Sidney J. Furie: Fire Up the Carousel!

Sidney J. Furie: Fire Up the Carousel!

It's time to open the Furie File.

This full-length documentary examines the life and career of the Toronto-born filmmaker Sidney J. Furie, a journey that spans over 60 years, from Canada to London and finally to Hollywood. In the midst of the Furie's own remembrances, he directs two last personal projects, shot digitally on shoestring budgets, from the first solo scripts he has written since 1961. 'Drive Me to Vegas and Mars' is a comedy about aging and letting go, while 'Hannah Cohen' is a Holocaust-themed love story set and shot in Israel. Sidney J. Furie: Fire Up the Carousel is an intimate portrait of a unique, prolific, and quietly influential filmmaker, a man with an impressive resumé who has stood behind the camera on great films such as The Ipcress File (1965), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), The Boys in Company C (1978), The Leather Boys (1964), The Entity (1982), The Appaloosa (1966), Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), and many others.

Directed by Daniel Kremer

Your Rating

Cast

Sidney J. Furie Himself

Make it a double feature

Sidney J. Furie: Fire Up the Carousel!

Overwhelm the Sky

Both from Daniel Kremer.

More from Daniel KremerSee all →

Overwhelm the Sky

Overwhelm the Sky · 2019

Overwhelm the Sky

MovieDramaThriller

Eddie Huntly, an east coast radio personality, moves to San Francisco to marry Thea, the sister of his best friend Neil, a successful entrepreneur. Shortly before Eddie's arrival, Neil is found murdered in what the police surmise was a simple mugging gone awry. As the sullen Eddie steps in as interim host of his old friend Dean's late-night talk-radio show, he obsessively makes regular visits to the forested spot where Neil's corpse was found. One such visit unleashes a chain of unpredictable events that sends Eddie snooping into the life of a sleepwalking drifter with a mysterious past.

Sophisticated Acquaintance

Sophisticated Acquaintance · 2007

Sophisticated Acquaintance

Mixing elements of narrative, experimental, pseudo-documentary and essayist cinema, Sophisticated Acquaintance tells the story of a tormented individual whose short life and long death were affected by a great many factors. Klaus Mann (John Gross), a present-day Philadelphia avatar of the real-life European author of Mephisto, lives in the shadow of his father, the eminent intellectual, novelist and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann (Ernst Hohmann). When Klaus pens a controversial essay on "revolutionary suicide" and then acts on it, in protest of the world's selfishness, a group of his contemporaries speak up in filmed interviews about what led him down that path. It is a film about the creative process, the tragic depiction of a strained father-son relationship and, most of all, it is a film about individuality.

Dead Neon: The Many Faces of Lenny Bruce on Film

Dead Neon: The Many Faces of Lenny Bruce on Film · 2023

Dead Neon: The Many Faces of Lenny Bruce on Film

MovieDocumentary

Lenny Bruce's depiction on film did not start or end with Bob Fosse's Lenny (1974). Through these other often offbeat cinematic incarnations, this essay piece considers how Lenny Bruce was the perfect Bob Fosse subject, and how Fosse's focus on the lives of performers invigorated his portrait of the controversial, trail-blazing comic.

A Trip to Swadades

A Trip to Swadades · 2008

A Trip to Swadades

Shot on black-and-white super-16mm, A Trip to Swadades tells the story of a 74-year-old ex-professor named Schweitzer Haas who, after many years of living away from Philadelphia, the city where he came of age, returns to visit his hermit brother Ezra who has perfected his freakish steel-trap memory. As a result, however, his apartment has become an unlivable and unsanitary place. He goes out to find some cleaning supplies, only to find himself lost in a city he no longer knows. By shear happenstance, he bumps into an old friend, a world-class cut-up, who takes him to a place of importance to their past. There, Schweitzer realizes he must reconcile with the brother he has not spoken to and has refused to understand for most of his life.

Torch

MovieDramaThriller

Clara grew up in the Belize jungles but was sent to live in San Francisco after a childhood trauma. Her older boyfriend, Gabriel encourages a trip back to her jungle home. Once arriving, the familiar faces and tropic environment fills Clara with hope for a brighter future. She's soon reminded that the jungle has a dark side and begins to realize that Gabriel may have an even darker one himself.

Love Twice

Love Twice · 2016

"What do you do when the spark touches down-brief and hot?" So begins award-winning director Rob Nilsson's (Permission to Touch, MVFF 2015; A Bridge to a Border, MVFF 2014) provocative meditation on the Möbius relationship of fiction to reality, and the notion of creative control. In Love Twice, Luz and Ken are star-crossed lovers in screenwriter Sal's script, until their desire takes shape, inscribing itself into a movie of their own design. Risking his sanity to save the screenplay, Sal struggles to regain control of his characters and satisfy the demands of his producer Lester (legendary Velvet Underground founder John Cale), driving a wedge between the lovers with a desperate attempt to seduce Luz.

