US 

FILM DIARY - JEFFREY KELLEY - DIRT ROAD DEAD

Photo of Jeffrey Kelley by Stephen MacGillivray

When your body dies it gets buried to rot, and for your soul to go on, it needs to cross the River Styxx, and in order for it to cross into the afterlife, you must pay the ferryman.

Dirt Road Dead is a story about a graveyard at night, and begins filming in authentic style on location after dark on November 17th, 2016. It is a dark story with a mystery and chills.

Written & Directed by Jeffrey Kelley (Five, Frozen Trade, Reboot:Rebuild)

Assistant Director: Ian Eastey (Reboot:Rebuild, FIVE)

Director Of Photography: Peter Doyle (Hometown)

Music Director: Scott Brownlee (FIVE, Reboot: Rebuild)

Produced by: Jeffrey Kelley, Ian Estey, and Peter Doyle

Featuring: Jeffrey Kelley, Scott Brownlee, Rob Jeffrey and Josh Gaudet.

Production Companies: Groove Hill Studio with Experiment Five Media and Eastern Entertainment Group

Coming 2017..... bring two pennies for the toll.

The link is: https://www.facebook.com/Dirt-Road-Dead-343156522689702/

PAYPAL LINKS ARE UP FOR NBFC MEMBERSHIPS FOR 2017

Co-op staff Ashley Phinney has recovered from SWFF behind the scenes work, and is now painting Cat's office! She's a machine!

Hey there, you don't have to wait until 2017 to renew your co-op membership or join for the first time says Co-op staff Ashley Phinney! The paypal links for memberships for 2017 are up on the co-op website, be an early bird and you may win two full comp passes to SWFF 2017! - http://nbfilmcoop.com/joining

BUZZ

SOUNDS OF SACKVILLE RADIO TOWERS REMEMBERED IN DOCUMENTARY

By Kevin Nimmock, Times & Transcript

When Sackville artist Amanda Dawn Christie found out her neighbours could hear a radio signal in their sinks and fridges, she decided to seek out the phenomenon in the way that made more sense to her: through art.

Christie began to build her own ‘radio sink,’ which grew to become a 24-foot copper structure. She wanted to harness the power of Sackville’s famed short-wave radio towers, which began broadcasting in 1944, to play through an entirely non-electric art piece of her design. 

"Sackville is a small enough town, so I became a weird town character," she said. "Strangers would approach me to tell me stories about the radio sounds in their sink, or fridge, or toaster. Eventually, I started carrying a sound recorder with me and documenting their stories." 

"I realized I had to make a film about this. I wanted to treat the stories like a radio documentary, since it is about radio. It began as a more experimental landscape film, where you would see the towers over four seasons. In the film, you don’t see any faces. You get to appreciate the beauty of the landscape."

"When speakers are speaking in English, there are French subtitles, and when they are speaking in French, there are English subtitles. It is very accessible to both communities. It was also important for me to include Mi’Kmaq and Maliseet voices and perspectives in the film, but the people I spoke with chose to speak in English."

Christie’s project became Spectres of Shortwave, a biological film about Sackville’s 13 Radio Canada International Towers, which broadcasted to Europe, North Africa, South Africa, and the Arctic, using shortwave signal. The film, which has undergone several major changes in the over five years since Christie started, was screened at Le Festival international du Cinema francophone en Acadie (FICFA), a French language film festival in Moncton, on November 13th. Simultaneously, audio of the film will be aired via shortwave radio from WRMI Radio Miami international, available across Canada. 

In 2012, after she had completed most of the film, CBC elected to destroy the towers. 

"That changed my whole project," Christie said. "All of a sudden, it became a much more historic document."

"In the first hour and a half, you hear story after story, and you build up a relationship with the people and the town, but in the last 20 minutes of the film you just watch it all get torn down."

The last 20 minutes of the film, shot in 2014 when the demolition occurred, contains no dialogue. Instead, Christie said she let the towers be the voices. 

"During the two years I was waiting for them to come down, I would go and clamp contact microphones on the towers, which turn vibrations into sound,’ she said. ‘Those 400 foot tall radio towers are like giant guitar strings in the wind."

"In the film, you hear these haunting drones or percussive metallic banging sounds. That’s the sound of the towers themselves."

"Each one had their own characteristics. I felt like they were voices. For me, the towers really became personified."

As the demolition begins in the film, all 13 towers can be heard, which Christie described as, ’symphonic.’ Every time a tower falls, its sound is removed from the matrix. 

"By the time you get to the end of the film, there is only one drone left, and it’s the sound of the last tower standing," Christie said. 

Historically, Sackville was chosen for a major line of towers because of its ideal geography and natural features. 

"Shortwave travels better over the ocean," Christie said. "With shortwave radio, you usually have copper ground wires at the broadcast site [to conduct electricity]. Sackville is on a salt marsh, which conducts electricity, so they didn’t have to lay those wires."

"For many, many reasons, that was the ideal place to put an international broadcasting site."

As she learned more about shortwave broadcasting while shooting, Christie said the film gained extra importance for her. 

"You can build a shortwave radio with very little. My first one was out of a toilet paper tube, some wire and a paper clip," she said. "You can’t build a digital receiver with that."

"Only 20-30 per cent of the world are on computers. A lot of people say ‘oh, technology moves forward, get over it,’ but there are so many communities across the world that have lost access to what is happening."

"I think that is tragic. Just because something is older, doesn’t mean it is worse." 

Christie said she doesn’t outline her feelings towards Sackville’s former towers in the film, to allow viewers to draw their own opinions. 

In addition to the film, Christie has created several accompanying art projects which will all be presented together at the Aberdeen Cultural Centre in Moncton in June, 2017. 

