20:30
20-22: ALPHA   (2014)
Directed by Thierry Loa
34 minutes
No language, pure visuals

Canadian filmmaker Thierry Loa is now touring through Europe with this film, which has been screened recently at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. In fact he will come to Cavia directly after screening his movie at Cannes to introduce his hallucinogenic "non-verbal" vision of our postmodern world of accelerated change.

20-22: ALPHA, the first-released film by project 20-22, is a nonverbal nonfiction film that examines the spectacular world of postmodern mankind by transcending the human language to offer a pure cinematic immersion into this futuristic and otherworldly, yet nostalgic and familiar world.
This is a swiftly-moving kaleidoscope of images that transverses the landscapes that we inhabit- from offices to shopping malls, from medical chambers to factories... and all the while keeps a cool objective eye that allows us to reflect on the direction of our civilization. Shot on vivid black and white celluloid, this is both a documentary and a sort of drug trip at the same time...  transporting the audience beyond its normal locked-in sense of space and time and plunging it into our 'society of the spectacle'.


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21:30
SPEAKING PARTS  1989
Directed by Atom Egoyan
93 minutes
In English

Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan is one of the most distinct cinematic voices to emerge from the independent film scene at the end of the last century. His movies are a strange mix... entertaining and stylized, but also complex and intelligent. They have a storyline, but are also fragmented and deeply mysterious. There is always something haunting about his movies, which often confront the banal situations of our modern existence. He sets his films in everyday situations that we are all familiar with, but they are cast in such a strange light. Like a hall of mirrors or a lucid dream, we find ourselves pulled into a surreal world which unfolds unpredictably.

Here is an early gem by Egoyan that centers on its main character Lance, who has two jobs. One is as a busboy at a hotel, which he does to make money. But his other job is acting as an extra in movies, where he is hoping that someday he will get a proper "speaking part". But this situation is more complex, since his work as a busboy is actually only a front for his real work: being rented out as a gigolo at the hotel. But actually the story is even more layered since it is also about a shy hotel chambermaid Lisa (Khanjian), who longs for Lance and obsessively watches videos of him as an extra in movies.

So what we have here is a movie about desires, and how they are used to manipulate us and pervert us. The characters in this movie are almost like lost mice in a maze... caught up within a strange business-like world of hotel corridors, universal TV hookups, conference rooms and video stores. Using innovative narrative structures and combining them with his character's obsession with watching video tapes, Egoyan explores the role of technology as both a medium for communication and as a barrier for our true self-realization. As the expression goes: so close, yet so faraway.

Innovative as hell, this is a film about sensual obsessions, inhibitions, bizarre relationships and longing in a world of virtual communication.