Catalogue > At random

Melanie Shatzky, Brian M. Cassidy

Interchange

Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur | 60:33 | Canada | 2018

Straddling the line between photography and cinema, Interchange is a near-wordless observational depiction of life alongside a stark and imposing Montreal highway. The film weaves portraits, landscapes, architecture and objects in its reflection on the city’s inhabitants, its traffic jams, the shipping of commercial goods and the nature of time itself. The highway portrayed in Interchange is less the subject of the film than its organizing structure: a large concrete heart, whose arteries intersect with the landscape and its residents in often startling ways, and serve as the framework for an extended meditation on the individual and their surroundings in the post-industrial age.

The films of Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky have screened at the Berlin, Sundance, Toronto, Locarno and Rotterdam film festivals, The Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery of Art, Le Musée de la Civilisation, ICA London, The Museum of the Moving Image and Lincoln Center. In 2012, they were nominated for a Gotham Award for Breakthrough Director and won Best New Director from Québec/Canada at the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM). Their feature debut, Francine, was called “a small gem of bleak neorealist portraiture” by The New York Times and was selected as a New York Times Critics` Pick. Their documentary, The Patron Saints, was called "one of the most powerful Canadian documentaries of recent years" by POV Magazine. Cassidy & Shatzky also maintain an active photography practice and have had their work featured in ZeitMagazin, GUP Magazine, Der Greif, It`s Nice That, Wired, and FlakPhoto, among others. In 2015, The Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) invited the duo to guest curate "A Photographer`s Eye: Photography & The Poetic Documentary", a special program about the intersection of photography and documentary film, which was showcased at La Cinémathèque Québécoise. Both Cassidy & Shatzky hold an MFA from The School of Visual Arts in NYC.