National Theatre Live: Angels In America, Part One: Millennium Approaches

America in the mid-1980s. In the midst of the AIDS crisis and a conservative Reagan administration, New Yorkers grapple with life and death, love and sex, heaven and hell. This new staging of Tony Kushner’s multi-award winning two-part play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, is directed by Olivier and Tony award winning director Marianne Elliott, and will be broadcast live from the National Theatre on 20 July 2017.
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SpotHero: Find & Book A Parking Spot

SpotHero helps you find and book parking spots in several cities.

Find Parking Spots

Finding parking is one of the most miserable aspects of living in Los Angeles, or any major city in which you need a car to get around. If I would have known about SpotHero earlier, I would have saved myself a lot of frustration in searching for a place to park. SpotHero, a website and app that makes it easy to find and book parking spots in cities around the US, has been around since 2011. The site is still going strong, and the company describes itself as the #1 downloaded parking reservation app (which means there are others, which I also did not know about).

Book Parking Spots

The concept of SpotHero is simple: you search an address or venue, and choose whether you want to find monthly or hourly parking. Then you look at all the available parking spots on a map, choose which one you want to book, pay for it, and go park there. There are plenty of people out there who probably would refuse to ever pay for parking in their city. I understand that feeling. But the ease in which SpotHero allows you to find and book spots makes it worth it if you want a sense of security. Finding a parking spot is terrible, but SpotHero makes it easy.

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Nightly: Two Hotels Instead Of One

Nightly is a hotel booking platform that offers two hotels rather than one.

Try Hotel Switching

Nightly is one of the more interesting companies to enter the crowded hotel booking space. While Kayak, TripAdvisor, Hotels.com, Priceline, and Expedia all have their (slight) differences, for the most part they’re pretty much the same. There’s a reason that most of those sites let you compare fares to their competitors. Nightly is a hotel booking platform, but it has a unique purpose: rather than booking one hotel, the site allows potential travelers to book two hotels for (what they claim to be) less than the price of one. The concept is called “hotel switching,” and Nightly’s algorithm claims to be able to find the best deals by utilizing it.

Switch Hotels, Save Money

Nightly’s approach to hotel booking might not be for everyone. It’s often annoying to switch hotels in the middle of the trip, and sometimes paying a little extra can be worth the cost of having a consistent place to stay. For those who don’t mind moving, however, it could provide an extra sense of adventure to your travels. You can see multiple neighborhoods in one city, for instance, or get to check out two different hotel brands. Nightly can be used basically worldwide, as the site works with thousands of hotels in 180 countries. If you’re traveling somewhere and want to save on hotel costs, it’s worth checking out to see if hotel switching can land you a better deal.

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One Minute Wonder: A Series of Video Portraits in 60 Seconds Flat

One Minute Wonder is an ongoing series of video portraits highlighting wonderful people.

60 Seconds Flat

As our attention spans decrease, so do the average lengths of the videos we watch online. Longform movies and television remain popular, but it’s increasingly difficult to get people to sit through a lengthy YouTube video. Two or three minutes is about all we can handle. Sometimes, one minute is all we need. One Minute Wonder is a collection of videos, each of them timed out to 60 seconds flat. Each of the videos is a short video profile of a particular individual. There’s a focus on artists, but the series varies from person to person, telling their story in a documentary style.

Meet Interesting Individuals

The navigation on One Minute Wonder is as simplistic as the site’s theme. The latest profile is displayed on the homepage, with an embedded Vimeo video as well as a short explanation behind the video. There’s also the option to shuffle videos, letting you watch the clips in a random order. There are only 60 videos available for streaming on the site, so theoretically you could watch the entire series in only an hour. Considering the way One Minute Wonder was designed, however, it’s much more enjoyable to go through the stories slowly. There’s a lot to learn about people in only one minute.

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#Canada150 | What Do We Seek As Canadians?

