The Herd traces the true-life tale of Andy Bahr’s reindeer drive across 2,400 km of hostile and unmapped terrain. The 62-year-old set out from Alaska in 1929 with a small team of Inuit and Sami herders. And 3,000 reindeer! They were heading for the Northwest Territories. The Canadian government, in a well-intentioned move to provide a livelihood for the Mackenzie Delta Inuit, had purchased the herd. The reindeer drive, expected to take about 18 months, lasted 6 years. Filmed on location from the Bering Strait in Alaska to the Beaufort Sea in the Northwest Territories, this stunning odyssey follows Bahr’s quest to the edge of the World. Filmmaker Peter Lynch continues to challenge the boundaries of fact and fiction, fusing drama and documentary. The Herd features performances from some of Canada’s finest actors, as well as painstaking historical documentation, epic myth and irreverent humour.

Filmed on location across Canada and the U.S.-from Cape Cod, Grand Manan Island and Ile Verte in the St. Lawrence River to Telegraph Cove, B.C., Niagara Falls and Toronto-this “shaggy whale story” is the latest stream-of-heightened-consciousness from Lynch, a Canadian auteur whose style-heavy approach is often compared by critics to that of Werner Herzog. It’s an absurdist tale that evokes Lynch’s earlier Quixotic adventures such as Project Grizzly and Cyberman.

This time around for Lynch it’s a playful tale of obsession, rendering a journey beyond the travelogue. “An illuminating and eclectic mix of stories, narrative asides and purposefully pleasurable diversions,” says Lynch. “It is a complex tale that twists and turns while celebrating the power of story telling. It starts out a mystery and ends as a discovered new myth.” Ultimately, the landscape we encounter in this Lynch tale is the wilderness of the ocean and the archipelagoes of the imagination.

A Whale of a Tale is directed and co-produced by Peter Lynch (acquafilm), co-produced by Ed Barreveld (Storyline) in co-production with the NFB and in association with CBC Newsworld.

http://www.whaleofatale.ca/

Toronto August 26, 2011 The Future Projections programme features moving-image artworks, opening at the Thorsell Spirit House, Royal Ontario Museum, 100 Queen’s Park, on September 8, 2011. Artists include Peter Lynch, Nicholas and Sheila Pye, James Franco and Gus Van Sant, Mr. Brainwash, David Rokeby, Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky, Gregory Crewdson, Ben Rivers, Duane Hopkins, David Lamelas, and Eve Sussman | Rufus Corporation.

Buffalo Days is a multichannel video installation by Peter Lynch, creator of such films as Arrowhead, Project Grizzly, The Herd, Cyberman, and A Whale of a Tale.

Peter Lynch: Buffalo Days (2011) — World Premiere From one of Canada’s most celebrated filmmakers, Buffalo Days examines the devastating impact of Europeans on native cultures. In place of an inherently organic system, Europeans substituted one of complete control, driving out or eliminating wildlife—especially buffalo—and people unable to conform. The projections perform different functions: one reflects the actual physical environment; another, remnants and ghosts of the Blackfoot people’s way of life. The haunting quality of the imagery is buttressed by a soundscape comprised of natural sounds and traditional Blackfoot drumming. The piece is a compelling rumination on several of Lynch’s favourite themes, among them how we interact or fail to interact with our environment.

—Steve Gravestock. Associate Director, Canadian Programing, TIFF

BUFFALO
The wild buffalo was once the single biggest animal species on earth. They had a far-reaching impact on nature and civilization in North America. They inhabited the land in incredible numbers on the Great Plains, providing inexhaustible resources and independence for the first aboriginal nations. That is, until white invaders exterminated these herds and their utility, wiping out the First Nations’ central way of life. In many cases, the buffalo’s elimination was implemented specifically to diminish the food source of the land’s indigenous peoples. Their way of life was then largely supplanted by the cattle livestock industry and the presence of white populations. Buffalo Days speaks of the absence of the buffalo in their wild state. This piece is haunted by the magnitude of this loss and the imposition of one culture onto another, and onto nature. The grasslands became another type of landscape and an entire ecosystem—one that included the buffalo and once supported a particular way of life—was virtually wiped out.

THE INSTALLATION
The elements for this work form a poetic meditation and elegy based on this narrative. It features cattle on land where the buffalo once roamed. It features images of an enigmatic, totemic human figure with a buffalo skull covering his face, a savanna tall grass blowing in the wind that was once the natural habitat of the buffalo. Below, on the floor, the viewer will glimpse the remains of buffalo in the way of scattered bones, set against the thundering sound of a huge herd, while the rhythmic sound of Blackfoot drumming swirls around the room. The location of the Royal Ontario Museum is ideal as it provides an intersection of natural history, Canadian social history and environmentalism, all features inherent in this project.

