Greta Thunberg, c/o Cedar Island Films/Flying Eye Productions/NFB
NFB to present Frontlight doc The Magnitude of All Things, about grief suffered both personally and on an environmental level, which features Greta Thunberg. Also three new interactive works to be showcased at DocLab, including the phone adventure Motto to be broadcast live from Montreal.
Four new works produced and co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) will be showcased at IDFA. NFP will present the European premiere of Jennifer Abbott’s feature-length documentary The Magnitude of All Things, which draws intimate parallels between the experiences of grief, both personal and planetary, and which includes contribution from Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.
This Cedar Island Films/Flying Eye Productions/NFB co-production will be showcased in the festival’s Frontlight section, which “encourages a deeper understanding of the world today, examining the zeitgeist from lesser-heard perspectives”.
Three NFB works are selected for IDFA DocLab. These are Agence (Transitional Forms/NFB) by Pietro Gagliano, which NFB describes as “an innovative blend of AI, cinematic storytelling and VR,” The Book of Distance by Randall Okita, acclaimed as a landmark in personal VR experiences and Motto, a playful adventure for phones by the team of Vincent Morisset, Sean Michaels, Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit and Caroline Robert, developed by AATOAA and produced by the NFB.
The festival’s IDFA on Stage section is also presenting Motto Live, a live performance exploring the world of Motto, broadcast live from Morisset’s studio in Montreal, joined by artists from different countries.
When Jennifer Abbott lost her sister to cancer, her sorrow opened her up to the profound gravity of climate breakdown. In The Magnitude of All Things, stories from the frontlines of climate change merge with recollections from the filmmaker’s childhood on Ontario’s Georgian Bay. What do these stories have in common? The answer, surprisingly, is everything.
“For the people featured in this film (including Greta Thunberg) climate change is not happening in the distant future: it is kicking down the front door. Battles waged, lamentations of loss, and raw testimony coalesce into an extraordinary tapestry, woven together with raw emotion and staggering beauty that transform darkness into light, grief into action,” says NFB. The film was named Best Canadian Feature at the Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival in Toronto.
Based in Vancouver, Abbott has been making films about urgent social, political and environmental issues for 25 years, including co-directing the 2003 Sundance award-winning The Corporation and its 2020 follow-up, The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel.
The DocLab selection Agence by places the fate of artificially intelligent creatures in your hands. Will you help to maintain their peaceful existence, or throw them into a state of chaos? Described as “a dynamic film that merges cinematic storytelling, artificial intelligence, and user interactivity, Agence is never the same twice.” The work was in official selection at Venice International Film Festival’s Venice VR Expanded, BFI London Film Festival’s LFF Expanded and the Festival du nouveau cinéma’s FNC Explore.
Pietro Gagliano’s work has been recognized through hundreds of awards and nominations, including two Emmy Awards, 31 FWAs, two Webby Awards and a Peabody-Facebook Award.
The Book of Distance by Randall Okita: in 1935, Yonezo Okita left his home in Hiroshima, Japan, for Canada. Then war and racism changed everything. Three generations later, his grandson Randall leads us on an interactive pilgrimage through an emotional geography of immigration and family to recover what was lost, in the first VR work by award-winning artist and filmmaker Okita.
The work was named Best in Animation at the Vancouver International Film Festival’s VIFF Immersed program and received the Prix Horizon for Most Innovative 6DoF Animation at FNC Explore, as well as the Golden Fireball Award, the top VR prize at the Kaohsiung Film Festival in Taiwan. It has been an official selection at numerous festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier section and the Venice Film Festival’s Best of VR.
Motto, by Vincent Morisset, Sean Michaels, Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit and Caroline Robert, is described as “a playful, one-of-a-kind adventure—an interactive novella that uses thousands of tiny videos to tell the thousand-year tale of a kind-hearted spirit. Part ghost story, part scavenger hunt, Motto finds a way to be both documentary and fiction, incorporating participants’ lo-fi, unstaged footage into its own emotional narrative.
Winner of the 2019 IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction for Vast Body, Morisset also created the acclaimed interactive projects BLA BLA and Way to Go with the NFB.
