I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing… Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore” — Naomi Shihab Nye Though it is a genre that often flounders on an excess of sentimentality, first-time writer-directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz’ The Peanut Butter Falcon…
“Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.” — Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings While his reporting sometimes comes across as performance art, journalist Mads Brügger (“The Saint Bernard Syndicate”) has gone beyond satire in his searing documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld. Winner of the best directing award at…
The San Francisco I knew as a young man was a place with a sense of community and culture that welcomed the adventurous, the imaginative, the creative, and the marginalized. Though, like every other major U.S. city, it was not always a place of harmony, and some neighborhoods had its dangers for outsiders, yet it…
Recapturing old memories can be challenging, especially when the line between what really happened and what may have happened is so fragile. Like Joanna Hogg’s recent film memoir, “The Souvenir,” Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor Castillo (“Thursday Till Sunday”), in her third feature Too Late to Die Young (Tarde para morir joven), is uncertain where memory…
“From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring.” — J.R.R. Tolkien A chronicle of a relationship that is no longer nurturing, The Souvenir follows Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne, “I Am Love”), a young film student in London during the 1980s as she navigates to adulthood through a minefield…
John Madden’s 1998 film “Shakespeare in Love” proposed a secret love affair as being the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s most popular play, “Romeo and Juliet.” The film’s widespread success revealed the public’s longing to find a real human being behind the name of the iconic poet and playwright who composed at least 37 plays, 154 sonnets,…
John Chester (“Rock Prophecies”), a nature cinematographer, and his wife Molly, a private chef and food blogger, had always dreamed of buying a farm and moving out of their cramped Santa Monica apartment, yet there was always a reason to put it off. The catalyst that changed their life forever, however, was a black dog…
