Dark One Featured in Hot Docs Online library launch of Canadian documentaries. The launch will have approximately 100 titles, including 40 feature-length documentaries.
Hot Docs Library here
DVD available at both.....
CreateSpace and Amazon
Video on Demand - Amazon.com
See it at .... IMDb
DarkOne Movie and Trailer Blog
Dark One Channel- Vimeo
Punk TV Part 1,Part 2
At You Tube 10 Parts
Stay tuned for Indoctrination
a 3cd spoken word/soundscape adventure and feature movie...Music by The Qube: Dan Biholar, Cockroaches, Chris Gavin, and Darryl Miller
Indoctrination-3SongRoughCut from Darryl Miller on Vimeo.
-Dark One : Feature Length Experimental Documentary, 88 minutes
Director/Producer: Darryl Miller Executive Producer: Elaine Pain
Production Company: Ice Cube Factory , Cupar, Saskatchewan
-Nominated 2007 for Best Canadian Feature Documentary at Hot Docs (the biggest North American feature documentary festival).1743 entries. 129 films were screened.
-Selected 2007 for the official program of 50th edition of the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film.DOK Leipzig is the largest German and one of the leading international festivals for artistic documentary and animated films.Out of a record 2,600 entries, only 120 animated and 190 documentary films will be screened.
Dark One- was in consideration for Canada's Top Ten 2007 by the Toronto International Film Festival Group (TIFFG). Canada's Top Ten promotes and celebrates Canadian cinema through an annual initiative whereby some of this country's leading experts in Canadian cinema (film critics, academics and industry professionals) select the best Canadian films of the year. 100 films were in consideration.
-The International Documentary Film Festival Jihlava has requested Dark One be part of the new Documentary Film Center's archive in Prague, to be studied by students at FAMU,and viewed by journalists, film professionals and the public. Jihlava discovers authorial documentary film, and follows it's traditional motto of THINKING THROUGH FILM. FAMU is one of oldest film schools in Europe.
New York Times Review Summary - Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Dan Biholar is a poet and spiritual seeker who came of age in the Western Canadian city of Regina during the late 1970's. One of Biholar's greatest creative influences was William S. Burroughs, and unfortunately Biholar absorbed his appetite for drugs as well as his distinctive literary style. In the 21st Century, Biholar is still writing, but his life has become caught up in a downward spiral of drug abuse; he's addicted to opiates, and is looked after by his aging mother, a holocaust survivor who is struggling with her own emotional issues. Despite it all, Biholar is still searching for a spiritual redemption that will free him from his thirst for drugs and allow his muse to take him to new places. Darryl Miller is a filmmaker who was close friends with Biholar when they were both teenagers, and has fought his own battle against chemical dependency; Miller revisits his old friend Biholar in the documentary Dark One, and paints a vivid portrait of a soul in crisis and an artist struggling against the bonds that hold him back (only one of which happens to be drugs). Dark One received its world premiere at Toronto's 2007 Hot Docs International Film Festival.
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/395705/Dark-One/overview
Screenings:
-World Premieres: Hot Docs International Documentary Festival
(Co-presented with The Images Festival)
-April 20th,2007 Bloor Cinema, Toronto - 11:30 PM
-April 22nd,2007 Innis Town Hall, Toronto - 8:45 PM
-Sept 13,2007 Regina Public Library - 9:00 PM
-Sept 14,2007 Regina Public Library - 7:00 PM
-Oct 31,2007 "naTo" National Front Theater - 10:15 PM DOK Leipzig
-Nov 2,2007 Filmeck Theater - 02:00 PM DOK Leipzig, Germany
-Nov 10,2008 University Of Regina-Film 250 Lecture + Screening
DARK ONE - Leipzig Summary
Dan Biholar sits at the kitchen table preparing his next 'shot' with a teaspoon and a lighter. While doing so he argues with his mother who survived the Holocaust, but still has to deal with death on a daily basis thanks to her son. In the background a parrot is dismantling a gas cooker and dropping pieces of metal noisily to the ground. A stranded family's everyday madness, that Dan uses morphine to escape from. Images merge and visions of decay and death take him on his trip to a different dimension. Dan is followed by his friend, the filmmaker Darryl Miller, who captures Dan's hallucinations and transforms the gloomy poetry of the addict into a hypnotic, visual and auditory trip that can only be created by someone who has experienced these abysses himself. Miller has been working on his disturbing film for nine years. A film that dissolves genre borders in a surreal way. In the end he succeeds in finding access to a hurt and desperate soul, threatening to burn on it's quest for spiritual salvation.