One of the projects was shown recently in Toronto. Christie said she made portraits of each tower, presented alongside biographical information like its size and specific function. With Musical instrumental called a theremin, she will play the sound of each tower, as it was recorded previous to their destruction. 

"The idea is to play the ghosts of the radio towers,’ she said.”

FREDERICTON'S MONDAY NIGHT FILM SERIES!

Dear Cinephiles,

Hope everyone is having a great fall! The team at the Monday Night Film Series is looking forward to serving you this fall, and we're pretty excited about the line-up of films!

For the 2016/2017 season, we will be keeping our prices for memberships and admissions the same as last year. 

Annual Memberships (Sept 2016 - April 2017) are $30 regular and $18 (students, seniors, NB film co-op members)

Half year memberships (Sept 2016 - Dec 2016) are $20 regular and $12 (students, seniors, NB film co-op members)

Admission prices: Members $4.00 and General admission $7.00

We will have programmes and posters available.

Please check out the film lineup on our website:  http://www.nbfilmcoop.com/exhibition/monday-night-film-series

Phone 455-1632 and email: info@nbfilmcoop.com concerning memberships please

See you at the movies!

Tony, Cat and John

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THE DAUGHTER

WHEN: Monday Nov 21st at 7:30pm in Tilley 102, UNB  

96 mins, Australia, 2015, English

A young man returns to his dying hometown and discovers a dark family secret that could tear apart the lives of those he left behind, in this contemporary adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck.

After a 15-year absence, Christian (Paul Schneider, Lars and the Real Girl) returns to his family home in rural New South Wales for the marriage of his father, Henry (Geoffrey Rush, The King’s Speech, The Eye of the Storm), the wealthy owner of the local mill that has been the economic bedrock of the community for generations. Christian gets reacquainted with his old friend Oliver (Ewen Leslie) and finds himself drawn to Oliver’s family, which includes wife Charlotte (Miranda Otto), daughter Hedvig (Odessa Young), and father-in-law Walter (Sam Neill, Jurassic Park). When Henry announces the imminent closure of the mill, it sends a quake through the community, particularly Oliver’s family, and the subsequent fissures release bitter secrets.

Stone allows his fine cast every opportunity to make Ibsen’s classic tale their own, with atmospheric support from cinematographer Andrew Commis (who creates a disarming intimacy with his use of the handheld camera) and composer Mark Bradshaw, who provides a lush, brooding score. While dysfunction and deception lie at the core of The Daughter, there is hope as well, with each of the characters imagining something better: a future unencumbered by the sins and betrayals of the past.

Theater director Simon Stone delivers a powerful, low-key yet achingly intense reimagining of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. —Eddie Cockrell, Variety

This year, 30 limited release, independent foreign & Canadian films will be shown. Admission is $7/film, but a yearly $18 student film society membership reduces admission cost to $4/film. The series is open to all. Memberships are available at Tilley 102 every Monday night.

For further info, contact NB Film Co-op 455-1632  info@nbfilmcoop.com http://www.nbfilmcoop.com/exhibition/monday-night-film-series

The NB Film Co-op in partnership with the UNB Faculty of Arts and the Toronto Film Festival presents the series.

ARTSLINK NB ANNOUNCES NEW BOARD PRESIDENT

Returning to our province, whether from a brief trip away or a longer period of exile, you can’t help but notice the spaces. There are not a lot of us inhabiting this gorgeous place, and we are not always very close together. This scale is part of why many of us choose to make our art and our livings in New Brunswick, but there are undoubtedly challenges to making either here.

And that’s where ArtsLink is so important. Here is an organization devoted to helping New Brunswick artists know what others are doing. In addition to reassuring us that we are not alone, this leads to inspiration and collaboration in our practices as artists, opening up new horizons. It also gives us access to a bigger portrait of the arts scene in New Brunswick, helping us to frame and tell the story of the benefits the arts can provide to all New Brunswickers. Telling that story effectively can only, in turn, make it easier for us to make our art and our livings here.

It’s not a simple story, but, like all good stories, there is something in it for everyone. For some, it’s the economic benefits (direct and spin-off) of our vibrant sector. For others, it’s the example set by our creativity, our ability to look at something and see its potential to be something else. That’s a habit of mind that we can help others cultivate in their own lives and work, to everyone’s benefit. For yet others, it’s the opportunity for reflecting (both in the sense of reflecting back like a mirror and of thinking deeply about) who and where we are, which will lead to a deeper understanding and respect for the natural and built environments and the peoples of this province. For many, the arts are simply a reaffirmation of what it means to be human, even in a purely biological sense, as they engage and exercise such advantageous evolutionary adaptions as attention, pattern-perception, and empathy. Finally (and this list of benefits is by no means finished), don’t forget the dopamine rush: that flush of pleasure at seeing something in a new light, of appreciating a new pattern, of recognizing something you had forgotten you knew.

As incoming president of ArtsLink, I am very excited about trying to see what I can do to further the interests and goals of this wonderful organization, so crucial to the wellbeing of our province. We have a talented and committed board, which, under the expert guidance of outgoing president (now past-president) Kathy Hamer, has achieved enormous amounts in a few short years. We have a terrific staff in Gillian Dykeman and Julie Whitenect. Their energy, inventiveness, and communication talents serve us all every day. And we have a growing and engaged membership of people who have chosen to make their art and their livings here. Coming off a very successful annual forum in early November, the organization’s attention will return to the planned Arts Education Project, to developing Catapult 2.0, to developing the Indigenous Curatorial Incubator, and to continued work on the proposed Status of the Artist legislation, all of which will make life and work here better for our sector and for the province at large.

Mark Blagrave, President

ArtsLink NB