Anarchic celebration of destruction

Watching “Trash Humpers” might make the viewer think they’ve stumbled across some senior citizen’s snuff film. Shot and edited with a hand-held video camera, the actors wear grotesque old-age masks and makeup, hunched over and shuffling like crippled denizens of a retirement home. But any resemblance to the feeble and aged ends there. Clip after clip show these “ancient” vandals infiltrating suburban America to smash household items, sodomize vegetation, defecate, and of course hump trash cans.  This is an anarchic celebration of destruction; the oldsters laughing and dancing in their mayhem, singing nursery rhymes of murder.  A freak show of outrageous characters are visited, including a joined-at-the-head Siamese twin and transvestite poet, each spouting a sometimes hilarious monologue or a civilization-destroying rant.  During a night time neighborhood drive one of the trash humpers remarks, “We choose to live like free people”, mocking the residents of the houses, soon to rise and prepare for work, as “A stupid way to live.”  The makers of “Trash Humpers” reflect a grisly, distorted mirror on our terminal civilization, firing a big middle finger to the world and the audience.

Trash Humpers
Directed by Harmony Korine
USA 2009

Trailer

Willis Wong

(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2009)

Embracing sex, crime and trashy pop culture

Broken Embraces is a Hitchcock-tinged thriller filled with many of the familiar Almodovar elements.  A film about filmmaking, it visually embraces sex, crime and trashy pop culture. Almodovar’s usual touch of wacko humour takes a back seat to a tension-filled dark drama.  A business magnate’s death causes a blind writer to recall the tragic events of 20 years ago.  As a former director he battled for the survival of his film and the love of its lead actress, played by a mesmerizing Penelope Cruz.  Past and present entangle and collide, as the writer’s story unfolds and a decades old mystery crashes inevitability into the present. What is the price of a deal with the devil? Unlimited power clashing with conscience, creative control, and tragically, lives. And the best revenge?  Re-embracing life and art as the writer stitches back together the shattered fragments of his past. As the pieces come together, Broken Embraces keeps the viewer engaged, all the way to its cathartic conclusion.

Broken Embraces

Spain 2009

Directed by Pedro Almodovar

Trailer

Willis Wong

(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2009)

More VIFF’s 2009 reviews

Highlights of the last day of VIFF 2009

Amreeka

(Canada , Kuwait , USA, 97 mins, 35mm)

Directed By: Cherien Dabis

In this immigrant story,  a Palestinian mother and her teenage son leave their Israeli-occupied homeland for Illinois. When Muna Farah (stage actress and director Nisreen Faour) gets a US green card in the mail, she is shocked. She had forgotten she applied for it back in the days when she was still married. Her son Fadi (Melkar Muallem), whose educational and job opportunities are so limited in the Palestinian territories, is overjoyed. He can’t wait to flee his home…

Ninja Assassin

(USA, 2009, 99 mins, 35mm)

Directed By: James McTeigue

Director James McTeigue (V For Vendetta) and producers the Wachowski Brothers (The Matrix trilogy) crank up the B-movie action until the the severed body parts fly. There is a certain anarchic joy in watching naughty ninjas getting splattered, dispatched by whatever implement is handy, be it a sword, a shuriken or a car. But make no mistake: this is one bloody film.

Extraordinary Stories

Historias Extraordinarias

(Argentina, 2008, 250 mins, DigiBeta)

Directed By: Mariano Llinás

The three primary story lines (though there are countless others) concern men known only as X, Z and H, respectively, each of them minor bureaucratic functionaries in nondescript towns on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, who find themselves tossed by circumstance into unexpectedly complicated adventures. The first man witnesses a murder (before committing one himself); the second scours the countryside for clues about his predecessor, an international man of mystery with a possible sideline in illegal wildlife trafficking; the third travels up river in search of the large stone “monoliths” he has been hired to photograph. Each thread is a mini road movie of a sort, although like the film’s whimsical (and perhaps unreliable) omniscient narrator, Llinás shows markedly greater interest in the journey than in the destination.

Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands

(Canada, 2009, 43 mins, HDCAM)

Directed By: Peter Mettler

The horror. The poison. The appalling stinking shit-storm we’ve created. These words easily come to mind as one witnesses the sorry spectacle that is the Athabasca tar sands from the air. Who needs Antichrist, Shock Troopers, or Apocalypse Now! when we’ve got our own Canadian hell-in-the-making in our back yard… As the film cannily asks, if we’ve done this, what will we do next? This is a stunning document that proves that a moving image can reveal space beyond ordinary human perception.

Queen to Play

Joueuse

(France, 101 mins, 35mm)

Directed By: Caroline Bottaro

When Hélène (Sandrinne Bonnaire), a humble hotel worker at an up-scale resort perched above the Mediterranean, espies a couple locked in the throes of a passionate chess session (featuring a cameo from Jennifer Beals), her interest in the game is inflamed. Unfortunately, her husband has little interest in learning any new moves. Increasingly obsessed, Hélène spots a chess board in the home of Dr. Kröger (Kevin Kline in his first entirely French role), a scruffily patrician American recluse for whom she cleans house, and badgers him till he agrees to teach her the fundamentals.

More VIFF’s 2009 reviews

Empire State Building Mashup

Empire State Building Murders is gimmicky, fiction as documentary, documentary as fiction, mockumentary. Whatever the genre, for film noir fans the movie is a fun travel into nostalgia crooked cops, shady ladies, murderous mobsters, rain-slicked streets and catchy lines: In my family you don’t divorce your wife, you bury her. Before dawn he was sleeping with the fishes. She had a pair of knockers that would stop your heart. And the cast is iconic—Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Richard Widmark, Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall.

Director William Karel mixed clips from 30s, 40s, and 50s noir classics to create a cut-and-paste fictional narrative about gangster-ridden New York as recollected in documentary-like interviews with the now much older actors Mickey Rooney, Cyd Charisse, Ben Gazzara, and Kirk Douglas.

Karel apparently likes to quote French filmmaker François Truffaut: “A documentary is one thousand times more of a lie than a fiction, where things are clear from the beginning.” With Empire State Building Murders, Karel, whose 2002 mockumentary Dark Side of the Moon—footage from Apollo 11 Moon landing was faked and actually recorded in a studio by the CIA—is in his element.

Empire State Building Murders

France, 2008

Director: William Karel

Sandra Peredo

(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2009)

Thursday’s highlights at VIFF 2009

The Maid

Directed By: Sebastián Silva

Winner, World Cinema Grand Jury Prize (drama), Sundance 2009.

Silva assails the richly fraught (and deeply funny) territory of Chilean society and socioeconomic relations with intelligence and empathy. Anchored by a formidable performance from Catalina Saavedra (who picked up a best actress award at Sundance) and dedicated to the director’s own childhood servants, The Maid earns its charm through precise attention to the details of character.

Kamui

Directed By: Sai Yoichi

Kamui (played by new star Matsuyama Kenichi, also in Bare Essence of Life) has escaped rural poverty and family ties by becoming a ninja, but now wants a kind of freedom not permitted in feudal Japan, the freedom to live his own life. The plot finds him in an area controlled by the corrupt and effete Lord Gunbei, allying himself with the fisherman Hanbei and his family and then all but press-ganged into a band of shark hunters.

Afghan Star

Directed By: Havana Marking

Winner, World Cinema Documentary Director and Audience awards, Sundance 2009.

After 30 years of war and Taliban rule, pop culture has returned to Afghanistan. Millions are watching Afghan Star–a Canadian Idol-style TV series in which people from across the country compete for a cash prize and a record deal. Documentary filmmaker Havana Marking follows the process as 2,000 would-be singers audition for a program that the organizers hope will “move people from guns to music.”

Inside the game: Grubby vs. Sky

Beyond the Game is a documentary about Grubby and Sky, two of the best World Of Warcraft players in the world, as they prepare to face one another in a tournament of virtual battle.  This is the 2007 World Cyber Games, a high stakes annual video game battle whose participants are cheered by live audiences and richly rewarded by sponsors.  Madfrog, a retired champion, is also profiled and recalls the physical, mental, and emotional effects from his non-stop competitive gaming.  Throughout the film Grubby (Netherlands) and Sky (China) talk about their completely opposing strategies, even quoting from Sun Tzu’s classic text The Art of War.  This is serious business.

