Teenager Hamlet home / DVD / project / synopsis / credits

 

Teenager Hamlet is a documentary-fiction feature length movie. Margaux Williamson, as director, spins a tale using the people and resources available to her in her neighborhood. The work searches to find a story specific to its time and elements of creation while sorting through the distinctions and confusions between acting in a play and taking action in real life.

 

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“Teenager Hamlet is a Canadian urban pastoral that recalls Bruce McDonald's and Don McKellar's work with passion and place. It remembers what it is to be young and filled with overwhelming curiosity; with a profound desire to make one's own sense of the world. To watch it is to feel that way.”
 - Lynn Crosbie (OCAD professor and cultural critic for the Globe and Mail)

"A moving and insightful way to use Shakespeare to explore youth, art and our generation in the modern age. It reminds me of the way Van Sant used Henry IV as a springboard into exploring the young, disenfranchised generation of Portland in the early 90s."
- James Franco (actor)

"Whimsical, funny, willfully amateurish… Teenager Hamlet manages to explore with great aplomb both the fear of death and the fear of 'Akting'." 
- Stephen Greenblatt (author of “Will in the World” and John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University)

"Margaux Williamson brings a huge amount of visual and verbal wit to bear on this playful make-believe portrait of her Toronto neighbourhood."
- Jon Davies (curator, The Power Plant)

"(Williamson) is surprisingly successful at distilling the essence of the play into a fresh and audacious form."
- Toronto Star

"Odd and intriguing"
- NOW Magazine (Toronto)

"Williamson’s playful, inventive and refreshing exploration of the ideas posed by Shakespeare’s most popular play presents a surreal counterpoint to the glamour of the mainstream movie industry." 
- Eye Weekly (Toronto)

"Funky, alt-futuristic and damn good fun."
- National Post