FAIL TO APPEAR
Deragh Campbell stars as Isolde, a support caseworker trainee working in Toronto. She’s still adjusting to the protocols and challenges of her job when she’s assigned to Eric, a man charged with theft and awaiting a court hearing. As Isolde prepares for the hearing, she finds herself struggling. In her efforts to get Eric released she has to cope with the paucity of resources granted to her, with the rules of the legal system to which she is beholden, and with one of the more delicate components of her mandate: creating bonds of trust with those she’s assisting, which, with Eric, proves easier said than done.

“Bourges’s film is defiantly, pathologically plain, emptying the frame of all extraneous information and finding a properly bleak visual analogue for the flawed institutional gestalt it depicts. It is also—depending on your disposition—covertly hilarious, as when an attempt at basic human connection ends with one of its two main characters bolting from an excruciating conversation. Behold transcendental cinema, 2017.” – Adrian Mack, Georgia Straight

Screening with the short film, SCAFFOLD, by Kazik Radwanski
Recent immigrants to Canada, working on scaffolding break the routine of their job by observing the people in the the neighbourhood from a unique, precarious and ephemeral vantage point.

“Arguably the director’s most experimental work, 2017 also marked the return of Kazik Radwanski, following up his sophomore feature How Heavy This Hammer with the short film Scaffold. The film, a faceless study of bodies at work, shows Radwanski taking a massive leap as a stylist, shifting his claustrophobic close ups to new focus, depicting the in motion rather than drilling in the anxieties of his protagonists. Scaffold marks the most exciting and ambitious work from one of the key figures in the New Canadian cinema, an exhilarating reinvention that has lead to the best short film of 2017.” – Brandon Wall-Fudge, BadFilmStudents