Wednesday, December 19, 2012 – 7:30pm
New Zealand 2011. Director: Justin Pemberton
Post-screening discussion with Dr. Chris Booth and Gwen Haworth.
Growing up as a small-town boy who feels like a girl, Graham sees one solution – to become “Ashleigh”. Shot over six years, this insightful documentary follows her search for acceptance.
Wednesday, November 21, 2012 – 7:30pm
(Stil levend)
Belgium 2011. Director: Nathalie Basteyns
VANCOUVER PREMIERE! A poignant, poetic documentary about lives cut short and hope rediscovered, Still tells the stories of several families coping with the aftermath of suicide. One family lost their son Freek ten years ago. In his early 20s when he took his own life, he was a golden boy with an uncanny resemblance to a young Prince William. Another family lost their daughter Eva only a year before filming began. She was only 25, and a talented photographer. All those telling their stories here experience loss in different and profound ways, but all share the same inability to understand what drove their loved ones to suicide
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 – 7:30pm
Ireland/Germany 2011. Director: Ian Fitzgibbon
Cast: Andy Serkis, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Aisling Loftus, Michael McElhatton, Sharon Horgan, Jessica Schwarz
Fifteen-year-old Donald (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) lives with all the usual teenage concerns: fitting in at school, obsessing about losing his virginity, annoyingly overprotective parents — plus a unique one: he has terminal cancer. A talented artist, Donald withdraws more and more into the fantasy comic-book world he has created in his ever-present sketchbooks.
Post-screening discussion with Dr. Jocelyne Lessard, PhD, RPsych, a psychologist for the oncology service at B.C. Children’s Hospital
Wednesday, September 19, 2012 – 7:30pm
USA 19692011. Directors: Robert M Young, David Grubin [Re-imagined by Nick Young, Zack Young]
Canadian painter William Kurelek (1927-1977) may be best known for his beautiful illustrations of bucolic children’s classics (Who Has Seen the Wind?, A Prairie Boy’s Winter) and his landscapes of Ukrainian-Canadian prairie life, but it is his disturbing early work and difficult upbringing that is the subject of this intriguing documentary.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012 – 7:30pm
USA 2008. Director: Azazel JacobsCast: Matt Boren, Ken Jacobs, Flo Jacobs, Dana Varon, Richard Edson, Piero Arcilesi
The idea for Momma’s Man came to director Azazel Jacobs one morning on a visit to his parents. Waking up to find coffee and cereal waiting for him, Jacobs wondered then why he had ever moved out. His film revolves around the childhood regression of Mikey (Matt Boren), a thirty-something computer programmer with a wife and baby.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012 – 7:30pm
Norway 2001. Director: Petter Naess
Cast: Per Christian Ellefsen, Sven Nordin, Per Christensen, Jorgen Langhelle, Marit Pia Jacobsen
A foreign-film Oscar nominee in 2002, and one of Norway’s highest grossing movies of all time, Elling is a winning Odd Couple comedy with an interesting twist: Felix and Oscar’s Norse counterparts are both outpatients from a state-run mental health facility. Deeply neurotic, 40-year-old Elling (Per Christian Ellefsen) is sent to the facility after his mother’s death. His roommate there is Kjell Bjarne (Sven Nordin), a lumbering gentle giant with two things on his mind: food and sex — despite the fact he’s still a virgin at age 40.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012 – 7:30pm
Sweden 2008. Directors: PeÅ Holmquist, Suzanne Khardalian
This arresting documentary follows a young psychotherapist in Gaza as he struggles to provide therapy against a backdrop of armed clashes and his own family issues.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012 – 7:30pm
Canada/Great Britain 2002. Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, Lynn Redgrave, John Neville
Post-screening discussion with Dr. Randall F. White.
David Cronenberg’s magnificent, bleak Spider stars Ralph Fiennes in a tour-de-force performance as Dennis Clegg, nicknamed “Spider” during childhood because of a fascination with arachnids. After thirty years in a facility for the mentally ill, he is released to an East End London halfway house, where he receives little care or attention …
Wednesday, April 18, 2012 – 7:30pm
USA 1967. Director: Frederick Wiseman
Post-screening discussion with Robert Menzies, a
professor of sociology at Simon Fraser University
In his legendary first documentary, cinéma vérité master Frederick Wiseman leads us into the MCI-Bridgewater mental institution, a prison-hospital for the criminally insane run by the Massachusetts Department of Corrections. Wiseman shows us, without judgment, the incessant abuse of inmates as they are needlessly stripped bare, insulted, herded about, mocked, and taunted.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012 – 7:30pm
USA 2009. Director: Barbara Schroeder
Post-screening discussion with Dr. Rob Tarzwell
“Talhotblond” was the username of beautiful 18-year-old Jessi, a high-school senior from West Virginia. Jessi met Tommy, a buff, brave 18-year-old soldier (username: marinesniper) in an internet chat room, and the pair stuck up an intense, passionate, two-year on-line affair.