Mary Cecilia "Bomber" LeBlanc, shown above with L'Arche assistant Mavis at the 2007 Cape Breton Island Film Series party for l'Arche Cape Breton, died peacefully Thursday morning in her home at The Vineyard, a L'Arche residence in Orangedale, surrounded by friends and caregivers. Death came six days before her 60th birthday, and, incredibly, hours before a provincial health bureaucrats were to meet to begin planning her involuntary removal from l'Arche, over protests of family, friends, and caregivers. Mary was a small woman with a steely will and an outsized capacity for getting her own way—and then leading a chorus of laughter about...

07 November, 2010

My favorite film series opens its fall season tonight with this year's surprise winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar: The Secret In Their Eyes, a movie that crosses genres: part thriller, love story, comedy, and political drama. Showtime: 7 p.m., at the Empire Theatre, 325 Prince Street, Sydney. Previews from WhatsGoinOn and The Post. Check out the links: Oh yeah, that other film festival starts today, too....

09 September, 2010

[caption id="attachment_6492" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Tanya Davis"][/caption] Sandbar Music of Charlottetown, PEI, has released a soundtrack MP3 of  the hit YouTube video, How To Be Alone. Tanya Davis wrote and performed the poetry and music at the heart of the piece; Andrea Dorfman directed the film, which had been viewed just over 600 times when featured here July 30. (Find a partial account of its viral progress toward the current 1.4 million hits here.) It's plain that, aside from one crankypants Globe and Mail reviewer, lots of people want to hear music and poetry like Davis's, and see moving pictures like Dorfman's. The traditional distribution...

08 September, 2010

One of the nice discoveries in my role as manager and chief film-picker for the Cape Breton Island Film Series has been the movies of Ramin Bahrani, the Iranian-American director of dramas like Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, and Goodbye Solo. Bahrani portrays the extraordinary lives of ordinary people in a naturalistic style that is almost documentary in character. We were the only film series in Canada to show Chop Shop; by the time Goodbye Solo came out a year later, Bahrani's movies were de rigueur on the indie circuit. Bahrani grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Roger Ebert calls him...

21 March, 2010

Thursday night, the Cape Breton Island Film Series screened its 200th film, a milestone we had no thought of reaching when we began the series in January, 2003, with Bowling for Columbine. You can download a pdf list of all the films we've shown here, and you won't find many turkeys. The list makes a great aide-mémoire at the video store. Ten films I particularly liked were: 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days City of God House of Sand Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Lost in Translation Man on Wire Rabbit Proof Fence Shut Up and Sing Thank You for Smoking The Lives of Others Hardly anyone liked: Russian Arc The...

19 March, 2010

The Harper Government's ambivalent attitude toward immigration deserves more thoughtful consideration than I have time for this morning, but in light of yesterday's release of a new guide for prospective Canadian Immigrants, a manual high in testosterone and shy on environmental values, I flag it here for future discussion. An immigrant himself, Contrarian left yesterday's Film Series benefit for L'Arche Cape Breton* thinking about the Senegalese immigrant cab driver at the centre of the featured movie — an ebullient character named Solo, brilliantly played by Souleymane Sy Savane, himself an immigrant to the US from the Ivory Coast.  Solo is one...

13 November, 2009

At Sydney's Waterfront Pavillion Thursday night, it's The Party Of The Year — and that's saying something in Cape Breton! The Cape Breton Island Film Series' 4th annual benefit for L'Arche Cape Breton gets under way at 7 pm at the Empire Theatre with the acclaimed indie film GOODBYE SOLO, the story of two men from completely different backgrounds who form an unlikely friendship. At 9, the action shifts to the Joan Harriss Cruise Pavillion, next to the Big Fiddle, for live music and dancing to the Blues Merchants and Cape Breton's best Lebanese buffet. The whole L'Arche Community will be there,...

11 November, 2009

- Carol Kennedy photo Cape Breton's Fall colors peak between the first and second weekends of October, and this year foliage tourists have four worthy festivals to chose from. The Hike the Highlands festival offers 23 guided hikes in a variety of distances, difficulties, and locations around the Cabot Trail from September 11 to 20. The festival also features workshops on nature photography, GPS, and geocaching, together with various social and musical events. The first annual inaugural Cabot Trail Writers' Festival in North River, October 2 to 4, features readings and workshops by authors Donna Morrissey (Kit's Law & What They Wanted),  Douglas...

09 September, 2009