Interviews with friends and family reveal stories of struggle and sacrifice—especially with Sky, who escaped from the impoverished countryside to become a gaming superstar.  The camera provides an often intimate view of the players, lingering on closeups of intently focused eyes while keyboards clack and echo the rapid-fire decision-making necessary for survival inside the game.  Jos de Putter’s dynamic camera beautifully contrasts scenes from our mundane world with the colour-saturated, action packed virtual world within the game; the neon-lit internet cafes and media-hyped tournament becoming a jarring hybrid of the two.  Beyond the Game is a revealing profile of an unforgiving game and the toll it takes on its all too human players.

Beyond The Game

Directed by Jos de Putter

Netherlands 2008

Willis Wong

(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2009)

Puccini and the Girl(s)

In 1908, Giacomo Puccini composer of Madam Butterfly, Tosca and La Boheme is ensconsed in his villa in Tuscany, writing his first opera in seven years—The Girl of the Golden West—set in a California mining town.  Puccini is a diehard philanderer, he is also creating operatic melodramas in his own life.  There are intimations that he is getting it on with a young servant girl.  He seems to have another lover (perhaps his stepdaughter) plus a passion for a singer who works in a floating tavern on the river  below his villa. And then there is the jealous wife.  In between he pounds on the piano.

What does it all mean? Not easy to know since director Paolo Benvenuti has chosen to forego dialogue, develop the narrative through the reading of original correspondences (the subtitles are virtually invisible), set every scene as a tableaux vivant and rely on music and lots of chiaroscuro to convey the emotional tone.

What does it all feel like?  A throwback to the silent screen.  Not for everyone.

Puccini and the girl

Director: Paolo Benvenuti

Italy 2008

Sandra Peredo

(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2009)

Wednesday’s highlights at VIFF 2009

Only When I Dance

Directed By: Beadie Finzi

Isabela and Irlan live and train in one of the violent favelas in Rio di Janiero. Backed by their formidable teacher, the pair embarks on a series of international competitions that will determine the course of their entire lives.

Autumn

Directed By: Özcan Alper

A former student radical, after serving time as a political prisoner, returns home to his village on the Black Sea coast of northern Turkey. In the nearby town he develops a wary, stricken infatuation with a prostitute from across the border in Georgia, who seems to return his interest with equal wariness. But their romance, if you can call it that, is framed, indeed overwhelmed, by the dour grandeur of the forested mountains, the crashing of the surf and the silence of the snow…

Empire State Building Murders

Directed By: William Karel

Co-written by crime novelist and film obsessive Jerome Charyn (Movieland, Gangsters and Gold Diggers), this clever pastiche of old movie clips and new “documentary” footage recaptures a fascinating place and time: the Empire State Building in New York during the ’30s and ’40s. A French declaration of love for America and film noir, the film stands halfway between myth and reality, skillfully blurring fiction and nonfiction.

1999

Directed By: Lenin M. Sivam

1999 presents us with a fresh voice in Canadian filmmaking. Emotional and eye-opening, Sivam’s film reminds us of the challenges and opportunities of immigrant life, and the devastating impacts of experiencing civil war.

Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl

Directed By: Manoel de Oliveira

Adapted from a short story by Eça de Queirós, Oliveira’s Blond Hair Girl depictes the life of Ricardo Trepa. And when Trêpa falls in love with the blond girl (Catarina Wallenstein) he spies in the window across the street, he is certain that while the image of the girl may be art itself, his unemployment makes the reality of romance impossible. At a spry 100 years of age, Manoel de Oliveira is certainly the oldest great film director in the world.

Camino

Directed By: Javier Fesser

Winner, Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress, Best New Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Screenplay, Goya Awards 2009.

