My Floating World : Miyuki Tanobe

Miyuki Tanobe, une Québécoise d'adoption, originaire du Japon traditionnel, peint avec de vieilles techniques orientales des scènes du Québec traditionnel qui se vendent comme des pièces de collection. Personnage attachant, qui a vaincu la servitude féminine de l'Orient et conquis son autonomie personnelle sous le soleil d'Occident. Film-monologue qui nous livre l'âme d'un personnage attachant, d'une artiste, d'une époque, d'un pays.

From his colourful canvases, William Kurelek paints a vivid history of his father, who left the Ukraine after World War I to begin a life of farming in Canada. There are scenes of village life in the Ukraine, then the early days of struggle on an Alberta homestead, and the growing comfort, confidence and family. The narrator tells the story as Kurelek remembers it and his paintings record it - harvest time, weddings, the move to Manitoba and scenes from prairie life in the '20s and '30s. The story concludes with the move down east where his father had planned to retire, but finding idleness irksome, he bought a small farm. Here in Ontario, Kurelek paints another landscape with the same pleasure he painted the old.

Against a backdrop of charming paintings and the Yarmouth, Nova Scotia landscape they reflect, Maud Lewis: A World Without Shadows celebrates the life and work of one of Canada's foremost primitive painters. Emerging from her youth crippled with arthritis, Maud Lewis escaped into her painting at the age of 30. She had never seen a work of art and had never attended an art class but her paintings captured the simple strength, beauty and happiness of the world she saw - a world without shadows.