Description

Canadian director Allan King is one of cinema’s best-kept secrets. Over the course of fifty years, he shuttled between features and shorts, big-screen cinema and episodic television, comedy and drama, fiction and nonfiction. It was with his cinema-verité-style documentaries, though—his “actuality dramas,” as he called them—that King left his greatest mark on film history. These startlingly intimate studies of people whose lives are in flux—damaged children, warring spouses, the terminally ill—are always done without narration or interviews, are riveting and at times emotionally overwhelming. Humane, cathartic, and important, Allan King’s spontaneous portraits of the everyday demand to be seen.

Collection Includes

• Warrendale
  For his enthralling first feature, Allan King took his cameras to a home for emotionally disturbed young people. The stunning Warrendale won the Prix d’art et d’essai at Cannes and a special docu­mentary award from the National Society of Film Critics.
• A Married Couple
  Billy and Antoinette Edwards let it all hang out for Allan King and crew in this jaw-dropping examination of a marriage in trouble, which “makes John Cassavetes’s Faces look like early Doris Day” (Time).
• Come On Children
  In the early 1970s, ten teenagers (five boys and five girls) leave behind parents, school, and all other authority figures to live on a farm for ten weeks. Come On Children is a swift, vivid rendering of the growing pains of a counterculture.
• Dying at Grace
  An extraordinary, transformative experience, Allan King’s Dying at Grace is quite simply unprecedented: five terminally ill cancer patients allowed the director access to their final months and days inside the Toronto Grace Health Centre.