Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s (The White Balloon, 3 Faces, Taxi) newest film, NO BEARS, opens in theatres across Canada on Friday, December 23, 2022. Filmed entirely in secret, Films We Like are proud to present this brave new film for Canadians to see.
Films We Like has announced the award-winning documentary Geographies of Solitude by Cape Breton filmmaker Jacquelyn Mills will open December 16th at Ted Rogers Hot Docs Theatre (Toronto), and at selected theatres across Canada. Since its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, Geographies of Solitude has won multiple awards including the Ecunumical Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, Best Canadian Documentary at Hot Docs Film Festival, Best Canadian Documentary at the Vancouver International Film Festival, and many more.
Set in the late 19th Century, the drama revolves around a young Danish priest who travels to a remote part of Iceland to build a church and photograph its people. The deeper he goes into the unforgiving landscape, the more he strays from his purpose, mission and morality.
Adapted from Italian writer Paolo Cognetti’s novel, the film follows the life-long friendship of two men from very different backgrounds against the backdrop in Italy’s breathtaking Aosta Valley region. One is a boy from the city, the other from a mountain village who grow apart only to have destiny bring them together again.
Following its successful North American Premiere at TIFF 2022 and Jury Prize at Cannes 2022, “EO” by legendary Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski opens across Canada on Friday, November 25, 2022.
Panahi continues his interrogation of authority in a story of a couple attempting to secure fake passports so that they can flee to France, and another where the director unwittingly becomes involved in the politics of the village in which he’s staying.
For the past decade award-winning documentarian Alice Diop has turned her camera on injustices and intimate stories of immigrant communities on the peripheries of Paris. In her astonishing narrative feature debut, she brings her typical sensitivity and rigor to a story inspired by a real-life trial of a woman who allegedly abandoned her 15-month-old daughter on a beach in northern France.
To celebrate the 4K remaster of Tales from the Gimli Hospital Redux by Guy Maddin, Canadian film distributor Films We Like has commissioned Winnipeg-based artist and designer Galen Johnson to create a limited edition print signed by director Guy Maddin.
Set during a smallpox epidemic in the village of Gimli, Manitoba near the turn of the century, Tales From The Gimli Hospital is a dreamlike, elliptical film which explores the jealousy and madness instilled in two men who share a hospital room "in a Gimli we no longer know."
With his first film in seven years, director Jerzy Skolimowski directs one of his most free and visually inventive films yet, following the travels of a nomadic grey donkey named EO. After being removed from the traveling circus, which is the only life he’s ever known, EO begins a trek across the Polish and Italian countryside, experiencing cruelty and kindness in equal measure, all the while observing the follies and triumphs of humankind.
Films We Like has acquired the Canadian rights to Sierra Pettengill’s riveting documentary Riotsville, USA. Pettengill uses unearthed military training footage of Army-built model towns called “Riotsvilles,” where military and police were trained to respond to civil unrest in the late sixties. Film Critic Susannah Gruber in Indiewire wrote: “This unique framework succeeds in turning history on its head, forcing us to question how these violent tactics from the past have led to the increasingly armed present we're witnessing today.”
Canadian distributor Films We Like announces the acquisition of Let There Be Drums!, a new documentary film by Justin Kreutzmann, son of Grateful Dead’s drummer Bill Kreutzmann. The on-beat documentary features a constellation of all-star drummers who examine the essential role drumming plays in popular music.
Joe Papp, founder of The Public Theater, Free Shakespeare in the Park and producer of groundbreaking plays like "Hair," "A Chorus Line" and "for colored girls," created a 'theater of inclusion' based on the belief that great art is for everyone.
Benoit Magimel stars as a high ranking government official in French Polynesia, dealing with hearsay sightings of a submarine whose ghostly presence could herald the return of French nuclear testing. Film Critic Peter Bradshaw wrote, “Pacifiction is an authentic descent into darkness.”
Shot on vivid 16mm film over a three-year period, the documentary chronicles notoriously shy, Melbourne-based musician Courtney Barnett’s ups and downs on the world tour for her album Tell Me How You Really Feel. Featuring Barnett’s unguarded narration from her audio diary, recorded on a dictaphone provided by filmmaker Danny Cohen, the film delivers frank and unprecedented insight into Barnett’s creative process, the sacrifices and inner conflicts set in motion by fame, and the sometimes dark backdrop to her whimsical, relatably poetic compositions.
GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE is an immersion into the rich ecosystem of Sable Island, guided by naturalist and environmentalist Zoe Lucas who has lived over 40 years on this remote sliver of land in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. Shot on 16mm and created using a scope of innovative eco-friendly filmmaking techniques, this feature-length experimental documentary is a playful and reverent collaboration with the natural world. Zoe leads us among wild horses, seals and bugs, through peaks, valleys, roots, sands, weathers, seasons and stars. The intangible is evoked with hidden sounds and vanishing light. Much like a field book, the film tracks its protagonist's labor to collect, clean and document marine litter that persistently washes up on the island shores.
Dunstan Bruce is 59 and he’s struggling with the fact that the world seems to be going to hell in a handcart. He’s wondering where did it all go wrong? For him. For humanity. But how does a middle-aged, retired radical, who now feels invisible get back up again? This is the untold and remarkable story of Chumbawamba and Dunstan’s personal redemptive voyage as well as a call to arms to those who think activism is best undertaken by someone else.
Bucharest, 1972. Ana, 17, dreams of love and freedom. One night, while partying with her friends, they decide to send a letter to Metronom, the musical program which Radio Free Europe broadcasts clandestinely in Romania. It is then that the Securitate, Ceausescu’s secret police, arrives.
Directed by Mikhaël Hers (Amanda, Venice award winner 2018), THE PASSENGERS OF THE NIGHT is a nuanced portrait of a Parisian family in the 1980s. Featuring Charlotte Gainsbourg, the film had its world premiere at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival.
Solomon, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, lives and works in a New York City recycling center. Convinced that his missing mother has been abducted by aliens, he has built himself a radio telescope to intercept possible communications from outer space. He meets by chance the attractive Chuyao, an employee of a nail salon in an irregular situation, who also shares a personal interest in UFOs. After a violent altercation with her thuggish boyfriend, the two left behind escape to the West in search of the truth.
