Happy 60th Birthday, Atom Egoyan! Born today in 1960 as Atom Yeghoyam, this critically-acclaimed Egyptian-born Canadian screenwriter, producer and stage and film director who is known for his nuanced character studies of people in unconventional circumstances.
Egoyan was part of a loosely-affiliated group of filmmakers to emerge in the 1980s from Toronto known as the Toronto New Wave. This refers to a loose-knit group of filmmakers from Toronto who came of age during the 1980s and early 1990s.
In the early 1990s, Egoyan's commercial breakthrough came later in writing and directing the 1994 Canadian drama/mystery film 'Exotica'.
For this, Egoyan later received the Grand Prix (Belgian Film Critics Association) in Brussels, the FIPRESCI Jury Prize at the 47th Cannes Film Festival, and Best Motion Picture at the 15th Genie Awards. The Genie Awards recognized the best of Canadian cinema from 1980–2012.
Three years later, however, it was Egoyan's first attempt at an adapted material that resulted in his seventh spellbinding feature of which he is best know as both writer, co-producer and director.
This was the 1997 Canadian drama/disaster film 'The Sweet Hereafter'. The film was adapted from the eponymous 1991 fiction novel by American novelist and writer of fiction and poetry Russell Banks.
Set in a small mountain community in Canada, the locals are devastated when a school bus accident leaves more than a dozen of its children dead.
A big-city lawyer Mitchell Stevens (Ian Holm) arrives to help the survivors' and victims' families prepare a class-action suit, but his efforts only seem to push the townspeople further apart.
At the same time, one teenage survivor of the accident, Nicole Burnell (Sarah Polley) has to reckon with the loss of innocence brought about by a different kind of damage.
The story for 'The Sweet Hereafter' was inspired by the 1989 Alton, Texas bus crash. The film was shot in British Columbia and Ontario, incorporating a film score with medieval music influences and references to the story of The Pied Piper of Hamelin.
Although 'The Sweet Hereafter' was not a box office success. On a budget of $5 million. the film only grossed $3.3 million at the box office. However, it was this film that brought him wider recognition and commercial success.
However, it was critically acclaimed and won three awards, including the Grand Prix at the 50th Cannes Film Festival in May 1997, where it had premiered.
It also won seven Genie Awards at the 18th Genie Awards in December 1997, including Best Motion Picture.
The following year, 'The Sweet Hereafter' also received two Oscar nominations, for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. However, it won none of these. This occurred at the 70th Academy Awards in late March 1998.
Roger Ebert gave the film four stars, calling it "one of the best films of the year, an unflinching lament for the human condition."
American journalist Janet Maslin, writing for The New York Times, said "this fusion of Mr. Banks's and Mr. Egoyan's sensibilities stands as a particularly inspired mix," with Sarah Polley and Bruce Greenwood "particularly good here."
According to Egoyan's personal life, he is currently based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and is also a professor of film at the European Graduate School (EGS).
He lives in Toronto with his wife, Armenian-Canadian actress and producer Arsinée Khanjian. She is trilingual (English, French and Armenian) and has appeared in many of Egoyan's films.
They both have a son, Arshile, who is named after the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky.
Egoyan, alongside fellow Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, was one of North American cinema’s key chroniclers of life in the developing video age, where the nature of human relationships radically altered in the wake of technology’s expanding role in our lives.
Bureaucracy and other power structures also tend to isolate characters in his films. They are about alienation and so can be alienating.
The work of Egoyan often explores themes of alienation and isolation, featuring characters whose interactions are mediated through technology, bureaucracy, or other power structures.
His films often follow non-linear plot structures, in which events are placed out of sequence in order to elicit specific emotional reactions from the audience by withholding key information.
Egoyan has been active from 1984–present.
#borntodirect
@TheFullEgoyan
@cfccreates
@BFI
@theeuropeangraduateschool
@RogerEbert
@Screendaily
@Britannica
No comments:
Post a Comment