Jun 5-12: SILENT LIGHT Plays VanCity!

At last! The Carlos Reygadas film we've been awaiting for months is on its way. (Here's a link to the earlier post. SILENT LIGHT will play the Vancity Theatre June 5-12.

Here's the VanCity blurb;

SILENT LIGHT
Mexico, France, Germany, Netherlands, 2007, 126 min, 35mm
Directed By: Carlos Reygadas
Cast: Elizabeth Fehr, Jacobo Klassen, Maria Pankratz, Miriam Toews, Cornelio Wall, Peter Wall
This film is not rated. No children under 18.
VANCOUVER PREMIERE // VANCITY THEATRE EXCLUSIVE FIRST RUN

Winner of the 2007 Cannes Jury Prize and five Golden Ariels (the Mexican film awards) including best film and director, Carlos Reygadas’ controversial opus opens our eyes to a world never seen before on film: the Mexican Mennonite community in the northern Chihuahua province. The story is human interaction at its most elemental: devoted father Johan, happily married to Esther (Winnipeg Mennonite author Miriam Toews, one of a cast of non-professionals) has a crisis of faith when he is attracted to another woman. Reygadas situates his film square in the transcendental tradition of Bresson and Dreyer, and doesn’t compromise an inch in offering up a haunting, visionary work that cements him as one of contemporary cinema’s most unique artists.

“Stunningly beautiful…the admirably unpredictable Reygadas has made the world’s first talking picture in the medieval German Plautdietsch dialect. Even more than the director’s previous films, including his 2005 black comedy Battle in Heaven, Silent Light is a behavioral experiment. Everything is monumentally deliberate, from the human interactions to the stolidly bucolic representation of Mennonite domesticity to the extraordinary, widescreen landscape shots that bracket the action. Oscillating between the sacred and the profane, Reygadas’ elemental tale of love and betrayal is part ethnographic documentary and part 16th-century psychodrama, with an obvious debt to Carl Theodor Dreyer. Was Reygadas looking for the appropriate environment for a Dreyer remake—or did Dreyer’s Ordet present the most ‘natural’ scenario for a Mennonite passion play?”  J. Hoberman, The Village Voice