Canary is an American independent film directed by Alejandro Adams and produced by Adams with Marya Murphy. Shot in a style similar to Dogme 95

Dogme 95

Dogme 95 was an avant-garde filmmaking movement started in 1995 by the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who created the "Dogme 95 Manifesto" and the "Vow of Chastity". These were rules to create filmmaking based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and...

, Canary is an intentionally genre-ambiguous science fiction, thriller and drama with comic elements.

Plot and structure

The non-linear narrative follows the inner workings of the fictional Canary Industries Corporation, a biotechnology outfit that leases organs to patients, on the proviso that they take care of them with a pre-delineated diet and exercise regimen. If the patient fails to do this, the organ will be repossessed. Meanwhile, a television news team, headed by a sexist segment producer and his long-suffering female assistant, chase the story of how the organs are harvested. The agent in charge of harvesting the organs (Carla Pauli) silently stalks her various victims.

The various characters in Canary, including the protagonist, are static, and the dialog is largely conversational, and not meant to move the plot forward. Though the setting is never explicitly stated, it can be inferred that it takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area

San Francisco Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...

. The film highlights the diversity of the area, with long, unsubtitled sequences of character conversing in Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

, Korean

Korean language

Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...

 and German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, as well as English.

Production

Canary was shot in 2008 in and around the San Francisco Bay

San Francisco Bay

San Francisco Bay is a shallow, productive estuary through which water draining from approximately forty percent of California, flowing in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers from the Sierra Nevada mountains, enters the Pacific Ocean...

. Local actors and non-actors were cast. It was shot on standard definition video for low cost. It is a follow-up to Adams' first film, Around the Bay (2008).

Distribution

Canary premiered at the Cinequest Film Festival on 1 March, 2009. Many of the cast and crew were present, including the director, who answered questions after the screening. The film screened at the Fantasia Film Festival

Fantasia Festival

Fantasia International Film Festival is a genre film festival that has been based mainly in Montreal since its founding in 1996...

 in Montreal

Montreal

Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...

in July, 2009.