V.I.A. is co-sponsoring the amazing Vancouver Sometimes Plays Itself film series that's screening at the Waldorf Hotel! It's the first comprehensive showing of some of the earliest, most ambitious and strangest films shot in Vancouver and it happens every Monday at 7 PM for the next few weeks. The series is presented by local arts researcher Elvy Del Bianco, who has spent the last year and a half identifying and acquiring Vancouver-set films, and will feature notable guest speakers. Michael Turner’s On Location 1 (Elvy Del Bianco’s Annotated Film Collection) will screen weekly before each film, and we're priming it here on the blog by offering Elvy's thoughts on that week's title.
This week's film is Ladies of the Lotus, and here's a clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjOghJwCcG8
And here's the synopsis and some thoughts from Elvy:
Ladies of the Lotus
1986
It’s a dangerous time for fashion models – if a deranged predator doesn’t get you, the slave traders will.
Ladies of the Lotus is the result of an unlikely co-directing partnership between Lloyd Simandl and Douglas Nicolle. Polish-born Simandl went on to direct some four-dozen features, almost all direct to video “women in peril” exploitation product with such titles as Chained Fury: Lesbian Slave Desires and Caligula’s Spawn. Vancouver native Nicolle -who described his involvement in the film as “something you do when you’re young, for the experience”- subsequently trod a decidedly more aesthetic path, directing documentaries -including Vancouver: A Portrait by Arthur Ericskon - and painting, both abstract and figurative.
This divergence goes someway to explaining this odd artifact. Although firmly planted in the low-budget exploitation camp, it includes highly stylized sequences of the early music video variety that serve as lyrical interludes to all the gratuitous nudity, shooting, drugging, abusing and marginal acting.
In terms of its cinematic quality, Ladies of the Lotus is definitely on the bottom end of the films presents in the Vancouver Sometimes Plays Itself series; however, it does offer a unique, if lowbrow and nasty, take on our fair city. Shot during the lead - up to Expo ’86 - a time when the city’s economy was shifting away the management of resource extraction to its current role as globalised playground and Pacific Rim trading hub - Ladies of the Lotus highlights the downside of those changes, portraying the city as a place where international criminal organizations battle for market share and people – women - are just one more commodity for export.
Vancouver Sometimes Plays Itself series screens every Monday, Admission is by Donation
7pm—Doors
7:30pm—Introductory Presentation by Special Guest Speaker
7:50pm—Screening
