Mars at Sunrise is a Cinematic Tone Poem
In times of stress we turn to torn fragments of ourselves and worship them as if they were whole nations (From Mars at Sunrise). Mars at Sunrise (2014) is director…
features
The Act of Killing: Liberal Porn or Daring Activism?
The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Anonymous, Christine Cynn, 2013) is a documentary about Indonesia’s anti-communist purges of 1965 that thankfully abandons the traditional interview format in favour of something…
Gender Mender: XXY is a cinematic exploration of intersexuality
From a purely organizational standpoint, there are plenty of reasons for the gender binary. The system delineates male and female characteristics as separate and static, ostensibly facilitating a natural and…
Remembering documentary film legend Peter Wintonick
You want to bring them back. Would they, if they could, return, after such a heavy crossing? You try, until the wish, almost disattached, gnawing, growling, finally bursts loose to…
JFK After 50 Years: Berlin to Dallas, Cold War to Camelot
Those of us, of a certain age, or so the story goes, can remember exactly where we were and what we were doing on 23rd of November, 1963, when we…
Allegheny, BC: transformative theatre that shirks corporate culture
With six internationally acclaimed albums and a well-received book of poetry to his name, Rodney DeCroo is turning his talents to the theatre. I met with Mr. DeCroo in Vancouver…
Ian Kamau: artistic reflections on city life
Ian Kamau is a Toronto based artist performing in Montreal for the Suoni per il Popolo festival at a concert organized by Howl!. Kamau is a key underground hip-hop artist…
Game of Thrones and Racist Fantasy
Aamer Rahman has recently caused quite a stir among Game of Thrones fandom with his Tumblr post about the shows very problematic representation of race, most notably that hideous last…
Friday Film Pick: Things are Different Now
Ryan Conrad recently pulled his film from the Frameline San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival because the festival, despite a robust budget and years of protest from filmmakers, audiences and…
Fearless photography explores the Egyption women of the revolution
The woman in a red dress being blasted by pepper spray in Gezi Park, Istanbul, is not an anomaly. Women are on the front lines of Turkey’s protest movement and…
Butch Dykes: A Herstory told in zines
At the recent Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, where another (better) world of incredibly inspiring, provocative and boundary-pushing art and media is on display each year, I stumbled upon Eloisa Aquino and…
The Art & Money Project
It’s no secret that money rules our lives. I think what we’re now seeing is really the final and most ruthless stage of the integration of art and creativity into…
Blood work: A conversation with the director of Blood Relative
One ongoing trend in documentary filmmaking involves privileged minority world saviours travelling to distant destitute lands in order to do good or capture the act of doing good on film.…
Temps Libre: an album filled with hope, inspired by the printemps érable
Something happened last spring: a whole generation of Montrealers was mobilized, politicized, made aware that they had a voice. Finally opening their windows onto spring mornings as the snow melted…
Return to Gummo
Harmony Korine has been making headlines for his new pop-culture romp, Spring Breakers, with the usual fanfare and some reviewers decidedly giddy with the possibility of maybe “getting it” or…
The Ghosts in Our Machine defends the animals on our screen
Over the last decade of programming political documentary for Cinema Politica I can say with confidence that there are two subjects that have always been decidedly divisive and caused the…
Bowling for Columbine turns ten
Editor’s note: Art Threat has launched a cultural archaeological project that involves digging up previously published but now inaccessible film reviews and cultural musings from Montreal-based writer and teacher Matthew…
Weiwei-isms: the Coles Notes of an infamous Chinese dissident
A magnitude 8.0 earthquake shook through Wenchuan County in Sichuan province of the People’s Republic of China on May 12, 2008. Official figures listed 69,197 dead, including 5,335 children, mostly…
The Documentary Download Dilemma
Much ink has been spilled and pixels punctuated regarding the ongoing controversial topic around the copyright, downloading, streaming and file sharing of creative content, yet there has been little discussion…