As regular readers of FITI will know, I’m a programmer and artistic director at Carbon Arc Cinema in Halifax. We’re going dark this week to give the cinema spotlight to the Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival, happening until Sunday at the Bus Stop Theatre on Gottingen Street.

I’ve had the opportunity to see a couple of the films screening in advance, starting with the opening night feature showing this evening:

There, There

This is the second full-length feature from Halifax writer-director Heather Young, whose first feature, Murmur (2019) won the Grand Jury Prize at the Slamdance Film Festival and opened the Halifax International Film Festival. There, There crystalizes Young’s thematic interests: stories of elders told in a kitchen-sink aesthetic, embracing non-professional actors and eschewing score or anything that could be described a gloss — she’s a filmmaker with a Dogme 95 rigour. This time she’s telling the story — inspired by her grandmother — of senior citizen Ruth (Marlene Jewell) struggling with memory loss, and her pregnant caregiver, Shannon (Katie Mattattal), their parallel lives and shared experience of isolation and loneliness at the beginnings and the end of life throwing the other into relief. Young is a patient and diligent filmmaker, the honesty in this one is undeniable.

Cloud

Filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film feels like two spliced together. The first part is a slowburn drama about a reseller, a man who purchases products on the cheap and sells them at a profit. He seems to not make much of a living and never cares whether what he sells is authentic, it frequently isn’t. He’s got a girlfriend who seems to want a future with him, and he has big ambitions. The second half of the picture is a full-on, crime thriller, where everyone around our hapless hero, and many of his customers, seek revenge on him for ripping them off.  The undercurrent of male rage funnelled by the internet really feeds this thing, it’s what makes it feel modern, but then the final act shootout is a total throwback to exploitation action of the past. If the motivations of the girlfriend feel a bit opaque, the implication of classic femme fatale drag the picture into the shade of noir.

Check out the HIFF website for the full slate of screenings!