The Cinematheque

July 22 Screening Added

“A Frankenstein-ian collage that evokes the films of Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Stan Brakhage, and Bruce Conner … Nothing short of revelatory.”

Simon Abrams, Village Voice, on It’s Such a Beautiful Day

Austin-based indie animator Don Hertzfeldt entered the legion of all-time greats with It’s Such a Beautiful Day, his innovative and emotionally blindsiding collection of three previously released shorts assembled into a single, seamless feature. Captured entirely in-camera using one of the last surviving 35mm rostrum stands, this handcrafted wonder fuses Hertzfeldt’s signature stick-figure aesthetic with experimental optical effects and ruptures of live action to tell the sad, strange, sanguine story of Bill, an everyman suffering from a mind-devouring malady. By turns quotidian and comically surreal, laugh-out-loud funny and heart-achingly profound, the cult animator’s overground triumph routinely ranks as one of the best animated films of the 2010s—if not, per The Film Stage, the single greatest animated film of the century (so far). It returns to cinemas bundled with Hertzfeldt’s wildly anticipated new short ME, a characteristically absurdist and cosmic-in-scale odyssey making its Vancouver premiere.

It’s Such a Beautiful Day
USA 2012
Don Hertzfeldt
62 min. DCP

preceded by

ME
USA 2024
Don Hertzfeldt
22 min. DCP

This program includes a musical interlude and introduction to It’s Such a Beautiful Day by Hertzfeldt.

“One of the great outsider artworks of the modern era, at once sympathetic and shocking, beautiful and horrifying, angry and hilarious, uplifting and almost unbearably sad.”

Tom Huddleston, Time Out, on It’s Such a Beautiful Day

“A rapturous joy to behold … An ambitious and provocative blessing that manages to be about everything and anything and always without sounding pretentious.”

Glenn Heath Jr., Little White Lies, on It’s Such a Beautiful Day