Calendar

Director: Atom Egoyan

1993 / 74min / DCP

Egoyan himself takes on the lead role in the slyly satiric tale of a photographer who, hired to produce enough images of Armenian churches to fill a calendar, travels the country’s rugged backlands with his spouse (Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan’s real-life partner) and a local guide, then returns to Toronto with his assignment fulfilled but no wife at his side, once home floundering through a succession of ritual-like encounters with women that may either be dates or auditions. “Implicating himself more directly than ever in his own material, [Egoyan] becomes at once more modest and more relaxed; his touch is lighter and funnier and his directorial hand is surer… Create[s] lush formal patterns that are both hilarious and evocative, rhythmic and beautiful, painfully recognizable as well as pleasurable.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

“It is as if Calendar has no beginning and no end. Structured like a hypnotic ellipse, it obsessively rotates, looping spectral memories that endlessly arrive and depart.” —Guest curator Iva Radivojević

Introduction by filmmaker Iva Radivojević on Saturday, January 17th