 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| EXILES IN LOTUSLAND | ||
  |
||
| 2005 | Ontario | 70 Minutes | Directed and Written by Ilan Saragosti | Alberta Premeir | ||
| Everyone’s looking for a better place in the world. For homeless and displaced youth, the road west has a special kind of attraction. But it’s not warmer climes or a vigorous sense of adventure that draws them to our far flung crust of the continent. For most, it’s a desperate do-or-die attempt to try and reinvent themselves. The chance to begin again is often the only thing that keeps them going at all. Such is the life of Mélo and Ti-criss, two kids who ran away from juvenile services and fell into the dumpster-diving lifestyles of Vancouver. Like a quarter of all street kids in Vancouver, they are francophones. For Karl, a researcher sent west by La Boussoule to study this phenomena, it’s more than just an unusual statistic: it’s a problem from back home that he’s passionately trying to get a handle on. But for Mélo and Ti-criss, it’s barely a reminder of where they are from that gets lost in the days and night of just getting by and getting high on crystal-meth. And although other characters and francophones abound in Exiles in Lotusland, the odyssey is truly Mélo and Ti-criss’s for better and for worse. Director Ilan Saragosti has smartly chosen the soft hand for this very hard topic, for there is nothing he could say that will top the chaos of Mélo and Ti-criss’s life. Never judgmental and rarely intrusive, we follow the young couple through Saragosti’s eyes across the country as they return to Quebec, only to be separated and heart broken. They then seek out bush life in the Okanagan only to return to the streets of Vancouver. And just when it seems like the cycle of homelessness and drug addiction will begin anew, Ti-criss becomes overtaken by poverty in a most irreversible way. - Victoria Independent Film Festival |
||
History graduate Ilan Saragosti got his start in film and video as a researcher before directing two dramatic shorts. He spent the years 1999 to 2002 crewing on various sets, also finding time to finish his first feature documentary, A Match Made in Seven (2002), which went on to win a Bronze Plaque award at the Columbus International Film and Video Festival as well as the Viewer's Choice for best documentary at the Temecula Valley International Film Festival. For the past two years he's been busy with the Gemini-winning TV series Culture Shock/Culture Choc and his new documentary Exiles in Lotusland. Ilan Saragosti's artistic concerns address the disintegration of traditional communities and reconstruction of the social fabric. He has two documentaries in the works, both examining new trends, and continues to work actively as a print journalist.
|
||
 |
||
|
|
Official Selection 2006 Hot Docs 2006 Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival 2006 Commonwealth Film Festival (Manchester, England) 2006 Worldfest International Film Festival (Houston, TX) Award
Winner 2005 Whistler Film Festival |
|
|
||
 |
||
| 2006 | Home | Submit | Sponsor | Friends | Volunteer | About | Archive | Wed | Fri | Sat |
||