HADES (Kevin Kopacka, 2015)

The packaged summary for Kevin Kopacka’s HADES (2015) reads:

A woman is caught in an endless cycle of dreams where she has to cross the 5 rivers of Hades, each representing different stages of her relationship.

The short film, based on the short story “Statusbezogen” by H.K. DeWitt, shows a young woman (Anna Heidegger) navigating in space the emotional trauma of a troubled relationship.  HADES is heavily symbolic, abstractly experimental, and colourfully metatextual, feeling like Maya Deren while looking like Dario Argento. MMC! loves its dream cinema and Kopacka provides an entry worthy to cap another spooky October.

Happy Halloween!

MeTube: August Sings Carmen ‘Habanera’ (Daniel Moshel, 2013) and MeTube 2: August Sings Carmina Burana (Daniel Moshel, 2016)

Thoughts of the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal (just underway) and various other fantastic film festivals still to come has me reflecting on cinematic weirdness and my attendance to the Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival back in October. Among my favourites were Daniel Moshel’s two bizarre shorts, MeTube: August Sings Carmen ‘Habanera’ (2013) and MeTube 2: August Sings Carmina Burana (2016). The former is a hallucinatory tribute to awkward YouTube performances. Featuring Swiss tenor August Schram as a nerdy opera wanna-be and Elfie Wunsch as his grimly attentive mother, the short transforms a reserved and amateurish rendition George Bizet’s Habanera from Carmen into an EDM-infused, pan-sexual bacchanal, and it’s weirdo-glorious. Moshel’s crowd-funded sequel takes MeTube‘s classical mindfuck to the streets with a flash-mobbed carnival of “Opera on Acid.” For more by Moshel and a peek into the making of the films, check out his YouTube and Vimeo pages!

I’m working on our next proposal (an underappreciated comedy for the Shout Select label) so hopefully that will arrive soon. TCB, baby!

SFFF Day 2 Report – Seizures and Non Sequiturs

Saskatoon is slightly warming as the week proceeds. I’m reluctant to say this is directly attributable to the Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival but after a surprisingly strong Day 2, I see no other credible explanation for it. Including the What the Hell! – Totally Messed Up Short Films block, Day 2 offered 16 different works for consideration, injecting a heavy dose of bizarro randomness into the Festival and creating a decidedly different tone from the previous day’s atmospheric horror extravaganza.

The Last Bridge (Helmut Kautner, 1954)

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents The Last Bridge.

Helmut Käutner’s stark, realist World War II drama The Last Bridge is an exceptional anti-war statement and a significant treatise on our shared humanity.  Maria Schell portrays Helga, a German doctor working as a nurse in a line hospital in Yugoslavia who is captured by partisan guerrillas and forced to care for their wounded and protect them from a typhus outbreak.  Torn between her national loyalties and her Hippocratic Oath, Helga struggles in the face of the suffering around her, leading to one of cinema’s most profound and tragic conclusions.  Widely acclaimed at its release, winning the International Jury Prize, a Special Prize for Schell’s performance, and the International Catholic Organization for Cinema and Audiovisual’s prize at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival, The Last Bridge is a poignant articulation of war’s folly and compassion’s value.

Disc Features:

• New digital master, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Audio commentary by German film scholar Eric Rentschler
• Maria Schell: Smiling Through Tears, a new 45-minute video on actress Maria Schell
• Schell’s 1959 appearance on What’s My Line?
• New and improved English subtitle translation
• Plus:  A booklet featuring new essays by film scholars Christoph Huber and Philip Kemp