"There are a few different ways to experience the Twin Peaks franchise. One is as pure vibes—as Brenda Walsh puts it, “it’s not hippie witch, it’s Twin Peaks and it’s very in.” That’s easy to dismiss, but honestly it’s often what gets me to watch. Another way, and this seems to have gotten increasingly dominant lately, is as a puzzle-box mystery-mythology, a more arcane Lost. And that’s wonderful, if only because it encourages a communal conversation to untangle it. But Twin Peaks is also about a teenage girl who was repeatedly raped and ultimately murdered by her father. About how the ongoing abuse shaped her whole world, creating desires and addictions that terrified and excited her, and drawing in a circle of men fascinated by the prospects of saving and/or exploiting her. About how the tortured energy she exuded made the other girls, even her best friend, jealous. It’s a scenario so human and awful that those people—or a viewer—might need a whole fantastic mythical framework just to be able to take it in. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me foregrounds this last aspect. And that’s why, to me, it’s the beating heart of the series."

"I emigrated to Canada with my mother the year Mon oncle Antoine debuted, the same time that the U.S. was doing nuclear testing on Amchitka Island, off the coast of British Columbia. The FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) was flourishing. Canadian radio was given a mandate to stop playing American bubblegum round the clock. In this era of radical identity building, along came a candle-lit holiday fable set in an undertaker’s home in rural Quebec. The nephew of Antoine is a young boy coming of age in a world that no one outside his cloistered family could imagine. Mon oncle Antoine is about the sexual, material, and death’s-end taboos in a small village—and the taboo against anyone outside of it ever learning of such things. Some people puzzle over why this film keeps being called Canada’s finest decades after its release, when so many other artists have surpassed its modest ambitions. It is because of this: It was the beginning of saying, “We are not the back forty of the U.S.; we are not a trinket of the queen’s; our land and generations have given us a purchase of our own.” It was the beginning of remarkable Canadian filmmaking."