MoMA Premieres Canadian Cinema

The exhibition includes L’Age de ténèbres (Days of Darkness), the concluding part of Denys Arcand’s Quebec Trilogy, and Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments, starring Oscar-nominated actress Ellen Page, as well as a week-long run (March 13–18) of Clement Virgo’s Poor Boy’s Game, starring Danny Glover and Rossif Sutherland.

Several filmmakers will be in attendance to introduce their screenings. The exhibition is organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, and is presented in cooperation with Telefilm Canada.

The films in this year’s edition feature many memorable and powerful performances. Poor Boy’s Game, an engrossing melodrama from Nova Scotia, delves into the lives and communities of two families who have been affected in very different ways by a brutal incident that happened years before. The film opens Canadian Front, 2008 with a special run under the MoMA Presents banner, which features films that will be screened for a week, giving MoMA audiences an extended opportunity to catch these significant works.

The comic spirit is represented by Laurie Lynd, whose Breakfast with Scot, set in the world of sports broadcasting and starring Tom Cavanagh (from ABC’s series Ed), subverts traditional notions of masculinity—his lead character Eric is a gay NHL sports announcer. The film, officially sanctioned by the NHL and the Toronto Maple Leafs, marks the first time a North American professional sports franchise has allowed its logo and uniforms to be used in a gay-themed story. Stephane Lafleur’s black comedy Continental, A Film without Guns presents a novel perspective on alienation and its absurdities.

In this year’s edition, two of the films in the series are first features by young women who adopt documentary techniques to shape narratives about people—a young boy in Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s Le Ring and an East African immigrant mother and her two daughters in Helene Klodawsky’s Family Motel—coping with threatening environments.

Veteran filmmakers include Denys Arcand, whose dark comedy Days of Darkness closed the Cannes International Film festival this year. The film, which concludes his Quebec Trilogy of The Decline of the American Empire (1986) and The Barbarian Invasions (2003), features a stressed civil servant Jean-Marc Leblanc (Marc Labrèche) who plays a Walter Mitty-esque character in a Canada where bureaucracy has gone mad. Bruce McDonald’s innovative The Tracey Fragments, features Ellen Page (Oscar-nominated this year for best actress in Juno) and utilizes split-screen techniques and multiple images on screen simultaneously to present a grim, fractured portrait of a misunderstood teenager shouldering the responsibility for a family tragedy. Bernard Émond’s claustrophobic Summit Circle is a taut drama that deals with the aftermath of a stroke and the gradual disintegration of a relationship as a result. -- www.moma.org