BAK Productions Montreal

Sunday, March 3, 2019

"The Messenger Hermes Remembers" plays in 2 Film Festivals for March 2019

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Messenger Hermes Remembers, a short film

by Algis Kemezys, screens internationally

Byron Ayanoglu's production of Algis Kemezys' film THE MESSENGER HERMES REMEMBERS is being screened twice in film-fests during March. It will be shown in Venice at the First International Hermetic Film Festival on the 7th of March as part of a double-bill gala opening night; and again on March 26th at the TLC Chinese Theater in Hollywood as an official selection of the Golden State Film Festival. The film, which was shot in multiple locations, from Greece to India to Mexico, as well as at home-base in the Laurentians, stars Algis himself, Nina Korey and Paul William Roberts.

FHIF Hermes is Algis's fifth film. All of his previous work has earned laurels world-wide. His documentaries, Mimetoliths and Master-Class with Walter Lassally were extensively shown and had distribution deals. Previous to film-making, Algis had notable success as a fine-art photographer with exhibitions in major galleries in New York City, Mumbai, Athens and across Canada, his home base. It all started when he was hired to assist photographic doyenne Berenice Abbott chronicle and print her life's work for a retrospective, when she was eighty and he, twenty one.

The twenty-four minute Hermes, already an official selection of this year's festivals in Melbourne, Barcelona, Sicily, Rome and Pune is a fanciful musing on the life and times of the messenger of the gods. Now old, but as always seeking the approval of his Olympian father Zeus, he wields his caduceus to recapture his own precocious youth, when he was testing the limits of his powers and yearning for eternal love -- with himself.

Filmed in many locations around the globe, most stunningly in the Hellenistic temples and mystical antiquities of Greece and Aegean Turkey, the story weaves in and out of the past and the present, to lead the viewer on a delightful voyage into the origins of myth.

A distinguished cast, headed by the majestic Paul William Roberts, animates the story with entertaining, sure-footed performances.

Contact: algis.kemezys@gmail.com ,

or by phone: 52-1-322-205-9994 (in Mexico)

This is the link to the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y046hXSGoGc

Thank you for your attention.

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Saturday, February 23, 2019

The Messenger Hermes Remembers

The current poster for The Messenger Hermes Remembers.

Sunday, January 20, 2019

My movie "The Messenger Hermes Remembers" goes to Hollywood!

I am celebrating the hundredth birthday of Cinema with the announcement that my short film The Messenger Hermes Remembers is an official selection of this year's Golden State Film Festival with a screening in Hollywood's famous Chinese Theatre in mid-March. To have a film of mine screened in Hollywood, let alone at Grauman's, has been a lifelong dream, as it probably is a dream of every film maker on this movie-addicted planet.

Cinema, the favorite entertainment of all seven billion people on Earth, is also the most accessible art form ever created. It affords a ready welcome for everyone with a few spare dollars, or a television signal, into the wonders of the world and the profound intricacies of the human mind.

I have been a film-maker all my life. From my first 8mm when I was seven. I came into my own through contact with two immortals of the visual media. The photo-doyen Berenice Abbott (whom I assisted and lived with when I was twenty-three) taught me how to be precise with an image. And Oscar-winning, veteran cinematographer Walter Lassaly (whose friend I became on Crete and as I documented his old age in Master Class with Walter Lassaly) taught me how to make the image move, or rather how to move with the image, how to delineate a single frame into a story.

Both of my wonderful mentors have passed on. I remember them with gratitude every time I shoot a still and in every frame that I intend to use as a component of a movie. They have served me well. I have had success with the documentary on Walter and also with the award-winning Mimetoliths, an exploration of the imagery on the rocks and caves of Crete and the fantasies they weave of ancient gods and extraterrestrial ancestors.

The Messenger Hermes Remembers, now awaiting its North American premiere in March, is a picturesque allegory of the human condition with all its divine alterations, its endless searches for answers. Filmed in Canada, Mexico, Greece, Turkey and India, it tells its story eloquently with words by Borges and a landscape where myth and culture meet.

By the way everyone is invited to see my handmade movie with free popcorn to those who do make it for the screening.