Matthew Rankin Retrospective

Matthew Rankin Retrospective
Shorts || Canada || 2006-2017 || 65 minutes
Friday June 8 || 9 PM || Neptune Scotiabank Stage Theatre || $10/$12

HIFF welcomes award-winning mastermind Matthew Rankin for a retrospective of his short experimental films. Matthew is an animator/inventor/historian/filmmaker and an advocate for handmade film. His films are complex visual feasts that blend live-action with classical and avant-guard hand animation techniques that include stop-motion, hand-painting, scratching, bleaching, light painting, and rubbing letratone patterns on film stock.  His fantastical films transform the cinematic language of abstraction into narratives, guided by eccentric characters in heightened emotional spaces. Matthew’s films have the uncanny ability to transcend reality while remaining rooted in historical facts; kind of like a “Heritage Minute on acid” (TIFF 2017).  Matthew is the 2018 Canadian Screen Award winner for Best Animated Short for Tesla World Light.  Currently he is in post-production on his debut feature The Twentieth Century, a Canadian historical biopic about the early life of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.

Welcome to the fun, funny, and beautifully bizarre imagination of Matthew Rankin - enjoy the ride!

A Q&A with Matthew Rankin will follow the screening.

01. This is an Official Message of Encouragement (2015)

02. Mynarski: Death Plummet (2014)

03. Sharhé Halé-Shakhsi: M. Rankin (2008)

04. I Dream of Driftwood (2007)

05. Negativipeg (2010)

06. Discount Everything

07. Cattle Call (2008)

08. Hydro Lévesque (2008)

09. TABULA RASA (2011)

10. The Tesla World Light (2017)

Matthew Rankin was born in Winnipeg. He studied history at McGill University and Université Laval before returning into the artistic underclass of his native city to make films. Working in photochemical hybrids of fiction, documentary and animated abstraction, Matthew has been Artist-in-Residence at the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo and the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture in Dawson City, Yukon. Matthew’s defiantly low-budget short films have played at Cannes Critics Week, the Sundance Film Festival and one of them was temporarily banned in his native Manitoba. He is currently in post-production on his first feature, The Twentieth Century.