Art Metropole

#09159

Teenager Hamlet

Artist

Margaux Williamson

Date

2010

Publisher

January Films

Format

Video

Size

13 × 19 × 1 cm

Description

Margaux Williamson sharply explores how young people make art and make their morality in the city.

One summer day, the painter Margaux Williamson leaves her studio, needing to know her world directly – no longer through making paintings. Emerging into the streets of her own neighbourhood, she discovers a mixture of slightly out-of-balance young people. Some seem like contemporary Hamlets, preoccupied with their own political impotence and social injustice. Others are like Ophelia, obsessed with their own and life’s beauty.

Enlisting the help of her curious friend Sheila and her talkative friend Sholem, Margaux follows these Hamlets and Ophelias into vacant grand hotels and through dry, abandoned fields. There is no script, just an array of questions, games and contrivances through which Margaux searches for what is at the heart of their neighborhood – trying to find the true story between reality and fiction, and between action and acting.

Teenager Hamlet began as an art project initiated by Toronto artist Margaux Williamson in 2006. An installation of the project was exhibited at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival for their Future Projections Program.

Featuring Sheila Heti, Sholem Krishtalka, Ryan Kamstra, Milosh Rodic. Music direction by Steve Kado.

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