Ezer Kenegdo

Ezer Kenegdo · 2017

Frictions develop when Yisroel "Izzy" Jonigkeyt, a Chassidic Jew from Crown Heights, travels to San Francisco to visit Polish-born Catholic friend Marek Wisniewski with the intent of discovering why a Bay Area art-world iconoclast named Harry Kierk seeks to destroy a lifetime's worth of his own work. As the visit progresses, Izzy and Marek discover for the first time that complex historical baggage impinges on their curious friendship and, soon, they begin to understand why Kierk is driven towards destruction. Continued encounters with Marek's vaguely anti-Semitic cousin Irek (who is their only gateway to contact Kierk) only compound these tensions.

Xenolith Atlas

Xenolith Atlas · 2022

MovieDocumentary

An imagined plague diary

Summer Sacrament

Summer Sacrament · 2017

Summer Sacrament

During one fateful summer, Richie is forced to deal with his mom's deportation and prepare for his First Holy Communion as a Catholic while living with a caring adoptive family whose young son becomes Richie's closest friend and support.

Arid Cut

Arid Cut · 2019

Sky-high housing costs, rents no one can pay, urban development, and street crime make life difficult for RV dwellers in Berkeley, California. City bureaucrats collaborate with real estate agents to gentrify neighborhoods forcing out already marginalized people living in cars, trucks, and RVs. With no more West to escape to, they contemplate turning back East.

Now, Irving Rapper

Now, Irving Rapper · 2026

Now, Irving Rapper

MovieDocumentary

Irving Rapper is, in many ways, Hollywood's forgotten man. After getting his start as a "dialogue director" at Warner Bros. in the mid 30's, he became synonymous with the studio's "women's pictures" and rose in prominence as one of Bette Davis's most consistent collaborators, including on her biggest commercial success, Now Voyager (1942). He was a rebel who led the studio in suspensions for chronically refusing to direct the scripts handed to him by the brass, waiting instead for material that better suited his interests and thematic preoccupations. He was also one in a secretive fraternity of gay directors who had to conceal their identities and shield their private lives from potential public ruination. Daniel Kremer takes you through an unexamined and misunderstood life of a man of great artistic inclination who expressed his innermost yearnings covertly through his work in motion pictures.

Even Just

For those with an open mind about what cinema can be. Jerry Garanyan, an ambulance-chasing San Francisco lawyer, is a camera buff and a dogged collector of moving images. Though his legal career is a dead end which nevertheless pays his bills, he lives for the ordinary ghosts, extraordinary shadows, and fugitive moments he has preserved forever in his personal library of 8mm celluloid. As his dearest sister reckons with losing her hearing, he is targeted for an elaborate con by smooth film world scam artists who purport to represent the "real movies."

Cruel, Usual, Necessary: The Passion of Silvio Narizzano

Cruel, Usual, Necessary: The Passion of Silvio Narizzano · 2024

Cruel, Usual, Necessary: The Passion of Silvio Narizzano

MovieDocumentary

Perhaps at first glance, the filmography of Silvio Narizzano appears unremarkable. Thanks to his sleeper hit Georgy Girl (1966), he's known largely as a "one-hit wonder" director. Upon closer inspection, however, likely no other filmmaker used cinema as effectively to exorcise personal demons in ways both ugly and beautiful. And few directors' sensibilities were more gay, both overtly and covertly. Film historian Daniel Kremer is your tour guide through an obscure, perplexing body of work heretofore ignored and often unfairly shunned. Cruel, Usual, Necessary: The Passion of Silvio Narizzano is an essay documentary of discovery.

Faultline

Faultline · 2022

A ten-year drought brings local ranches to the brink of disaster. The search for Bert Neville takes its toll on Rail and Mitra. They break up and Rail continues on alone. Travis, Ziggy and Karin hitchhike in high country and get lost in a burnt out forest. Taylor travels with Ukrainian gallery owners looking for the prototypical western artist. Dane introduces Rail to his mother, Violet, a full blood hewise, who remembers the horrors of the Indian schools. Her ex-husband Bedford refuses to give his real name to a white man. Her daughter April broadcasts a tribal blog on indian affairs. Dane and Rail are stopped by local militia types. Entrepreneurs propose a geothermal plant to ranchers and locals divided by political views. Rail finds an old map in an abandoned ranch and Mitra, now recovered, rejoins him. Is the mystery of Bert Neville about to be solved?

Survival Scars: Franklin J. Schaffner as Auteur

Survival Scars: Franklin J. Schaffner as Auteur · 2023

Survival Scars: Franklin J. Schaffner as Auteur

MovieDocumentary

Franklin J. Schaffner is the man behind a great many iconic American films: Planet of the Apes (1968), Patton (1970), Papillon (1973), The Boys from Brazil (1978), and others. Though he was an often enigmatically quiet but no less confident and decisive filmmaker, seldom was he discussed as an "auteur" director, despite his Academy Award win for Best Director and many august institutions naming coveted awards for "excellence in directing" after him. Daniel Kremer takes a deep dive into Schaffner's distinguished career, examining visual and thematic tropes that render his work extremely personal and part of a vast picture.

Jim and the Infidels

Jim and the Infidels · 2008

Jim and the Infidels

Ambitious film students Jim and Laura and their nihilist, restless group of film student friends decide to adapt Macbeth and shoot it with a mostly homeless cast. Jim and his friends search for locations in abandoned buildings in Philadelphia and it's in one such building that their own story takes a very unexpected and cinematic turn.

More Like This

Couldn't load this row right now.

Rate this film

Your ratings make Midnight smarter