To help mark #Canada150, the NFB is offering up special online programming and public events across the country that put Canadians in touch with their nation’s stories. Our third installment, What We Seek, celebrates our thirst for knowledge and discovery, and celebrates the intrepid expeditions and great Canadian inventions.

>> Explore What We Seek now<<

 

A scientist peers for God in the electrical activity of our brains. A 73-year-old prospector searches for gold in the remote wilderness of the north. An Ojibway man with advanced diabetes looks to his people’s past to find a way forward.

As Canadians, we have a long and rich history of searching: for answers, for cures, for riches, for a deeper sense of self. In the third installment of our series, we’ve done some digging of our own to unearth what, exactly, we seek—and what we find along the way.

Great Explorers

In William Pettigrew’s The Vinland Mystery (1984), watch as researchers unearth the only known Norse settlement in North America, at l’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/vinland_mystery/

Gold Rush

A 73-year-old prospector searches for a legendary gold deposit in Northwest Territories, in Donald Wilder’s Nahanni (1962).

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/nahanni/

Arctic Exploration

Arctic IV (1974) is James de B. Domville’s early look an underwater pioneers beneath the polar ice.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/arctic_iv/

Great Discoveries 

Stanley Jackson’s The Quest (1958) recreates Frederick Banting and Charles Best’s discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto, profiling one of Canada’s greatest scientific breakthroughs.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/quest/

Beyond the Limits of Art

In the field of cinematic discovery, Creative Process: Norman McLaren (1990) is Donald McWilliams’ stunning journey into Norman McLaren’s artistic and technical innovations.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/creative_process_norman_mclaren/

Spiritual Quest

Brion Whitford, an Ojibway man with advanced diabetes, is on a deeply personal quest into his people’s past to find a way forward in The Gift of Diabetes (2005), co-directed by Whitford with Genie Award-winning Winnipeg filmmaker John Paskievich.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/gift_of_diabetes/

Out-of-this-world playlist

As a featured part of What We Seek, the NFB is also showcasing a new playlist, Conquest of Space.

On September 29, 1962, Canada joined the space race with the launch of Alouette 1, a satellite designed and built entirely in this country. This Canadian first made us only the fourth country to operate a satellite, after the USSR, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Discover more about this and other extra-planetary events in our playlist of films on space and space exploration:

• Satellites of the Sun (1974) by Sidney Goldsmith
• Mirrors of Time (1990) by Jean-Jacques Leduc
• Universe (1962) by Roman Kroitor and Colin Low
• Moon Man (2004) by Paul Morstad
• Shadow Chasers (2000) by Carlos Ferrand, Jean Marc Larivière, Fadel Saleh, and Eileen Thalenberg
• Cosmic Zoom (1968) by Eva Szasz
• Death of Kao-Kuk (2015) by Luc Chamberland
• Hubert Reeves, Star Teller (2002) by Iolande Cadrin-Rossignol
• Scientifiq Piqniq (2013) by Paloma Dawkins

Previous chapters

What We Call Home, the first installment of 1 Nation. 4 Lenses, was launched online at NFB.ca on February 20, followed by What We Protect (April 20). The final chapter, What We Fight For, will go online in September.

Follow the conversation or add to it on social media by using the hashtag #Canada150.

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Western Gaze: 4 to Watch from North West Studio

The little-known story of Alberta’s Black pioneers, a darkly entertaining animation about the Hudson’s Bay Company and an interactive story shot in Cambodia are among projects currently in the works at Edmonton’s North West Studio. Here are four titles to watch for in the coming months.

Skin for Skin: Heritage Moment Goes Gothic

As the governor-in-chief of the Hudson’s Bay Company at its peak, George Simpson looms large in Canadian history, known in his own time as both “Emperor of the North” and a “bastard by birth and persuasion.” With Skin for Skin, an animated short that recently completed postproduction at the North West Studio, the Calgary-based animation team of Carol Beecher and Kevin Kurytnik, have fashioned a thrilling revisionist account of the HBC under his iron-fisted rule.

Setting their tale in 1823, a time when the HBC was processing well over half a million beaver pelts every year, Beecher and Kurytnik draw on references both literary and cinematic – from Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Stanley Kubrick – to evoke a world of brutal exploitation and unsettling beauty. Creating 3-D sculptures of the main characters and props, manipulating them within built 3-D environments, and then overlaying everything with finely wrought hand-drawn effects, they craft an epic adventure that reframes a crucial episode in Canada’s historic national project.

“We’re calling it Canadian history, gothic style,” says producer Bonnie Thompson. “Carol and Kevin have done exhaustive research and are masters of the animation arts, but they also possess a deep knowledge of film history. Look closely and you’ll find references to Buñuel, revisionist westerns, and silent movies like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. The film really packs a powerful visual punch. Test screen audiences are bowled over.”

Pillars of the Calgary animation scene, where they run Fifteen Pound Pink Productions, Beecher and Kurytnik first proposed the project to the North West Studio in 2012. “They wanted to investigate Canadian history from a different perspective, to explore its darker undercurrents and subtexts,” says Thompson. “We’d been looking for a chance to collaborate and were eager to work with them.”

For an earlier sampling of the Beecher/Kurytnik artistry, check out Mr. Reaper’s Really Bad Morning. “If you should suddenly find yourself jonesing for an animated flick that doesn’t necessarily play by the rules, Mr. Reaper’s Really Bad Morning might just be the prescription to soothe your indie soul,” says Film Threat Magazine.

Skin for Skin is directed by Carol Beecher and Kevin Kurytnik, working closely with William Dyer and a committed team of talented animators. Produced by Bonnie Thompson and executive produced by David Christensen, Skin for Skin is due to launch at Montreal’s Fantasia Festival later this summer.

John Ware Reclaimed: Cheryl Fogo on the trail of Canada’s Black Cowboys

“Growing up in Calgary I embraced the whole Western mystique,” says writer and filmmaker Cheryl Fogo. “I lived and breathed horses, rodeo stories and the Wild Cowboy West.”

Fogo’s ancestors settled on the Canadian Prairies well over a century ago, part of a wave of African-American immigration that came north in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, but as a young adult she was confronted with a striking absence: her own people’s experience had been effaced in mainstream accounts of Canadian history.

“Despite more than 120 years of Black presence in Alberta, no one pictures us when terms like ‘old stock’ are thrown around,” she says. “The whole White settler Canada narrative is incomplete. So I started writing for myself and others like me — to fill the hole where our stories should have been.”

Since then she’s authored a range of work that retrieves and illuminates this history – essays and journalism, children’s novels and other fiction, as well as theatrical pieces. With John Ware Reclaimed, a documentary that starts production this summer, she continues an investigation she began with John Ware Reimagined, a play that won the 2015 Writers Guild of Alberta’s Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama

John Ware, born in the Antebellum American South, was already an accomplished cowboy when he arrived in the Canadian west in the early 1880s. “The horse is not running on the prairie which John cannot ride,” reported the MacLeod Gazette in 1885. Although a legend in his own time, his story remains unfamiliar to most Canadians, as does the bigger story of Western Canada’s Black pioneers. “In telling Ware’s story, I’m able to reclaim my own place in the Western narrative, “ says Fogo.

Working with cinematographer Douglas Munro, Fogo conducted a preliminary shoot at the former Ware homestead, which remains a working ranch to this day, and now goes into full-scale production. A July shoot will feature the African-American rodeo champion Fred Whitfield, who is bringing Ware alive in a series of impressionistic of recreations. Also participating are cultural luminaries like novelist Lawrence Hill, who was filmed doing a reading about John Ware. Margot McMaster will be editing.

John Ware Reclaimed is directed by Cheryl Fogo, whose credits include the NFB release The Journey of Lesra Martin, and is produced by Bonnie Thompson for the North West Studio. Executive producer is David Christensen.

