Ashley McKenzie
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Crafting a Life as a Filmmaker: Ashley McKenzie on Queens of the Qing Dynasty
Queens of the Qing Dynasty, the second feature from Nova Scotia’s Ashley McKenzie, is a unique work of independently produced Canadian cinema. Both a stark about-face from the hardscrabble realism of her 2016 debut Werewolf—about a pair of strung-out young lovers living hand-to-mouth on the margins of Cape Breton—and a decisive break from the docufiction trends of art cinema at large, Queens is rigorously composed and austerely dramatized, an artful fable pitched somewhere between comedy and tragedy. Starring newcomer Sarah Walker as Star, a neurodivergent teen who develops a deep connection with her caregiver An (Ziyin Zheng, also making their […]
by Jordan Cronk on Sep 30, 2022 -
Berlinale 2022 Critic’s Notebook: Queens of the Qing Dynasty, Dry Ground Burning, Rewind and Play, Camouflage, Happer’s Comet, The Middle Ages
My favorite film of the Berlinale was Queens of the Qing Dynasty, Ashley McKenzie’s ambitious and otherworldly fantasia about a “queer friendship romance” between a suicidal young woman and a Chinese immigrant she meets while hospitalized. Inspired by two teenagers she befriended during the casting of her previous feature, Werewolf (2016), McKenzie first sketched out the central character, Star (Sarah Walker), whose everyday life is mediated by endless negotiations with social workers, doctors, guardians, landlords and the various bureaucracies that employ them. Star is aging out of child protective services and has been deemed unfit to live independently, so as […]
by Darren Hughes on Mar 22, 2022 -
Beyond Telefilm Canada: Curating the Future of Canadian Film at VIFF’s “Future//Present”
What does a Canadian film look like? This could be construed as a bad joke with limitless punch lines, the film equivalent of “a man walks into a bar…” But this query isn’t meant to drag my own national cinema, which has produced great filmmakers like Alanis Obomsawin, David Cronenberg and Michael Snow. Instead of a set-up to a gag, this line of questioning opens a conversation about the future of Canadian cinema, especially when it comes to funding. This topic was front of mind at the Vancouver International Film Festival this year, which debuted a new program, curated by […]
by Kiva Reardon on Oct 27, 2016
