Exit Papers From Paradise

A thirty-something plumber grows increasingly frustrated with his life as a plumber in Paradise, Michigan, until an event propels him to pursue his dream of being a surgeon.

Frustrated 35 - year - old plumber Isaac Sullivan believes he has both the intellect and skill to be a surgeon. Forced to take over his father's plumbing business straight out of high school, Isaac's had dreams of attending the University of Michigan that fell by the wayside. However, the unfortunate setback didn't stop him entirely. For the past decade, he has absorbed every medical textbook and journal available to him. For practical experience, Isaac performs surgeries on the wildlife around his house, preparing for the day he attends Michigan. Yet the years continue to pass and Isaac remains stuck in Paradise, Michigan, as a plumber. That is, until this year, when an event pushes him to apply as an undergraduate for the first time. Exit Papers from Paradise is about the gap between the person we are and the person we desperately want to be.

Isaac Sullivan is a plumber but believes he has the intellect and skill to be a surgeon. For the past decade, he has absorbed every medical text available and has even performed surgeries on wildlife, preparing to someday attend university. Finally, an uncomfortable encounter causes him to apply as an undergraduate for the first time.

Based on a true story about the uprooting of Newfoundlanders by the mining collapse of the 1980s, and their eventual move to newly booming Alberta. There they find that life is not easy but family is still paramount.

The quick slide from country club to trailer park leaves Bliss Moonbeam Cornwall with only one reason to get up in the morning — revenge. But revenge requires money, and Bliss abandons common sense to get it. And she needs Chief Redfern, a former drug cop from Toronto, to stay out of her way and quit eyeing her with suspicion.

This is an enormously important and long-awaited project in film studies: it is collection of selected writings by the filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, rendered into English. There is no equivalent volume in Russian or in any other language, so this is an original work. Alexander Medvedkin (1900-89) belongs in the canon of major Soviet filmmakers. He invented a form of "total” documentary cinema for workers in the early Soviet era that was aimed at bridging the distance between film and life, whereby the target audience of a film would be involved in its making, and then their viewing and discussion of it would become the basis for action to change their work situation and relations. He was also a major satirist at a time when the Soviet authorities feared the ambiguities of satire and tried to confine laughter to narrowly prescribed channels. Medvedkin’s work remains a crucial link in the history of documentary cinema, especially in its more engaged or agitational forms. He was a true-believing, card-carrying Communist, but he was also a victim of the Soviet regime. Soviet institutions prevented him from fully achieving what he hoped to accomplish as an artist because he behaved as an individualist who sought to produce artistic projects in defiance of obstacles from the authorities.