Screening Dates
  • April 17, 2019 7:00
Free Admission

Gifted Vancouver filmmaker Phillip Borsos (1953−1995) made good on the promise of his award-winning shorts (including Cooperage, Spartree and the Oscar-nominated Nails) with his remarkable first feature, one of Canadian cinema’s most revered works. Richard Farnsworth is gentleman bandit Bill Miner, an aging Old West stagecoach robber released into the 20th century after decades in prison. His introduction to modernity includes his first exposure to the movies: Edwin Porter’s 1903 classic The Great Train Robbery, which inspires old-fashioned Miner to attempt some new-fangled larceny. Jackie Burroughs co-stars as feminist and photographer Kate Flynn. Shot by Frank Tidy and written by John Hunter, Borsos’s beautiful movie offers a charming evocation of place and an elegiac, film-smart take on the Old West and Old Westerns. It won seven Genies, including Best Film, Director, and Original Screenplay, and solidified B.C.’s reputation as a film centre in Canada.

Print courtesy TIFF Film Reference Library Screening Collection.

Acknowledgments

National Canadian Film Day is an annual, one-day, coast-to-coast-to-coast celebration of Canadian cinema. Launched in 2014 and organized by REEL CANADA, it is held each year in April.

National Canadian Film Day
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Note

In 2017, The Cinematheque, in partnership with TIFF, Library and Archives Canada, and the Cinémathèque québécoise, proudly presented Canada on Screen, a year-long national program that celebrated Canada’s 150th birthday by selecting and showcasing Canada’s 150 essential moving-images works, based on a countrywide poll of critics, scholars, and industry professionals.

Canada on Screen was designed to be a living list; every year, one additional masterwork will be selected for inclusion. The first new addition is The Grey Fox, director Phillip Borsos’s much-loved revisionist Western, one of the most acclaimed films to emerge from British Columbia and one of the great debut features of our national cinema.

To mark National Canadian Film Day 2019, The Cinematheque is pleased to present a free screening of Borsos’s classic film.