The Actuality Dramas of Allan King (Criterion Collection - Criterion Collection - Eclipse Series 24)

Canadian director Allan King is one of cinema's best-kept secrets. Over the course of fifty years, King shuttled between features and shorts, big-screen cinema and episodic television, comedy and drama, fiction and nonfiction. Within this remarkably varied career, it was with his cinema-verite-style documentaries-his 'actuality dramas,' as he called them-that he left his greatest mark on film history. These startlingly intimate studies of lives in flux-emotionally troubled children, warring spouses, and the terminally ill-are riveting, at times emotionally overwhelming, and always depicted without narration or interviews. Humane, cathartic, and important, Allan King's spontaneous portraits of the everyday demand to be seen. Films Include: Warrendale; a Married Couple; Come on Children; Dying at Grace; Memory for Max Claire, Ida and Company.