AD HOC #68
AD HOC AND BLACK ZERO PRESENT
RICK HANCOX’S HOME FOR CHRISTMAS
December 11, 2024
8PM
Innis College, 2 Sussex Avenue, Room 222
Join Rick Hancox in person for a presentation of Home for Christmas, a record of a train, bus and ferry journey taken from filmmaker Rick Hancox’s then-home of Toronto, Canada, to his family’s Landfall homestead on Prince Edward Island. The journey occurs at an auspicious time for Hancox, in the last days of his twenties and the first days of his thirties, and his experience becomes an open parallel for those viewers who are separated from their families by a great divide, living their own lives in distant cities, and for whom such a trip, a commonplace, humble, monotonous journey, takes on the epic dimensions of a pilgrimage. This screening is occasioned by the launch of a new Blu-ray Disc of Hancox’s film from Canadian underground home media imprint Black Zero.
“It is the honesty of portrayal which is staggering, for instead of an idyllic image which many filmmakers present of themselves, Hancox presents (and thus, sees) himself without cinematic make-up… with ‘wild sync’ sound (reminiscent of an early film), and with the use of only available natural light.”
Richard Stanford
“Home for Christmas is a unique exploration of the Canadian mythos—winter, trains, booze, the family and solitude. In penetrating the essence of the mythical, Hancox has combined the home movie with the technological epic, to achieve a profound filmic archaeology of the warmth of Northern existence, in the Pierre Perrault sense, that if you are cold in this country, you must be a tourist.”
Michael Dorland
The program will be presented with two secret shorts!
TRT: 70 minutes
AD HOC aims to rethink what an experience of cinema can be. We seek to reposition historical landmarks and buried treasures within the on-going tradition of experimental and other non- commercial modes of filmmaking, drawing on work from Toronto, throughout Canada, and internationally. Within these parameters, we aspire to diversity in programming, as well as to multimedia and interdisciplinary screening events that bring together varied communities.
AD HOC = Stephen Broomer, Madi Piller, Jim Shedden, Bart Testa.
AD HOC would like to thank Innis College and the Cinema Studies Institute. Special thanks to Alberto Zambenedetti, James Cahill, Denise Ing, Charlie Keil, Sean Rogers, and Eyan Logan.