Camino (Nerea Camacho), a vibrant eleven-year-old, is stricken with a terminal cancer that leaves her paralyzed. Her mother Gloria (Carme Elias), whose intense faith borders on fanaticism, urges the girl to embrace such suffering as it represents God’s will. As Camino drifts closer to death, vulture-like members of the church converge on her, considering her unwavering bravery grounds for beatification.

We Live in Public

Directed By: Ondi Timoner

Masterfully incorporating a decade’s worth of footage, Timoner assembles a constantly riveting and often harrowing portrait of the one-time “Warhol of the Web”: Josh Harris.

Tuesday’s highlights at VIFF 2009

My Tehran for Sale

Directed By: Granaz Moussavi

One of the big hits of VIFF this year, in her debut feature, director/poet Granaz Moussavi draws deeply from her own experience. With an eye for telling, often painful detail (gossiping women in a medical clinic, or asylum-seekers clustered outside the Australian Embassy) and a truly terrific soundtrack (featuring Mohsen Namjou, known as the “Bob Dylan of Iran”) My Tehran for Sale reveals the humanity at the centre of this little-understood country and its people.

Where Are You?

Directed By: Kobayashi Masahiro

Kobayashi’s films have always looked at single-minded characters in difficult-going-on-impossible situations, but their focus is narrowing down to questions of naked, emotional needs. Where Are You? may just be his crowning achievement.

Chloe

Directed By: Atom Egoyan

Set in Toronto, and representing perhaps his most accessible outing to date, Atom Egoyan’s latest–based on Anne Fontaine’s French filmNathalie–deals with some seriously adult themes. Jealousy, the tenuous bonds of marriage, emotional duplicity–all are given a thorough going over in Chloe, thanks in no small part to Erin Cressida Wilson’s cogent script. Moore and Neeson are, as to be expected, both at the peak of their acting powers, but it is Amanda Seyfried’s show to steal, and steal it she does.

Lebanon

Directed By: Samuel Maoz

WINNER OF THE GOLDEN LION FOR BEST FILM – VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2009

One of the young men in the tank, a new arrival Shmuel, is a clear surrogate for first-time director Shmulik (Samuel) Maoz, who based Lebanon on his own experiences as a gunner thrown into war for the first time. Despite being mostly set in the claustrophobic confines of a dark tank, Lebanon is an intensely cinematic film, a personal immersion in the look, feel, and even smell and taste of what war is like; this is a staggering film about four boys who had never been involved in anything violent before and found themselves forced to kill.

Ne change rien

Directed By: Pedro Costa

Spawned from a short documentary Costa made with French actress Jeanne Balibar about her singing career, Ne change rien is a feature length dedication to Balibar’s alternative work (alternative to acting)—training, rehearsing and performing music.

Monday’s highlights at VIFF 2009

Mammoth

Directed By: Lukas Moodysson

Trailer

Mammoth, the first English-language project from Lukas Moodysson, one of Scandinavia’s most interesting and provocative writer-directors, finds him back in narrative mode after experiments such as A Hole In My Heartand Container confused the arthouse fans attracted to Show Me Love,Together, and Lilya 4-Ever. It’s a good-looking, smoothly directed, continent-hopping drama about parents and children, globalization and the ever-growing disconnect between rich and poor.

Assume Nothing

Directed By: Kirsty MacDonald

Trailer

Excellent Documentary!

‘What if “male” and “female” are not the only options? How do other genders express themselves through art? Inspired by the work of New Zealand photographer Rebecca Swan’s book of the same title, Kirsty MacDonald’s documentary Assume Nothing, does exactly that… Namely it suspends all conventional definitions of gender and sexuality and creates a free-floating borderless realm that celebrates difference, in all its contradiction and complexity.

Visual artist Shigeyuki Kihara, a Samoan/Japanese-born Fa’a fafine (meaning a person who embodies both male and female aspects), gives a surprisingly and mesmerizing open-minding interview.

