Broadcasters: City TV
Distributor: Primitive Entertainment
Finalist, Documentary Feature Films, Worldfest Houston, 1992
Earth Peace International Film Festival, 1991
Worldfest Houston, 1992
Project Info:
Visually beautiful... this film has it all. Composed predominantly of languid tracking shots of the sort directors Peter Greenaway and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre have spent their careers perfecting, The Falls communicates the grandeur of the tumbling tonnes of water by bathing the eyeballs in soaking, wide-screen splendour... The film intermarries the naturally sacred and the unnaturally profane with breathtaking dexterity...The Falls has brilliantly framed Niagara Falls as the picture of a civilization.
This evocative, slyly subversive tour of Kevin McMahon's hometown of Niagara Falls established his poetic, lyrical approach to the essay film, as well as his penchant for exploring Canadian culture from a playfully intellectual perspective.
The "Canadian capital of kitsch" has many eccentricities and contradictions beneath its tacky tourist exterior. A member of a family of daredevils recounts the number of people who have perished over the falls, including his own brother. A resident of the notoriously polluted Love Canal tells of the twisted trees lining her street and the birth defects suffered by her daughter.