January 9, 2019

Press love for 1999

 

After a festival circuit with stops in Kosovo, Switzerland, New York, Toronto, Italy and of course Moncton, New Brunswick, the critics are in and they love 1999!

“Chadwick intrepidly shifts backwards and forwards in time, she and her protagonists speaking in their native Chiac …the language flows sometimes literally word by word between the two languages. The film does the same between past and present, re-creating those bonds from that time of life filled with secret passions, secret pains, and the secret lives of others.”

— Pamela Cohn FILMMAKER MAGAZINE AT VISIONS DU RÉEL

“1999 is one of the most haunting documentaries I’ve ever seen… A portrait of a group of people who, just when they were beginning to live, came intimately face-to-face with the finality of death, 1999 is not an investigation but an immersion into the emotional flux of a community struggling to cope with loss and a period of time when the unimaginable became a regular occurance. Chadwick is too smart and subtle a filmmaker to simply invite her subjects to recount traumatic episodes or to try to excavate the past for journalistic truth. Instead, the movie immerses you in a very particular milieu and moment in time= and by doing so sheds light on universal emotions and a period of life that all of us who are fortunate enough to make it to adulthood can relate to. Deceptively simple and associative, 1999 is a philosophical mediation on memory, sorrow, uncertainty, adolescence, and rebellion.”

— Astra Taylor FILMMAKER MAGAZINE AT HOT DOCS

“Powerful and revelatory… Despite the heavy subject matter, it’s a visually buoyant film. The doc is one of the few standouts to introduce an auteurist voice at Hot Docs this year. Chadwick, who also programs films with the Camden International Film Festival and previously worked with Hot Docs and Montreal’s doc fest RIDM, displays an adept hand at formal sophistication. 1999 articulates grief and acknowledges the lost lives of the classmates through a prismatic aesthetic in which rays of light flicker atop and around speakers.”

— Pat Mullen POV

4 Stars, “A powerful meditation on trauma and resilience.” NOW MAGAZINE

“15 Must See Documentaries from the Opening Weekend of Hot Docs’ 25th Landmark Year.” THE GATE

Theatrical runs in Montreal, Moncton and Geneva have been followed by a slew of community screenings across Canada in 2018 and into 2019. More news to come in the new year!