The Seventh Art is an independently produced video magazine about cinema.
Lots of good stuff here, including interviews with Pedro Costa, Sean Baker, Terence Davies, David Gordon Greene, Claire Denis, the Safdie Brothers, Ruben Östlund, Lukas Moodysson, Paul Schrader, and Thomas Vinterberg.
Anecdote Alert!
There is also an interview with Toronto filmmaker Hugh Gibson, who I first met in 1993 when he was just 14 or 15 years old. His parents had sent him to Art & Trash Video, a shop I ran from '93 to '98. Because he was underage, his folks wrote him a letter saying that he could rent any film he wished, regardless of the film's rating. I put a note on his file and for the next five years we rented Hugh many of the world's greatest films. (A&T existed pre-DVD, so we were renting out VHS tapes and Laserdiscs.)
To my knowledge, we had the largest foreign film collection in Canada: 14,000 titles from 113 countries, all organized by Country > Director. Regular customers included Cinematheque Ontario, The Festival of Festivals (now called TIFF), and every filmmaker in the city worth their salt. It was a great place to work.
In 1994, we were also one of the first video stores in the world to have a website. I'd built it to help myself learn how to build websites. A few months earlier I'd also built [sic], which was one of the first-ever blogs. (The word blog would not be coined for another 3 years.) [sic] won Canadian Website of the Year, which got it some press, and that, along with the Art & Trash site, led to my phone ringing and me becoming one of the first professional web designers in the country. My clients included YTV, The Ontario Federation of Labour, Danko Jones, and General Motors. I would do this for a living for twelve years until returning to retail at Vortex.
The Art & Trash site contained a searchable database of our entire inventory and I distinctly remember having to repeatedly explain to people what a website was. It was these customer interactions that, in a circuitous way, would also lead to me being interrogated in my living room after midnight by CSIS a few years later, but that's another story altogether.
Years later I would run into Hugh at TIFF when he was introducing a film he hadn't directed. We caught up and met for dinner a few times — turns out he lived on Roncesvalles — but then I lost touch with him when he moved out of the neighborhood.
Here's the trailer for his stellar documentary, The Stairs:
