Hoffman hands down film in a very personal and transformative way, without much fanfare, but in a way that indelibly impacts the receiver. And yet, this is just the start, because there is no single way to merely ‘watch’ a Hoffman film when you enter the darkened space of the cinema, you become a participant within Hoffman’s memories and you come to know Hoffman as a person perhaps better than you know yourself. “Indeed, in an interview with Barbara Sternberg, Hoffman acknowledges that “not all filmmakers deal with death so directly, or so often” as he has within his body of work. Wednesday October 7 – Saturday October 10, 2009ĭEATH, LIFE, LOVE, MEMORY AND LOSS TOGETHER COMPRISE THE ESSENTIAL STUFF THAT FORMS THE OEUVRE OF CANADIAN EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER PHILIP HOFFMAN WINNIPEG’S FESTIVAL OF FILM AND VIDEO ART
Composers Toni Edelmann and Tucker Zimmerman have created the music for the film and the film was co-written with Janine Marchessault.” Screenings Contemporary figures such as organic farmer and raw milk advocater Michael Schmidt also appears in the film. “The paintings and writings of Homer Watson and Paul Kane are featured and explored in the film, along with writers George Orwell and Wallace Stevens. Phone/fax 41, email: Film Stills & Photographsįor high-resolution versions of these images for use in print or online, please contact chimera imaging. The film is structured through Hoffman’s extraordinary landscapes of Southern Ontario which make the temporal fabric shimmer, bringing us a meditation on childhood, property, colonialism, ecology, and love.Īvailable from: Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre The film explores these characters through a variety of archival materials: diaries, landscape paintings, photographs, heritage films, poems, phone messages, maps, historical reenactments, songs) that express the complexity of time and the politics of land.
The film weaves together a complex temporal structure that juxtaposes the lives of two figures, one historical (Nahneebahweequa: a nineteenth century aboriginal woman and` land rights activist) and the other contemporary (an ex-pat drifter and father of the filmmaker’s step daughter) across two hundred years.
‘All Fall Down (Philip Hoffman 94 min, 2009 Canada HDCAM) is an experimental documentary that takes as its starting point a nineteenth century farmhouse in Southern Ontario, Canada, and asks the question `what has been here before?’