The Twentieth Century
Director: Matthew Rankin Run Time: 90 min. Rating: NR
Starring: Catherine St-Laurent, Dan Beirne, Sarianne Cormier
Presented in the Virtual Screening Room in partnership with Oscilloscope.
“A balls-to-the-wall phantasmagoria of maple syrup soaked ridiculousness”
– Pat Mullen, That Shelf
About the film:
Winner of Best Canadian First Feature at Toronto and the FIPRESCI Prize in the International Forum of New Cinema at Berlin.
A wildly abstract re-imagining of Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s rise to power. Deranged and mesmerizing, the film takes grand liberties with historical truths and twists together a fantastical fiction world.
About the filmmaker:
Internationally acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin’s projects are an inventive hybrid of animation and experimental docudrama. A student of history, he studied at McGill University in Montreal and the Université Laval in Quebec. In 2005, he co-founded the l’Atelier-National du Manitoba filmmaking collective devoted to the artistic study of history and culture in Winnipeg and Manitoba.
Rankin’s award-winning short films have been selected at film festivals around the world. Most recently, Mynarski Death Plummet (2014) was an Official Selection of Sundance Film Festival, TIFF, and AFI Fest, and his black and white avant-garde short The Tesla World Light (2017) screened at Cannes, TIFF, and won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Animated Short.
Rankin spoke with CBC radio about playing fast and loose with Canadian history in his satirical debut feature film, The Twentieth Century.
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