Home for Christmas

A landmark work in personal documentary, Home for Christmas is a record of a train, bus and ferry journey taken from filmmaker Rick Hancox’s then-home of Toronto, Canada, to his family’s Landfall homestead on Prince Edward Island. The journey occurs at an auspicious time for Hancox, in the last days of his twenties and the first days of his thirties, and his experience achieves a universal resonance for those viewers who are separated from their families by a great divide, living their own lives in distant cities, and for whom such a trip, a commonplace, humble, monotonous journey, takes on the epic dimensions of a pilgrimage.

Rick Hancox is an essential figure in the development of a personal Canadian cinema. His films have been made in parallel to his reflections on the nature of memory, time, history and personal cinema, and have often served as illustrations of his values, of cinema as a poetic, subjective medium. As a mentor to a generation of Ontario filmmakers known informally as the Escarpment School, Hancox’s impact is felt in the Canadian filmmaker’s impulse towards self-conscious, poetic autobiography, a style that he advanced through films such as Moose Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past (1992), Home for Christmas (1978), and his trilogy of poetry films (1982-1985). 

First pressing, limited edition of 1000.