Act of God Director: Jennifer Baichwal, Canada, 2009, 75 minutes
CLOSING NIGHT FILM
Saturday May 30 | 7:30 PM | Granville 7 Theatre
Filmmaker in attendance.
Note: Act of God opens June 5 at Tinseltown!
When writer Paul Auster was 14 years-old, he stood beside his
friend Ralph as he was struck and killed by lightning. They were
on a Boy Scout hike. "There’s something monumental about
a lightning bolt coming from the sky, it doesn’t feel like an
ordinary death, it has something of the divine about it,"
says Auster.
The human need to make sense of a random and wildly unpredictable
universe flows through director Jennifer Baichwal’s new documentary
Act of God. The film explores not only the phenomena
of lightning and the experiences of people who lived through being
struck (and those who did not), but poses metaphysical questions
that have confounded human beings since the beginning of conscious
thought.
As one woman unintentionally puns, being struck by lightning
is much more than ‘a bad shock.’ From the advent of human society,
it has occupied a symbolic role as a means of transformation and
the genesis of all life. In Yoruba beliefs, it is a gift to humankind
from the god Shango. To an ex-marine who was declared clinically
dead for twenty-eight minutes, after being struck by lighting
through the telephone, it was a means of spiritual rebirth. "Lightning
and change go hand in hand, and in a single moment I was changed,"
he says. To others, it is a far less beneficent force. A man who
lived through the death of his friend Dino, who was essentially
cooked from the inside out, recounts the experience in horrifying
detail.
The film features a terrific soundtrack from musician Fred Frith.
He wasn’t actually struck by lightning, but his neurons make their
own electrical storm while he plays guitar. Act of God
is a mysterious, discursive, and sublimely beautiful meditation
on meaning and the lack thereof.
"It changed my whole way of looking at the world,"
says Paul Auster, who credits his experience as the reason he
became a writer. "The mechanics of reality, there’s no meaning
to this, it’s absolutely meaningless, yet this is the way the
world works."
Director’s Biography
Jennifer Baichwal has been directing and producing documentaries
for 14 years. Let it Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles,
her first feature documentary, won a 1999 International Emmy for
Best Arts Documentary and premiered at the Toronto International
Film Festival in 1998. The Holier It Gets won Best Independent
Canadian Film and Best Cultural Documentary at Hot Docs 2000,
Geminis for Best Editing and Best Writing. The True Meaning
of Pictures premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival
in 2002 and was invited to the Sundance International Film Festival
in January 2003. It won a Gemini award for Best Arts Documentary
in 2003 and played at DOXA in 2004. Manufactured Landscapes,
about the work of artist Edward Burtynsky premiered at TIFF in
September 2006 and won Best Canadian Feature Film. Her new film
Act of God explores the metaphysical effects of being
struck by lightning.
Major Partner
Community Partner
for this advance screening of this soon to be released Canadian
film
