LIFT Screening: What these ashes wanted

The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto
And The Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre present

WHAT THESE ASHES WANTED

by Phil Hoffman

Phil Hoffman will attend the screening.

The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto
And The Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre present

WHAT THESE ASHES WANTED

by Phil Hoffman

Phil Hoffman will attend the screening.

What these ashes wanted (2001) places flesh on the poet Anne Carson’s
words “…death lines every moment of ordinary time.” With this work Hoffman resides in an acutely intimate time, a daily practice of loss lived precariously between the terror of psychic disintegration and the provisional solace taken through public rituals of mourning. What these ashes wanted is not a story of surviving death, but rather of living death through a heightening of the quotidian moments of every day experience.

(Catalogue for Images Festival, Toronto, 2001)

The three parts of this film: He always thought they would grow old together, Four Shadows, and 17 combine hand-processed film, video diaries and found sound recordings in a non-narrative expression of grief for the loss of the filmmaker’s partner Marian McMahon to cancer in 1996.

What these ashes wanted (2001) won the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival (2002), the Gus Van Sant Award at the Ann Arbour Film Festival (2003), and the Telefilm Canada Award at the Images Film Festival (2001) in Toronto.

Phil Hoffman has been a filmmaker and teacher for over twenty years. Hoffman’s films have been described as ‘experimental diarist cinema’, an intimate first-person collision of fiction and documentary. In his films, he uses the daily material of his life, and the material properties of the film medium, to explore themes of memory, family and loss.

Thursday 9 October 2003 –

Non-members: 6
Members: 8

Location:
Innis Town Hall 
2 Sussex Avenue 
Toronto ON Canada