Workman Arts presents the 14th Annual Rendezvous With Madness Film Festival

The 14th Annual Rendezvous With Madness Film Festival (November 9 to 18, 2006) opens with two remarkable films focusing on the facts and myths surrounding mental health and addiction: Executive Producer Chantal Kreviazuk's Pretty Broken and Director Ole Christian Madsen's Kira's Reason: A Love Story.

The festival closes with an all day retrospective of Winnipeg-based filmmaker Guy Maddin. Both Kreviazuk and Maddin will be in attendance at their respective programs.

Pretty Broken is a powerful meditation on mental illness. Kreviazuk delivers a convincing monologue, bravely inhabiting the role of a woman living with a mood disorder. Alone in a psychiatric ward, she muses over questions of social stigma, perception, and acceptance, and wonders who is truly mad, herself or society. Kreviazuk will participate in the post-screening panel discussion on November 9, 2006, addressing issues of mental health in her film.

Ole Christian Madsen's Kira's Reason: A Love Story is the twenty-first entry into the Dogme canon. The film focuses on a deeply felt love story between two people whose worlds are perfectly secure and comfortable until Kira inexplicably develops a psychiatric disorder that eventually commits her to a hospital. The cramped intimacy of the Dogme aesthetic lends an extra touch of realism in one of the most affecting films of 2001. After premiering at TIFF on September 11th, the film never had a theatrical release. On November 9, 2006, Rendezvous with Madness is re-launching this poignant drama, giving Toronto film-goers once again the opportunity to consider the power of love in coming to terms with mental illness.

On November 18, 2006, the festival wraps with an all day retrospective of Winnipeg-based filmmaker Guy Maddin, featuring three programs, three themes and three panel ponderings. The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) will co-present Inspired Afflictions: Facts + Mythologies, an afternoon program featuring Maddin's 1988 cult classic Tales from the Gimli Hospital.

Two evening screenings will take place at the Workman Theatre. The Program Triangle Tales: Maddin on Mad Love, presents his third feature film Careful (1992).

The Closing Gala, Down Memory Lane, features the 2003 autobiographical film, Coward Bend the Knee, Maddin's very first film The Dead Father (1986), and one of his most recent films, My Dad is a Hundred Years Old (2005). This up close and personal program promises to unpack the psychological underpinnings of yearning, memory and identity.

There are over 50 films to be announced. With a screening venue located right inside the Queen Street site of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), the Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival takes you inside the walls of Canada's largest mental health and addictions facility, creating an ideal context that reflexively demands further thinking about the definitions and social uses of madness. RWM profiles all genres from experimental to documentary, drama to animation.

One of the Festival's highlights is the post-screening panel discussions with local and visiting filmmakers, artists who deal with mental illness and/or addiction and mental health professionals. Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival is perhaps the only fully accessible film festival in Toronto, with a PWYC policy ensuring that everyone can attend.

Workman Arts is a multidisciplinary non-profit professional arts company, which promotes a greater understanding of mental health and addiction issues through various artistic media and supports individuals with mental illness and addiction in their artistic pursuits. Through theatre, film, visual arts, music and literary arts, WA generates increased public awareness of the arts, mental health and recovery. WA is guided by the principle that the creative process in integral to the quest for personal and spiritual development.

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For media inquiries please contact: Kevin Pennant at 416.596.2978 or email: kp@pennantmediagroup.com