Kazik Radwanski
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“I Always Write for Places Where They Won’t Kick Me Out”: Kazik Radwanski on Matt and Mara
Matt and Mara presents a familiar premise—two old friends with an unresolved romantic connection reconnect years after their lives have diverged—but Canadian writer-director Kazik Radwanski turns this potentially contrived narrative into an organic examination of interpersonal dynamics that’s tailored to the strengths of his performers and longtime creative collaborators Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson. When Matt (Johnson) grabs the attention of creative writing professor Mara (Campbell) right before she’s about to start class, it’s clear both are looking to break out of their ruts. Mara is out of sync with her musician husband Samir (Mounir Al Shami) amidst the daily […]
by Vikram Murthi on Sep 20, 2024 -
“Deragh Had Never Skydived Before…” Five Questions for Writer/Director Kazik Radwanski about His TIFF-Premiering Anne at 13,000 Ft.
Overwhelming anxiety, bad workplaces and ill-advised self-medication are all very on-trend for 2019—Kazik Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 Ft is right for the moment. A Torontonian child care worker at a government-run facility, Anne (Deragh Campbell) is the protagonist of a handheld drama whose initial energy is very in a post-Dardennes vein, with nervy-but-not-illegibly-jumpy camerawork following her. One way to add production value to your lowish-budget production is suggested by the opening, where Anne skydives out a plane as part of a bachelorette party (!). The footage is clearly unfaked and my nightmare; smartly intercutting between the build-up and her job, a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 9, 2019 -
“I’ve Always Been Cautious of Measuring Success”: Kazik Radwanski on How Heavy This Hammer
After premiering on home soil at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, Canadian filmmaker Kazik Radwanski’s second feature film, How Heavy This Hammer, screened at the Berlin International Film Festival to critical acclaim. A New York premiere, as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s annual winter First Look series, wouldn’t surface until a year later where, in anticipation of its Gotham debut, it was deemed by the Village Voice as “striking, clear-eyed, and very, very funny” and “justly celebrated as one of the best Canadian films in years.” A microbudget film about an overweight Canadian father saddled with a combative attitude and love for computer games (well, one […]
by Erik Luers on Feb 17, 2017 -
“I Never Show the Script to the Actors”: Kazik Radwanski on How Heavy This Hammer
With his second feature, How Heavy This Hammer, Toronto-based filmmaker Kazik Radwanski tackles the trope of the seemingly soulless main-child with a formal intensity that is at once casual and rigorous, and all the more unnerving as a result. Erwin (Erwin Van Cotthem) is unable to find anything of value in his life beyond the mental and emotional respite of fantasy computer games and the brutish diversions of rugby matches. His wife and two sons are nothing more than grating obligations, whose needs nearly drive him to the brink of an all out crisis. Radwanski renders these quotidian frustrations – […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Feb 17, 2016 -
TIFF 2015 Critic’s Notebook: Leaky Members in New Work by Wim Wenders, Kazik Radwanski and More
Two movies at the Toronto International Film Festival, which kicked off Thursday, made me think back to Ben Lerner’s year-old novel 10:04. In it, there’s a conversation about a specific male performance that supposedly begins around middle school and high school-age: “You take your dick out of your pants to piss in a urinal, you start bending at the knees just a little, or otherwise making a show as if you were lifting some kind of weight.” Men performing their maleness through a leaky member shows up in Wim Wenders’s Everything Will be Fine and Kazik Radwanski’s How Heavy This […]
by Whitney Mallett on Sep 13, 2015 -
Redrawing the Boundaries
MDFF is a Toronto-based production company steadily churning out nuanced humanist films that capture a particular middle-class Canadian experience, while at the same time challenging the tendency for Canadian cinema to stay ghettoized within its own borders. Its founders, Kazik Radwankski and Dan Montgomery, are doing more than just bringing regional idiosyncrasies such as Toronto’s racoons or Vancouver’s methadone clinics to European film festivals. They’re using MDFF as an umbrella to foster a film-going culture in their own city, simultaneously supporting the emerging independent filmmakers north and south of the border whose films they produce and screen. Radwanski and Montgomery […]
by Whitney Mallett on Oct 20, 2014 -
Locarno Critic’s Notebook #3
Leviathan. You may have heard the title by now. By the time it screened to press, the film had already gained some momentous hype, and I’m pleased to report it does not disappoint. Often exhilarating, Véréna Peraval and Lucien Castaing-Taylor‘s creation is a unique viewing experience—loud, disorienting, frightening, exciting and visually awesome. The best film from the main competition, at the very least, Leviathan (above) offers the sort of sensory adventure that cinema can but rarely does offer. Using cheap GoPro digital cameras, the filmmakers show us images and perspectives we’ve never seen before. Apparently, Apichatpong Weerasethakul did not like […]
by Adam Cook on Aug 13, 2012
