This Dust of Words
Wednesday, February 18, 2009 – 7:30 PM
USA 2007. Director: Bill Rose
Post-screening discussion with Judy Graves and Bill Rose
A haunting, elegiac documentary to thwarted promise, This Dust of Words traces the life story of Elizabeth Wiltsee from a young writer of uncompromising talent to a lonely death at the age of 50, homeless and apparently beset by paranoid schizophrenia. With an IQ of 200, Elizabeth taught herself to read at the age of four and was translating classical Greek by the time she was ten.
‘Bag for a Bag’ Winter Clothing Drive – Feb 18 7:00pm
Receive a free bag of popcorn when you donate a bag of clothing.
The idea for Momma’s Man came to the director one morning on a visit to his parents. On waking to find coffee and cereal waiting for him, filmmaker Azazel Jacobs wondered then why he had ever moved out. In the film, which revolves around the childhood regression of Mikey (Matt Boren), a thirty-something computer programmer with a wife and baby, Jacobs has merged his life into fiction by casting his real parents, Ken Jacobs, the noted avant-garde filmmaker and artist Flo Jacobs, a painter, in the roles of Mikey’s parents.
As a child growing up in suburban Granada Hills, California, the first time filmmaker Cynthia Lester realized something was really wrong with her mother was when school friends said they had seen her in the alley going through their dumpster. Born in Poland in 1944, and raised by her Aunt, an Auschwitz survivor, Eugenia Lester grew up in an austere communist society. She immigrated to America in 1974, and faced poverty and depression while struggling to raise a family as a single mother. 
Everything is most definitely not fine in this compelling feature debut from Quebecois director Yves-Christian Fournier. Sixteen-year-old Josh (Maxime Dumontier) wakes one morning to learn of the suicide of one of his best friends. Another young man is found dead, and then another – all victims of an apparent suicide pact that leaves four teens dead and Josh the only survivor of this group of five friends. 
Assuming the post of Chief of Staff at the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous, Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist Dr. Richard Thorndyke (Mel Brooks) comes across evidence of embezzlement and unexplained disappearances. He’s hustled off to a psychiatric convention by scheming Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman), she of the impossibly pointy breasts and Teutonic moustache, and her snivelling sidekick Dr. Montague (Harvey Korman), who has a predilection for S-M. 
Peter Seller’s Oscar-nominated performance in Being There is one of the most remarkable of his career. Directed by Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Coming Home), and adapted by Jerzy Kosinski from his short comic novel of the same name, the film stars Sellers as Chance, a developmentally challenged middle-aged man-child who works as a gardener for a wealthy Washington, D.C. citizen.
Filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb’s brother Nicky was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism, when he was 21. Although people with Asperger’s can be highly intelligent, they are unable to pick up on social cues. Subtleties of body language, facial expression, tones, or gestures go unnoticed, and their own behaviour can strike others as bizarre and inappropriate. As a small child, Nicky demonstrated amazing abilities. 
The Dignitas organization in Zurich, Switzerland, is the only place in the world where citizens from any country can come to receive assistance in committing suicide. Asserting that the choice to end one’s life is a basic human right, Dignitas founder Ludwig Minelli has indirectly assisted in the suicides of more than 500 people from more than 40 countries.
On a kibbutz in southern Israel in the 1970s, 12-year-old Dvir Avni enters his bar mitzvah year with the knowledge that his dearly-loved mother Miri is mentally ill. When Stephan, Miri’s Swiss boyfriend, comes to visit, he captures Dvir’s heart and makes Miri happier than she’s been in years.
Our society’s preoccupation with body image is reflected in the fact that, at any given time, 70 percent of women and 35 percent of men are dieting. More seriously, a 1993 Statistics Canada survey reported that, among women aged 15 to 25, 1 to 2 percent have anorexia and 3 to 5 percent have bulimia. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses, with 10 to 20 percent eventually dying from complications.