Cooking with Stella

Directed By: Dilip Mehta

Trailer

The fiction feature debut of photographer Dilip Mehta, co-written with his sister Deepa, Cooking with Stella is a perfectly judged charmer that wears its politics so lightly you’ll never mistake it for a Message Movie. It’s the story of Michael (Don McKellar) and Maya (Lisa Ray), a pair of new parents from Ottawa who arrive in New Delhi where Maya has landed a diplomatic post. Comfortable and insulated in their High Commission compound, they get their big taste of India from their cook, Stella.

Around the World with Joseph Stiglitz: Perils and Promises of Globalization

Le monde selon Stiglitz

Directed By: Jacques Sarasin

Trailer

Jacques Sarasin’s portrait of Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, former chief economist of the World Bank and author of the bestseller Globalization and its Discontents is both a hard-hitting account of globalization’s negative effects on the world and a primer on how we can turn things around.

Nora’s Will

Directed By: Mariana Chenillo

Winner, Audience Award, Miami 2009, Morelia 2009.

Trailer

A master Machiavellian-style planner, an elderly woman named Nora has planned her death, down to the smallest detail. But even as she meticulously orchestrates the lives of those closest to her, most especially her ex-husband José, the contents of a mysterious photograph suggests other possibilities.

The White Ribbon

Directed By: Michael Haneke

Winner, Palme d’Or, Cannes 2009.

Trailer

With this new film, Michael Haneke returns to his classic themes of guilt, denial and violence as the mysterious symptoms of mass dysfunction. The White Ribbon is a period film set in a secluded northern German village on the eve of the first world war, shot in a pellucid monochrome, impeccably acted, and directed with this filmmaker’s icily exact rigour and severity.

Sunday’s highlights at VIFF 2009

Rembrandt’s J’accuse

Directed By: Peter Greenaway

Trailer

Peter Greenaway (The Tulse Luper Suitcases) directed Rembrandt’s J’accuse an essayistic documentary in which his fierce criticism of today’s visual illiteracy is argued by means of a forensic search of Rembrandt’s Nightwatch. Greenaway explains the background, the context, the conspiracy, the murder and the motives of all its 34 painted characters who have conspired to kill,,,,” The first line of the production synopsis of this dazzling investigation pretty much sums it up, but the great pleasure of our provocateur’s companion-piece to“nightwatching“ is its playful complexity…

A Prophet

Directed By: Jacques Audiard

Winner, Grand Jury Prize, Cannes 2009.

Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet depicts the jailhouse coming-of-age of a French-Arab man (Tahar Rahim) who is strong-armed by a powerful Corsican inmate (Niels Arestrup) into murdering another Muslim. The Corsican takes him under his wing and teaches him about the workings of power. The young man bides his time, educates himself, consolidates his own base, turns the tables on his mentor, and leaves prison ready to claim his piece of the Paris underworld.

I Killed My Mother

J’ai tu ma mère

Directed By: Xavier Dolan

Xavier Dolan’s debut feature may be the greatest Canadian film success story of the year. It received a triumvirate of prizes at the Cannes Festival’s Quinzaine and is the talk of the town–and a significant box office smash–in Québec. At just 17, Dolan penned the script for this semi-autobiographical story of a stormy relationship between a mother and her son. Call it therapy.

Dirty Paradise

Directed By: Daniel Schweizer

Along the Amazon, the Wayana people live in a remote region of French Guiana, rich with flora, fauna and, unfortunately, gold. It is gold that has brought 10,000 illegal gold-seekers to the area, where they hide in the forests and cause ecological devastation. The primary rain forest is plundered and rivers and creeks are polluted by tons of mercury and mud. The authorities, the army and the French police say they are powerless… Meanwhile the mercury levels in the fish–a staple of the Wayana diet–are so high that many of the local children face severe neurological complications.

Battle for the Xingu

Directed By: Iara Lee

The Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon, is home to more than 10,000 indigenous people whose traditional way of life has been suddenly threatened by the Brazilian government’s plans to build a massive hydro-electric dam. They are now fighting back…

Cedar Boys

Directed By: Serhat Caradee

Winner, Audience Award, Sydney 2009.

