Cinema Project is pleased to welcome guest curator and filmmaker Brett Kashmere to town to present this special program. Carte Blanche du Canada magnifies cracks in the friendly Northern façade: Isolation, loneliness, melancholia, the dissipation of rural life, the fall of civilization and the end of civilized play are displayed in this program of Canadian film et video.

Free Fall, by the legendary National Film Board artist Arthur Lipsett, features dazzling pixilation, in-camera superimpositions, syncopated rhythms and ironic sound-image juxtaposition. Individual perceptions of memory are foregrounded in distance is relative by Amber Goodwyn, a silent travelogue built around the romantic conceit of a missing lover.  still | move, a sociological reflection on family history by Michael  Rollo, transposes the architecture of photographic albums  to chronicle the decay of his grandparents’ prairie railroad community. unfinished passages, a five-part film cycle by Brett Kashmere, uses reprocessed archival images and  text to trace the migration of the artist's great-grandfather from London, England to Golden Plains, Saskatchewan. Christina Battle's sumptuously colored buffalo lifts reveals a herd desperately trying to hold on as they struggle to cross the film frame. Jake Kennedy's Colonel Canuck propagates the popular image of a well-mannered, simple, and lonely Canadian, lost in a cross-cultural chatroom. Richard Kerr's Last Days of Contrition is a moving poem that speaks of terror and wonder through desolation of the western American landscape; the film acts as a metaphor for the industrial/militay politics of 20th century America.