Press release

Atopia is proud to announce the theatrical release of award winning, Quebecois filmmaker François Miron’s first feature film, The 4th Life. An erotic, surreal psychological thriller in the tradition of Jodorowsky (El Topo), Lynch (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet), Aronofsky (Pi) and Guy Maddin (Tales >From The Gimli Hospital), The 4th Life explores themes of obsessive love, emotional violence, sexual abuse and insanity through the chaotic life and relationships of a beautiful, young woman, Marie (Janet Lane). The 4th Life is a psychedelic, rock and roll kaleidoscope of lust, lesbianism, violence and one girl’s search for sanity and love in a paranoid, dangerous world. Miron reveals Marie’s hallucinatory world through a narrative as splintered as our heroine’s mind and heart, where the truth lays hidden within symbols and delusion contaminates and melts the boundaries of reality. A surreal, evocative film with a dark sense of humor and a gloriously psychedelic aesthetic, The 4th Life explores the outer limits of our inner psychic realities with a heady dose of sex, violence and rock and roll thrown in for good measure.

François Miron is an internationally recognized experimental filmmaker who works exclusively with emulsion film (not video or digital effects). The body of his early work consists of several short, award winning experimental films created using found footage and a powerful film image manipulation technique that he mastered — optical printing. A professor at Concordia University, he obtained his MFA in filmmaking from The School of The Art Institute Of Chicago where he attended under a full merit scholarship. A lively contributor to Montreal’s underground scene, Miron’s experimental films are often screened behind bands and in galleries, and he won a Juno award for his photographic work for the cover of Arcade Fire’s album, Neon Bible. The 4th Life features sound design by renowned musician and film score composer David Kristian and music by British doom metal band Electric Wizard.

The 4th Life will be screened in Montreal at Cinema du Parc from June 13-19.

Press kits, screening copies and photos available upon request.

• www.the4thlife.com

News posted Tuesday, May 13, 2008.