Trailer

Diretor Serhat Caradee—that critics have been compared with Martin Scorsese—understands the need to avoid being obvious, a hallmark of the mechanics of a modern crime story. This story of three ambitious but impoverished Lebanese boys from the west dropping into crime in Sidney Australia has a ring of truth that other movies simply miss completely. Very powerful piece.

Porgy and Me: In the World of Porgy and Bess

Directed By: Susanna Boehm

In the (white) world of opera, Gershwin’s alternately celebrated and controversial opera Porgy and Bess is one of the very few works that takes people of colour as its subject. Susanna Boehm’s stirring documentary follows the cast of the New York Harlem Theatre Company on their European tour of Gershwin’s work. As the troupe travels from city to city, attracting stares from startled Austrians, the parallels between the opera and the real life experiences of individual singers are revealed in a series of deeply personal conversations.

Police, Adjective

Directed By: Corneliu Porumboiu

Winner, Jury Prize (Un Certain Regard), Cannes 2009.

Trailer

While Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective is probably the smartest film of the year, its smartness never draws attention to itself; it’s smart without being clever. Maybe a little bit smarter than its protagonist, Cristi, an undercover cop who spends a lot of Police, Adjective on the beat in Vasilu, Romania, walking and watching–seeking out the truth but filtering it through his own perceptions.

Bluebeard

Directed By: Catherine Breillat

Breillat (Romance X, Fat girl, Sex is Comedy) luxuriates in the fairytale period detail and the glories of particularly vivid digital video while giving the film a dreamlike quality that perfectly suits the material. And she doesn’t stint on twists in her tale, nor the occasional splattering of blood…

Broken Embraces

Directed By: Pedro Almodóvar

Ravishing in its artifice and outfitted with all of Pedro Almodóvar’s stylistic tricks, this lavish tale of desire, power, duplicity and fate is steeped in noir conventions and good humour. Broken Embraces provides Penelope Cruz with glamorous centre stage in a four-way love-story-cum-flashback-mystery, a superbly entertaining new film that’s his first foray into noir since 2004’s Bad Education. And as forays go, this one is a doozy…

ENJOY!

ZMD: Zombie Attack!

Zombies of Mass Destruction is director Hamedani’s poke in the eye at America’s post 9/11 paranoia. When insanity happens the response is more insanity. On the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iranian-American Frida returns to her white picket fence hometown of Port Gamble and is met with suspicion and…ZOMBIE ATTACK!  Once the first jugular is pierced, the first face peeled, an unrelenting zombie avalanche of gags and gore is let loose. The flesh-eating disaster brings out increasingly absurd reactions from “ZMD’s”  cast of characters, among them a hellfire priest, a gay couple and a survivalist. The politically-minded will see a satire on the arbitrary search for terrorists under every Persian rug.  And for those who come for the blood ZMD will fill the most voracious appetite of  gorehounds seeking splatter and zombie annihilation.

Director: Kevin Hamedani
U.S.A./2009

Willis Wong

(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2009)

INTERVIEW with Zombies of Mass Destruction’s director Kevin Hamedani and lead actor Doug Fahl by Willis Wong

An October 5th Interview with ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction director Kevin Hamedani (photo above) and lead actor Doug Fahl at the Vancouver International Film Festival by Willis Wong for Intermedias Review.

Wong:  You’re obviously a great fan of zombie movies—ZMD references Peter Jackson’s “Dead Alive”, Romero’s “Dead” films, Boyle’s “28 Days Later”—what came first, zombie movie or political satire?

Hamedani:  Political satire.  I wanted to discuss my experiences post 9/11 and at first I actually wrote a serious  script that wasn’t even a horror film at all and I just wasn’t feeling it. At that time I had already made a few serious semi-autobiographical low budget films.  I was done with that and felt like doing something a little bit more fun, so just one morning over breakfast with a friend, talking, the idea of terrorists and a virus and zombies [came up]; at that time it was the terrorists that actually caused the problem.

W:  You’ve made the most of your budget, throwing in one gag and one gore scene after another, there’s a throwaway man-on-fire in the background, there’s a lot of post-production CG.  Was the filming pace frantic?