Who Is Dan Biholar?Dan is a poet,a drug addict, searching for spiritual enlightenment, spiraling into oblivion. Many documentaries on drug addiction present one dimensional cardboard characters with no interest in anything except their next fix, stereotypically drunken, homeless, skid row bums.Any complexities in their lives as multi-faceted individuals are reduced to a safe distance from our own almost acceptable make believe middle class lives.They are the hopeless.There is no salvation.We remain safe, pure, and exempt because there can be no possible connection between us.We can judge, but not understand or participate.Dark One is NOT one of those documentaries.I met Dan over 20 years ago, in our late teens.Dan was a poet.I was a musician. We were both experimenting with drugs.My interest was LSD, MDA, Coke and whatever else I could get. Dan got into morphine and other hard core drugs.We were both on a spiritual quest.I became heavily addicted to these mind expanding drugs and started having bizarre hallucinations, seeing spirits and experimenting with telepathy.I became delusional like Dan is(at times).Six years later I sought help and went to Detox and treatment twice.The spirits went away.I directed my energy to my music and finally a film degree.I have remained a friend of both Dan and his mother Helen.In the late 90's ,I started a soundscape/poetry project incorporating Dan's words and my music.During the project.I realized that the concept could be better utilized in film. The result is the 88 minute film "Dark One", and 45 minute audio soundscape CD , also called “Dark One”.Both works feed off and augment the other and will be sold together as one package.Check out the MP3 link...Dan at a young age modeled himself after William Burroughs, and now regrets it.Dan's poetry and voice quality reflect this influence. His voice is hypnotic and often has an unearthly tone to it, like a bad dream. Not only has his poetry taken on a stream of consciousness style, but his whole life, moving from concise idea to literary roughness that is often brutally honest to a fault, and often crude and uncultured.His experiences, stories, memories constantly alter with each telling.There are however consistent themes that weave in and out and form his life and this documentary on his life. William Burroughs, poetry and artwork, the quest for spirituality, his addiction are the most obvious.However his family, friends and search for love and acceptance are also critical.His treatment, by the establishment, as represented by the police and lawyers etc.has further molded his attitudes, demonstrating the hypocrisy of those in power. As a result of an institutional tendency to hide problems, lock them away, instead of trying to help individuals or accept the true reality of living with a life situation.The prison experience has become more than personal.The legal taxation of drugs, alcohol and cigarettes versus personal use of drugs demonstrates to Dan and his mother a blatant double standard.Dan's mother, Helen, struggles with Dan's addiction lifestyle, and her own dark memories about her husband's alcoholism and her experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp as a child.Lastly Dan's bird, a beloved member of the family, to Dan a symbol of freedom and unconditional love wanders about the kitchen, oblivious to everything but her toys and surrogate lover, a blue stuffed bunny...Dan constantly attempts to achieve freedom: from society, from drugs, and from himself.He has extreme moments of clarity and delusion.He has delusions of grandeur, thinking he can save the world, but then realizing he can't even save himself.He has been on the methadone program on and off, always getting kicked off due to abuse of the system.He has come to a belief that spirituality is his only means of redemption.Reading many controversial, religious and spiritual books, he has developed a personal and unique belief system that takes bits and pieces of different ideologies , mixing and remodeling them.Magic, demons and God co-exist in constant battle. "Dark One" explores Dan's life and enters the psychological time and space of addiction where reality is only a dream.~ Darryl Miller.
Note: According to Dan, Mihi Baitse/Baitze, Helen Biholar's father, came from Leipzig to Romania in the early 1900s. Helen was born Sept 2, 1928. Helen's life experiences were often dark and quite complicated. Dan Biholar is the main focus of this film, and although we look briefly at interactions with his family, the film only looks skims the surface of Helen's past experiences during wartime. I collected much more material, but it would have altered the flow ,direction and duration of the film. I have uploaded 54 minutes of MP3s of Helen discussing here life and experiences here
Blog http://icecubefactory.blogspot.com/
