In celebration of Tuumba Press’ recent publication of Nathaniel Dorsky’s new book Devotional Cinema (described by Kathleen Tyner as “a rare treasure of penetrating insight into the language of film… somewhere between a Zen koan and a Victorian love story”), the Cinematheque presents A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea, the 1991 masterwork by Stan Brakhage, close friend of Dosrky’s and easily the most prolific filmmaker in the history of the medium. The first in the epic “Vancouver Island Quartet,” a major series of luminous long form film poems which straddled the final decade of Brakhage’s life, A Child’s Garden is a visual meditation on the land- and seascape of Victoria Island, British Columbia and an imagined biography of Marilyn Brakhage through an envisioning of her childhood there. (Steve Polta)