H:  Yes.  It was intense and insane, not enough time.

W:  Was there time to ad-lib?

H: Oh yeah, Cooper Hopkins, who played Lance–I had worked with him since high school. Actually we did plays together and he improvised a lot during my stage work, so I trusted him in doing that on film. A couple of funny lines are improvisations, and we improvised certain gags.
W: With the level of craziness post 9/11 and especially after the election of a black president, was it tough to out-crazy present day politics?

H:  Well, what you have to do is go over the top. What was going on in the last eight years was so absurd that if we didn’t have an absurd film, it wouldn’t have been good enough as a satire about that period, kind of like “Doctor Strangelove”–’There’s no fighting in the war room’, all those little lines, the guy riding on the nuclear bomb–that was a reaction to the idea that we could actually kill ourselves with this one bomb and that was when people were actually starting to realize that.   The fact that Middle Easterners were being beaten up in cabs or stopped because of their last name, for me growing up being exotic pre-2001, ‘Oh you’re Persian–that’s so cool’, and then overnight, all of a sudden my neighbors who I grew up with stopped waving at me when I would drive home from work.  That to me was so unbelievable and so absurd that I knew the film had to go as far as it could in terms of the gore being just ridiculous because that represented the violence in the time.  I knew I had to make fun of everybody from the white characters to the Iranian characters because I thought everyone was at fault.

W:  Right, nothing’s sacred, even the schoolteacher turns into Rambo.

H:  Yeah, she turns into a conservative type, and that happens in politics.

W:  Well, speaking of gore, there’s the face-peeling and the eyeball-eating scenes–was there anything cut out, left on the cutting room floor because it was too over-the-top?

H:  There was a zombie eating a foetus.  If I didn’t have to compromise, it would be in there.

W:  There’s a comic book series that shares the same name that might be turned into a Hollywood movie down the road. Is there room for two “ZMDs”?

H:  No, you can’t have two films with the same title.  We contacted them because I wrote the script prior to that comic even existing.  The script was started in 2004 and we didn’t find out about the comic until post-production.  We  were editing and then every week we’d do the research to find out if anyone was talking about us and then we found out this comic existed.  Our lawyers contacted their lawyers saying, ‘We need to discuss this, one of us needs to change the name, let’s just sit down and talk about it’, and they didn’t contact us.  I think they thought we were like a mini-dv, little low budget in-your-backyard kind of film.  I think that they just thought not to bother, and we tried our best to contact them, so OK, we’re almost done with our film and this is the title we had from the very beginning, so we kept it.  We were even considering changing the title, so we were thinking of additional titles. We were open to all that but they didn’t even contact us so we’ll see what happens when their film comes out.

W to Doug Fahl:  How did you enjoy wielding a shotgun, blood splatters–was it a new experience?

Fahl:  Yeah definitely, the whole film-making experience was new.  That was my first film; I had previously done commercial work.  It was a complete blast.

W:  A total dive into the genre.

F:  Yeah, once I was cast I was a little nervous, like am I going to be able to do this action stuff, you know?

H:  Really?  You were nervous?

F:  Well, I mean a little bit.  I’m nervous on any project, like am I going to be able to pull this off convincingly?  But once I got on set and realized even though it’s fast paced, the pace is very slow.  You have plenty of time to prepare for your scene as you’re waiting around, but the gore, the blood, although it’s sticky and uncomfortable and cold, I enjoyed every minute of it.  Even waiting around for hours it’s exciting.

W:  Was the majority of the movie shot at night?  How did you handle the schedule?

H:  I love it.

F:  You just get used to it.  You’re all on the same schedule.  When they say it’s breakfast it’s really midnight and lunch is at 3 am.  The town, we shot at Port Gamble, one little block, and that became our home for a month so It just felt like the street was our hallway and the post office was our kitchen.  We had the run of the town and it was very exciting. You could take a stroll down the street, watch the shooting, go over to the graveyard and relax.

