Grey Gardens

Christie Pits Film Festival 2019 - dynamic duos
Sunday, August 11th

Grey Gardens

Short films — Neighbours & Glitter's Wild Women

Featuring what is arguably the most dynamic duo in documentary history, Grey Gardens takes us inside the squalid life of Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (Big Edie) and Edith Bouvier Beale (Little Edie), a mother-daughter pair of high society drop-outs living in their overgrown Hamptons estate and caught in a perpetual feedback-loop of heyday nostalgia and “should’ve, would’ve, could’ves.” Close relatives of the Kennedy-Onassis clan, the pair drew attention when news of their living conditions made national headlines. Today Grey Gardens is a cult classic, thanks in part to the Maysles brothers’ direct cinema approach that gives the leading ladies space to tell their own outrageous story. But a fresh eye will also note that this is film about a co-dependent rivalry spawned by a fall from grace and the very depths of isolation.

Screening with Grey Gardens, pioneering queer Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren’s 1952 Oscar-winning stop-motion short Neighbours (featuring McLaren and the also legendary Grant Munro) is a friends-turned-enemies tale that warns of what happens when we refuse to look at the big picture. Local filmmaker Roney’s darkly comedic thriller Glitter’s Wild Women - soon to be adapted to a feature film - evokes the specter of the Beales while charting an unsettling magic realist path all its own, as two reclusive sisters who harvest psychedelic glitter set out to organize an outdoor film festival and make a movie that their audience may not live long enough to watch.