APRIL 3-13, 17-30
MAY 2

OPENING NIGHT • THURSDAY, APRIL 3
REFRESHMENTS & SPECIAL INTRODUCTION
6:30PM - DOORS
7:30PM - VIDEODROME / INTRODUCED BY ERNEST MATHIJS

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“One of the best directors working today ... Anyone born and reckoning on dying needs to confront Cronenberg.”
DAVID THOMSON,THE NEW BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF FILM

“David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation.”
J. HOBERMAN,VILLAGE VOICE

“A vision that is genuinely original ... Cronenberg’s best movies still have the capacity to cause a Jungian culture shock. They’re like Buñuel, or Francis Bacon: wit and trauma, savagery and pity.”
MARTIN SCORSESE

From pariah in Parliament — his shocking debut feature Shivers (1975), supported by the Canadian Film Development Corporation (forerunner of Telefilm Canada), sparked a national furor — to acclaimed international master, David Cronenberg has had an astonishing career. The Toronto-born director has produced one of the most distinctive (and debated) bodies of work in cinema. Now in his fifth decade of filmmaking, he continues to impress with each new movie. “Beginning with Dead Ringers (1988), or even The Fly (1986),” argues prominent American film critic and Cronenberg champion J. Hoberman, “Cronenberg has been, film for film, the most audacious and challenging narrative director in the English-speaking world.”

From his earliest, most scandalously subversive films — likened by another admirer to “grindhouse trash by an intellectual” — the great subject of Cronenberg’s often highly visceral cinema has been the body, and body horror — the inescapable corporeality that defines our humanity; the flesh-and-blood body in revolt or out of control; the battle between spirit and flesh, mind and body; body modification and mutation (by science and technology, or by disease and decay); sexual transgression and sexual dread. “For me,” Cronenberg has said, “the body is the first fact of human existence.”

This complete retrospective of Cronenberg’s film works was organized by the Toronto International Film Festival as part of “The Cronenberg Project,” a multi-platform initiative devoted to Cronenberg’s world and world view. The retrospective’s name, “From Within,” derives from the title under which Shivers, that contentious early shocker, was originally released in the United States: They Came From Within — an apt descriptor of the major Cronenberg thematic! The retrospective includes new 35mm prints or new digital restorations of many of this singular artist’s signature works.

Acknowledgements: From Within: The Films of David Cronenberg was curated by Noah Cowan and Piers Handling of the Toronto International Film Festival. We are grateful to TIFF for support in making this Vancouver presentation possible. Thirteen of the feature films and all four short films screening in the retrospective are courtesy TIFF’s Film Reference Library. Special thanks to Brad Deane (Manager, Film Programmes) and Samuel La France (Coordinator, Film Programmes) of TIFF Bell Lightbox for their kind assistance.