Loving Vincent

This screening took place on Monday, November 13, 2017 at 8:00 pmYukon Arts Centre

A stunning, fully painted animated feature, starring Douglas Booth and Oscar-nominated Saoirse Ronan that explores the life and controversial death of Vincent Van Gogh, told by his paintings and by the characters that inhabit them. The intrigue unfolds through interviews with the characters closest to Vincent and through dramatic reconstructions of the events leading up to his death. Winner of the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) Audience Choice Award for Best International Feature, 2017. "Loving Vincent is gorgeous. It's a film of immersive beauty. Watching it makes one feel like the protagonist in that old eighties A-Ha video who gets lured into the pages of a comic book by a come-hither hand and becomes absorbed into a pencil-drawn adventure. Except instead of some cheesy monochrome comic, the viewer is sucked into the gorgeous, colourful, highly engrossing landscapes of 19th-century Dutch post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, the temperamental, half-psychotic painter called le fou roux ("the redheaded crazy"), who sliced off his left ear and delivered it to a brothel, whose life and work exist at the fateful intersection of madness and genius. Loving Vincent intrigues at the level of construction alone. It purports to be – in its marketing campaign and with an introductory title card – "the world's first fully painted feature film," meaning that its individual frames (some 65,000 of them) were painted with oils on canvases by a team of more than 100 artists. Yet what may have come off in less ambitious hands as a painted flip book illustrating van Gogh's biography emerges as an actual, honest-to-God film. The camera (or the illusion of one) moves through these images. Characters move and talk and fist fight freely. The bar tops and French farmers' fields and hirsute postmasters and dark, starry nights that appear across van Gogh's paintings come thrillingly alive. The effect is somewhere between Richard Linklater's digitally rotoscoped films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly and, well, a van Gogh." 3 of 4 stars —John Semley, The Globe and Mail