August 2 - 9, 2011

File Under Miscellaneous

Saturday, August 6 - 9:00 pm
EVENING ENCOUNTER with JEFF BARNABY Co-presentation with Fantasia, Blue Sunshine, Prospector Films
Fiction
Canada |
2010 |
Mikma'q, English OV
/ English ST
| 7m
Jeff Barnaby

Wandering in an Orwellian universe, a spiritually exhausted, hard-up Mi’gmaq man decides to assimilate into the dominant culture. He checks into a clinic to get rid of his red skin.

Co-presentation with Fantasia, Blue Sunshine, Prospector Films

EVENING ENCOUNTER with JEFF BARNABY 

Like a Rimbaud of the film world, Jeff Barnaby has no truck with conventions or good manners, challenges the commonplace, rehabilitates bad taste against polite aesthetics, messes up the furniture, dares the unthinkable and aims his camera. An evening meeting a brilliant Mi’gmaq filmmaker and his unclassifiable films. Starting out with his latest opus (File under Miscellaneous) in the running for in the 2011 competition, a retrospective (The Colony, From Cherry English, Red Right Hand, Black Out, Neurotica) in the director’s company.

 

The Colony – 24 minutes – 2007 – 35mm

A bi-racial ménage a trois drenched in surrealist urban skank. Maytag, a reservation displaced Mi’gMaq, latches onto the only other Indian within light years of the city only to have her snatched away by his drug dealer and friend. Sadistically lovesick and drug addled, Maytag launches an insecticide on the cockroaches that have colonized his trailer convinced that they helped steal his fiancé. Heart broken and thoroughly crushed, he turns to his only friend for solace, his chainsaw. A demented allegory on miscegenation, the plight of modern native Canadians and their affinity for self-destruction.

From Cherry English – 10 minutes – 2004 – HD

From Cherry English is a surrealist Mi'gMac allegory about the loss of language and identity to the anonymity of the urban wasteland. Traylor, a Mi'gMaq man being pulled between two worlds meets a non-native woman who sends him on a hallucinogenic journey of masochism and self discovery.

Red Right Hand - 9:00 min, 2004, DV, Colour

If you want to show skank, this is how you do it. A descent into the depths of degradation. A malicious work of cinematic beauty.

Black Out – 4 minutes – 2003 DV

Obsessed with her body, a young woman goes to violent lengths to fit into her favorite dress.

Nuerotica (student film) – 2001 - VHS

A take on homophobia, a young man ventures into a public bathroom only to have his worst fears realized.  Only Barnaby's second student film, shot with a lo-fi modified analogue VHS camcorder, it is the first hint of the bio-centric horror, disdain for political-correctness and honed aesthetic that has made Barnaby one of Canada's most promising young filmmakers.

blue sunshine: http://www.blue-sunshine.com/
fantasia: http://www.festivalfantasia.com
prospector films: http://prospectorfilms.ca/