success of his critically acclaimed and award-winning film Mommy, Xavier Dolan returns with It’s Only the End of the World, a thunderous drama about home and familial roots.

Winner of the Grand Prix in Cannes, Dolan’s latest film is based on the late French playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce’s Juste la fin du monde, and demonstrates how his singular voice transcends borders and makes him one of Canada’s most exciting contemporary filmmakers.

Louis (Gaspard Ulliel, Saint Laurent, Paris, je t’aime) is a successful director who, having just received a terminal diagnosis, returns home to his estranged family after a 12-year absence. However, his homecoming is quickly tainted by lingering resentment from his family, who see Louis as both a prodigy and a deserter. His attempts to inform his mother (Nathalie Baye, Lawrence Anyways, Catch Me If You Can), sister (Léa Seydoux, The Lobster, The Grand Budapest Hotel), brother (Vincent Cassel, A Dangerous Method, Eastern Promises), and sister-in-law (Marion Cotillard, Macbeth, Rust and Bone) of his illness are repeatedly stymied by the surfacing tensions between family members.

Stunningly stylized and shot in intimate close-ups, the film’s aesthetic helps convey the director’s intuitive understanding of the characters, their memories, disappointments, and, ultimately, their profound love for each other.

“Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World is histrionic and claustrophobic: deliberately oppressive and pretty well pop-eyed in its madness — and yet a brilliant, stylized and hallucinatory evocation of family dysfunction”
—Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

THE TRAILER: