The bulk of NXNE Film screened last weekend – including Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, which I had the privilege of introducing and which is the best movie I’ve seen this year – but there’s one more event on the schedulizer. Laugh Sabbath, the annual collection of comedy shorts, screens Sunday (June 22) at 3:30 pm at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema.
Seventeen shorts will be screened, including Jeremy Woodcock and Cameron Wyllie’s viral Sheppard Subway charmer Finding Bessarion. And yes, you can watch that one on YouTube if you haven’t already, but it’ll play very differently with an audience. Magic of cinema, and all that.
Speaking of movies that play very differently with an audience, I am really pissed that I can’t make it to the screening of Joanna Arnow’s I Hate Myself :), which is happening Wednesday (June 25) at 9 pm at Camera Bar on Queen West.
The latest film to be co-presented by MDFF and The Seventh Art, I Hate Myself 🙂 is a personal documentary about Arnow’s year-long relationship with poet James Kepple, which is about as toxic a pairing as you can imagine.
To borrow an idiom from my English in-laws, they’re as different as chalk and cheese – if the chalk was a short-fused racist and the cheese a passive-aggressive filmmaker who uses her camera to record her judgment rather than express it directly.
I watched this alone, but I can only imagine it’ll be a very different experience with an audience, each person reacting differently to the back-and-forth between Arnow and Kepple – and, because the MDFF/Seventh Art screenings tend to draw a cinematically literate crowd, to the choices Arnow makes in depicting said back-and-forth.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Arnow moderated by Kiva Reardon, editor of the excellent feminist film journal cléo I am also annoyed to be missing that. Full details are at the Facebook event page.