THE IDEA
The idea for the piece grew out of Lynch’s My National Parks short film “Paahtomahsikimii—The Place Where Lakes Go Into The Mountain.” “Paahtomahsikimii” poses a complex, radical portrait of a national park, teasing at the boundaries of art and cinema. It subverts the conventional idea of the national park and its position within our national consciousness.

***

Buffalo Days is presented in collaboration with TIFF and the Royal Ontario Museum’s Institute for Contemporary Culture. Produced with the support of the National Parks Project. Thorsell Spirit House, 100 Queen’s Park. Exhibition runs September 8 to 18.

Special thanks to: Max Dean, Michelle Gay, Noah Cowan, Steve Gravestock, Laurel MacMillian, Francisco Alvarez

Cinematographer: Steve Cosens Additional Photography: Rick O’Brien Editor: Caroline Christie Additional Assistance: Andres Landau Sound design: Elma Bello and Daniel Pellerin, Theatre D

See images at http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/tiff/2011/buffalodays

FUTURE PROJECTIONS is made possible through the generous support of the Hal Jackman Foundation and the Ontario Arts Council.

For TIFF information contact the Communications Department at 416-934-3200 or email proffice@tiff.net

ARTIST CONTACT: Peter Lynch Acqua Film Inc. T 416 533 2962 E acquafilm@sympatico.ca W peterlynchfilms.com

http://www.nationalparksproject.ca

For Peter’s interview about this project, please visit:   http://blog.citysonic.tv/category/directors/peter-lynch/

Inspired by the feature documentary A Whale of a Tale, Dem Bones is a short dance film by Peter Lynch; a bold, exhilarating trip that is cinematically emotional and conceptually rich. The story deals with a primordial enigma as the film’s characters are transported and transformed through mammalian evolution of time and space.

For Lynch this was his first film which incorporated modern dance and was the result of a very gratifying collaboration between choreographer Robert Desrosiers and dancers Elisenda Moya and Irek Muchalski. “For me dance allows you to express ideas beyond conventional reality — it was very freeing to explore the relationship between dance and camera.” Lynch adds, “thematically, I wanted to further explore our pre-historical states and contextualize that in our present pretense of material existence”. At the core of its essence, Dem Bones examines and expresses our evolutionary connections to the order of the whale — an extreme mammal in evolutionary terms.”

Composer Anne Bourne created the original sound track for the film. She describes the traditional Negro spirituals like “Dem Bones” as songs that slaves sang in order to pass messages on to other slaves as how to escape from their plantation masters. The term “Dem Bones” meant “true voice”. Bourne’s playful arrangement of Dem Bones features a vocal performance by Molly Johnson. Lynch’s long-time collaborators cinematographer Rudolf Blahacek and editor Caroline Christie were also on board.

Ed Barreveld and Mehernaz Lentin produced the film.

Dem Bones is produced by Acqua Films, Industry Pictures and Storyline Entertainment in association with Bravo!FACT, A Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent, supported by Bravo! NewStyleArtsChannel, a division of CHUM Limited, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and The National Film Board of Canada.

http://www.storylineentertainment.com/dembones01.shtml

Dem Bones

In 1996 Project Grizzly took audiences on a bizarre quest with Troy Hurtubise, a “close-quarter bear researcher” obsessed with going face-to-face with a deadly grizzly bear. Eight years after its celebrated premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Project Grizzly has become an international pop-culture phenomenon.
 
Directed by Peter Lynch and produced by The National Film Board of Canada Project Grizzly explores the territory between documentary and drama, where the dividing line between fact and imagination is as thin as a knife edge. In this twisted nature film, it is man, not bears, who come under the closest scrutiny. As a pop-culture phenomenon, Project Grizzly has gone where no Canadian documentary has gone before: Quentin Tarantino named it his favorite film of 1996, Harvard awarded Troy Hurtubise their Ig Nobel Prize in 1999 and in 2003 the ultimate compliment was paid as it was famously parodied on “The Simpsons”.

Official Site – ProjectGrizzly.net
Related Sites – Microfilms Inc.
National Film Board of Canada
Project Troy.com – Troy’s Website
Internet Movie Database

Starring Steve Mann. Directed by Peter Lynch. 87 min.

While the title sounds like a bad Saturday-morning cartoon, Cyberman is actually a fascinating and often funny documentary about a very real, albeit very strange, person. Steve Mann is a Toronto inventor, U of T professor, social activist and the world’s first cyborg. Looking like a Borg from Star Trek, he is the ultimate techno-geek, sporting sunglasses equipped with cameras and a wearable computer linked to the Internet. His goal is to have people not only see his world, but live it with him.

Directed by Peter Lynch, who made the terrific Project Grizzly, the film reveals Mann as not only a genius who prefers to live life through his filtered cyber-world, but also a sweetly innocent man who taught himself to swim by studying books and calculating vectors. 

http://wearcam.org/cyberman_pov_article/index2.htm

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2002/03/50976