You Are in Bear CountryLive music, a live bear, a half-dead bureaucrat, and rejected psychotropic propaganda for the Canadian government. Such is the hallucinogenic experience of «You Are in Bear Country».
Part live performance, part short film screening, «You Are in Bear Country» is a personal narrative by experimental filmmaker Matthew Rankin about his failed year spent working as a propagandist for the Dominion Parks Service in Ottawa. Integrating Public Service Announcements, archival ephemera, radical graphic design, live music, and 19 of Matthew’s failed nature films, including the volcanic «Municipal Relaxation Module» (TIFF, Aspen, Canada’s Top Ten), «You Are in Bear Country» is a massive mockery of the artist as civil servant and the use of the natural world in Canadian government branding.
Matthew Rankin was born in Winnipeg. Working in photochemical hybrids of fiction, documentary, and animation, Matthew’s films have been presented at Annecy, Berlinale, Cannes Critics Week, Sundance, SXSW, TIFF, and, of course, in Winterthur. His surrealist epic «The Twentieth Century» was awarded the Best Canadian First Feature Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019.
The evening is hosted by Matthew with accompanying ambiences by sound artist Sacha A. Ratcliffe. Winterthur musician Nico Feer will infect and contaminate the official images with a narcotic live music score. Presented to packed houses of very stoned audiences across Canada, «You Are in Bear Country» will have its international premiere at Kurzfilmtage.
Mit freundlicher Unterstützung von: 
