Preliminary Notes on the $100.....

The mountains foster a poster that can only be described as sublime;  straight and not so straight people with their backs up against the cold cold rock, eyes upside forward, blissfully blinded by the whitewashed glare emanating from the mountain's tempered glass correlates, the not quite there space of a city teased by giants. Everything about the +15's reminds me of my estranged uncle and aunt. Late 90's beige perfection, carpets that were always vacuumed, yet never dashed with superfluous scents; Vanilla Refresh, Tropical Citrus Morning, Evergreen and Snow, all absent from their townhouse hidden in one of Vancouver's million dollar suburbs. Much like the +15's, their house had a perfect stepped on carpet smell, faded colours, the dustless smell of  raked over fabric hiding the inert power of static bolts waiting to crawl through your socks...into your arms.....

Downtown is full of arrows, streams of rural refugees dressed to the nines, often sporting some sort of defiant tribal headgear that speaks to their roots. Again, mountains winking from beyond, perfectly poised between glass towers, ephemeral lines creeping along the downtown, light/dark, an authentic emanation of the Canadian Modern; a moving division whose first stop is the rocks, light scraped down to its photonic bones,  tumbling into the city as a proto-nomadic shadow-cut-play.

The $100 Film Festival blew my mind, them eastern fashionistas don't know what their talking about when they roll their eyes to us yellers out west. The west is open and borderless. The ga ga innocence of film without eyes has no home in Upper Canada, where every image has already found the words that make it coffee shop talk. Out here programmers sprinkle mind numbing transgression without reserve; out here indexical masters such as Nicky Hamlyn  cohort with Punam Kumar-Gill's folksy, kodachrome inspired super8 portrait of a family ritual called Letterbox; out here the unhindered naivety of ecstatic amateur gestures are celebrated,  out here we find an authentic expression of Maya Deren's  dictate that the avant-garde must be foremost a celebration of love,  ritualized love where shoes are thrown off in both reverence and comfort ; out here the cathedral of celluloid sculpture has found a home, as craft, as home-movie, as baffling accident, as projector folly; out here the beer flows like water, and a new generation of master artisans find their voice; out here ancient gears get much needed kinetic lubrication and we kiss our grandfather's eyes by dusting off their joyous instruments of  family big love; out here truck stop smiles and beef bloody beef mix with our red-eyed eggs, a sorta all-nighter satisfaction that illustrates that the honest-out-west remains warm, greasy and hidden among the sparsity of Canada's culture/landmass ratio.

http://www.cinemaofruins.com/