How hard is it to find a Canadian film on the shelves of a library or a movie rental outlet, such as Rogers? It is hard. I naively thought that I would be able to borrow or rent a Canadian film from anywhere where they rent DVDs. I asked for Atom Egoyan’s films in one of the locations of the Ottawa Public library; none of his films the library owned were available at the location. Besides this, in most cases there was only one copy of each film shared among all the library locations. The waiting time to see one of Egoyan’s films was up to 15 weeks! Since there was no separate shelf for Canadian cinema it meant that I had to look at each DVD box individually to identify the country where the film was made.
Ironically, what I found among the DVD boxes was “Nothing”, a film directed by a Canadian filmmaker Vincenzo Natali. My neighbour hood video rental store offered nothing substantial at all. Of course I know that there are local resources available for studying and enjoying Canadian cinema, such as the Canadian Film Institute, the Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa Inc. (IFCO), and the Available Light Screening Collective to name a few. There are also local video stores such as Invisible Cinema, Elgin Street Video (258 Elgin St) and Glebe Video (779 Bank St) that are much more devoted to cinematic art than some of the larger video store chains. I think, though, that the culture of the country one lives in, should be a lot more accessible; the barriers associated with one’s desire to get exposed to the arts of its own country must be completely eliminated. There is an active interest in Canadian cinema but there is not enough access to it!
GIVE IT TO US!!! MAKE CULTURE ACCESSIBLE!
PS By the way, I did watch “Nothing”. The main characters in this film were the underdogs, yet again.
No comments:
Post a Comment