Invisible World: Interactivity meets Roshomon

The seed was planted back in 1994 when Tyler Enfield was travelling in Cambodia, a young backpacker immersed in a carefree expatriate subculture, only vaguely aware of the civil war that had recently devastated the country. But witnessing the near drowning of a local child would change all that, throwing everything into a sudden and sharp new focus. Over twenty years later, now an established writer and photographer, Enfield evokes the event in Invisible World, a novel initiative in multi-format interactive storytelling.

In Roshomon style, the 22-minute interactive piece employs shifting screens to present three separate but intertwining versions of the same story — with the child’s mother, the backpacker and a war weary Cambodian doctor each giving a distinct narrative account of the shared traumatic event.

Invisible World was co-created by Tyler Enfield and Gaylen Scorer with NFB producer Bonnie Thompson coming onboard as a key collaborator. “There was an extra level of complexity on this production, both in terms of technology and cinematic strategy,” says Thompson. “When planning the Cambodia shoot, we had to design shots for three screens and three voices, each with its own point-of-view and back story, while maintaining a visual coherence throughout. It’s a unusual way to create and experience cinema.”

Giller Prize winning author Madeleine Thien shares a scriptwriting credit with Enfield, writing the narration for the mother and doctor, and also voicing the mother’s character. The Cambodian-born American actor Francois Chau (Lost, Criminal Minds) voices the doctor. The cast features Cambodian actors Ngem Svey Ya as the mother, Sereyvuth Kem as Dr Von, and first-time Australian actor Mark Tilley as the young backpacker.

Invisible World is available in three language versions – English, French and Khmer – and is available in several versions. Invisible World: The VR Experience, coproduced with the Canadian Film Centre’s Media Lab and designed for HTC Vive headset, premiered at Montreal’s Festival du nouveau Cinema in 2016 and has since been shown at South Korea’s Busan International Film Festival and Edmonton’s NorthwestFest, where programmers also hosted interactive theatrical screenings of the project. App and website incarnations, designed for desktop and tablet, are due to launch later this year.

Invisible World is produced by the NFB North West Studio (producer, Bonnie Thompson: executive producer, David Christensen). Invisible World: The VR Experience is co-produced by the CFC Media Lab (producer, Ana Serrano) and the NFB North West Studio (producer, Bonnie Thompson). Executive producers are Ana Serrano (CFC) and David Christensen (NFB).

Snow Warrior Catches Cold

You need to put at least two winters behind you before you get to claim bike courier stripes in Edmonton. So says Mariah, the wiry protagonist of Snow Warrior, as she mounts her wheels and peddles off though the predawn deep freeze to start her working day.

Currently in postproduction at the North West Studio, the short documentary pays tribute to a hardy breed that plies its trade on the streets of one of the coldest cities on earth, an outdoor workplace where winter temperatures can drop to  forty below zero.

Co-directed and written by seasoned documentarians Frederick Kroetch and Kurt Spenrath, Snow Warrior was shot by cinematographer aAron Munson, who made inventive use of lightweight digital cameras. “There was a great can-do spirit on this shoot,” says producer Bonnie Thompson. “At one point the team macgyvered a bike that could be towed behind the camera, and it’s given us fantastic footage, poetic and exciting at the same time.”

Kroetch and Spenrath position their film within a very Canadian tradition of winter-themed cinema — citing NFB films like Gilles Carle’s much-loved feature The Merry World of Leopold Z, a seminal work of early Quebec cinema that was originally commissioned as a documentary about Montreal’s snow plough operators.

oehttps://www.nfb.ca/film/vie_heureuse_de_leopold_z/

Snow Warrior is co-directed by Frederick Kroetch and Kurt Spenrath, and is co-produced by the North West Studio (Bonnie Thompson, producer) and Edmonton’s Open Sky Pictures (Frederick Kroestch, producer). It’s due to launch in late 2017. NFB Executive Producer is David Christensen.

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Charming

Les mythes de Cendrillon, Blanche Neige la Belle au Bois Dormant revisités...
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