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Showcasing Canadian cinema

Jill Sharpe brings her subversive documentary Culture Jam to Taipei this weekend. PHOTO COURTESY OF SPOT

Although Hollywood is its next-door neighbor, the Canadian film industry has never been short of its own innovative and internationally renowned filmmakers. A festival to take place this weekend entitled "Canada's Cutting Edge: New Approaches to Contemporary Cinema," offers a chance for Taiwanese audiences to witness the new look of Canadian film.

The movies of three directors will be screened for this cultural exchange, with two of the directors in attendance at the festival. There will be screenings at SPOT-Taipei Film House tomorrow and Sunday, and at Hsinchu's Film Museum on the following weekend.

Both events are free and open to the public.

One of the films to be shown is documentary maker Jill Sharpe's Culture Jam: Hijacking Commercial Culture. The film, which won British Columbia's LEO Award for Best Documentary and Best Editing, takes an intimate look at the growing phenomena in North America where social critics and pranksters question corporate values through message distortion and subversion. The film follows American and Canadian "culture jammers" -- such as Jack Napier of the Billboard Liberation Front, Reverend Billy from the Church of Stop Shopping and "media tigress" Carly Stasko -- in their war against blind consumerism. Jill Sharper herself will be on hand at the film's Taipei screening for a question and answer session with the audience after the movie.

Also to be shown is a collection of films by Ann Marie Fleming, who has worked in animation, experimental film, documentaries and short films. Fleming's 2001 feature animation Lip Service was chosen for Taipei's Women Make Waves Film Festival. And her 2002 work Blue Skies won Best Short Film at the Toronto Film Festival. This retrospective will include experimental film Waving (1987), short animation My Boyfriend Gave Me Peaches (1994), and the well-received feature short film Blue Skies, a reflection on memory and political strife after Sept. 11. Ann Marie Fleming will also be on hand at the Taipei screenings of her films.

The only long feature film in the showcase is director Louis Belanger's debut film Post Mortem, winner of Canada's Gemini awards for Best New Director and Best Actress. The story centers on two lonely people in Montreal brought together through outrageous circumstances: Linda, a single mother who supports herself by picking up men and robbing them and Ghislain, a loner who works nights at the police morgue. Something strange happens at the morgue that forces the two to look at the freakishness in themselves.

There will be screenings tomorrow and on Sunday at SPOT -- Taipei Film House, located at 18 Chungshan N. Rd., Sec. 2, Taipei (台北市中山北路二段18號) and on March 8 and March 9 at the Hsinchu Film Museum, located at 65 Chungcheng Rd., Hsinchu City (新竹市中正路65號) For a more detailed schedule, visit the Web site at http://www.spot.org.tw.
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