The Films of Allan King

Allan King is a Canadian filmmaker born in Vancouver in 1930 and deceased in 2009 in Toronto. Trained in philosophy, he quickly became interested in film and joined the CBC in 1954. In 1956, he made a portrait of Vancouver's homeless, Skid Row, which attracted international attention and marked the beginning of an independent film tradition in Western Canada. In 1960 he formed the Allan King Associates in Toronto and made his first "docudrama", Running Away Backwards, about Canadians expatriated to Ibiza.

Allan King had a strong influence on Canadian film production, even if his name does not yet resonate with the intensity it should. His style, described as "actuality drama", seeks to capture the intensity of everyday situations experienced by individuals who are often tormented. A contemporary of the Maysles brothers, Pennebekar and Wiseman - to name but a few - he developed the Anglo-Saxon "cinéma-vérité", in phase with the excitement provoked by the development of Quebec's direct cinema at the same time. Lighter cameras and the arrival of synchronous sound favored this revolution of vision that rejected narration, interviews and the distant capture of reality. King became one with his protagonists, filming as closely as possible, plunging into intimate situations with an often disconcerting desire for frontal frankness.

His cinema is interested in situations of transformation, in the internal and external movements that characterize human evolution. Disturbed children, couples on the verge of a nervous breakdown, rebellious teenagers, adults in cognitive loss, he places himself in the extremes of the social fabric to show, sometimes in a ruthless way, what our inner battles are made of. A filmmaker of raw intensity, seeking sincerity in the expression of the human bodies and interactions, King remains one of the best kept secrets of Canadian documentary cinema, and Tënk is delighted to present here, for the first time, three of his cult films with French subtitles.