Ivory Tower

Ivory Tower is Canadian director/musician/puppeteer Adam Traynor’s feature film debut. The Ottawa-born Traynor treats this ‘existential sports comedy’ as an exercise in high silliness, with just enough family drama to give the action some emotional heft.

Set in the world of international chess competition, it features the sibling rivalry between two chess prodigies fighting over the game and the same woman. The film is infused with the rhythms of both chess and music, and stars a roster of talented Canadian musicians, including multi-instrumentalist and Grammy-nominated producer Chilly Gonzales, Juno-Award winning DJ/producer Tiga, and internationally-renowned raunch rocker Peaches. Music fans should also watch for appearances by indie-pop superstar Feist and underground pop sensation The World Provider.

Gonzales, best known for producing Feist’s albums and having his music appear in the Apple iPad commercial that launched the product last year, stretches himself here not only as a musician (by providing the film’s soundtrack) but also as an actor and writer. Traynor and French filmmaker Céline Sciamma – writer and director of the provocative 2007 film Water Lilies – also share scripting credits. Their combined talents result in a comedy that Cahiers du Cinema compared (positively!) to the work of both Will Ferrell and Wes Anderson, and which Toronto.com described as ‘sweetly nutty’.  Perhaps having doubted that a group of non-actors and a first-time director could pull off such a high-concept comedy with any degree of success, the Montreal Gazette ended up declaring it ‘a hilarious and surprisingly accomplished satire.’  With such a talented group of collaborators, perhaps it shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise after all.

    –  Lost Dominion Screening Collective