Willis Wong

(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2009)

Read here Wong’s ZMD review

WATCH HERE THE TRAILER

More VIFF’s 2009 reviews

VIFF 2009 Highlights

For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism
Dir: Gerald Peary (USA)

Andrew Sarris, Janet Maslin, J. Hoberman and Roger Ebert are among the critics featured in Gerald Peary’s entertaining and informative look at the writers who thought film mattered–and still do. A timely reminder of the role played by those Americans who sought to elevate the medium to the level of art.

THE EXPLODING GIRL
Dir: Bradley Rust Gray (USA)
Winner, Best Actress (Kazan), Tribeca 2009
An epileptic, Ivy has learned to control her feelings to lessen the stress on her body, but her repression eventually becomes too much of an anchor to bear.

Bradley Rust Gray’s (Salt) delicately delineated character study unfurls like a poetic meditation. Ivy (Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of Elia), newly returned from university and balancing a long-distance relationship with a burgeoning attraction to a close friend, holds the film’s titular focus with ease.

Today Is Better Than Two Tomorrows
Dir: Anna Rodgers (Laos/Ireland)

Two 11-year-old cousins living on the Mekong Delta in Laos find their rural lives turned upside down when their uncle insists they study in the city–and learn English. Anne Rodgers’ carefully etched documentary–four years in the making–shows how modernization can be both good and bad for rural Laotians.

To Die Like a Man
Dir: João Pedro Rodrigues (Portugal)

Set in Lisbon’s flourishing drag-queen demimonde during the late 1980s, João Pedro Rodrigues’ latest foray into the gay body politic is a sensitive and transfixing look at Tonia (Fernando Santos), an aging pre-op transsexual under pressure from her much younger junkie boyfriend to make her sexual transformation into something permanent. But this is no drag of a movie: Rodrigues achieves moments of pure magic with, other, less flamboyant, numbers sung or played on the soundtrack, most of them popular Portuguese songs. To Die Like a Man thus retains the feel of a kind of intimate, melodramatic musical, one of those behind-the-scenes portraits from the 1950s.

I Killed My Mother

Directed by: Xavier Dolan

Xavier Dolan’s debut feature may be the greatest Canadian film success story of the year. It received a triumvirate of prizes at the Cannes Festival’s Quinzaine and is the talk of the town–and a significant box office smash–in Québec. At just 17, Dolan penned the script for this semi-autobiographical story of a stormy relationship between a mother and her son. Call it therapy.

Tetro
Dir: Francis Ford Coppola (USA)

Francis Ford Coppola returns with this pungent family drama set in Buenos Aires. Vincent Gallo is a failed artist and star-in-the-making Alden Ehrenreich is his estranged younger brother come calling to ask some pointed family questions. Klaus Maria Brandauer is their egomaniacal orchestra-conductor father. Also featuring Carmen Maura.

Backstory
Dir: Mark Lewis (UK/Canada/Germany/France)

Visual artist Mark Lewis explore the history and culture of cinema, fusing his curiosity about historical filmmaking techniques with a carefully aestheticized approach to cinema as both a fan-based and industrialized cultural phenomenon. Backstory explores the personalities and artistry behind rear projection technology in Hollywood and Cinema Museum visits a unique private collection.

The New Rijksmuseum

Directed By: Oeke Hoogendijk

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is the epicenter of Dutch cultural life: it’s where they keep the Rembrandts, the Ruysdaels and the millions of artworks, documents and objects accumulated by a very wealthy country over several centuries. And like a lot of venerable cultural institutions it’s in the midst of a vast, expensive, controversial and yet-to-be completed reno. Oeke Hoogendijk’s documentary–as undidactic and clear-eyed as her 2002 The Holocaust Experience–with great economy manages and visual flair to dramatize a long, complex period of conception, planning, negotiation, halting progress and agonizing setbacks as charismatic director Ronald de Leeuw and his team of planners, architects and curators try and realize their ambitious vision.

Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
Dir: Lee Daniels (USA)

“An urban nightmare with a surfeit of soul…. To simply call it harrowing or unsparing doesn’t quite cut it; Precious is also courageous and uncompromising, a shaken cocktail of debasement and elation, despair and hope… But this is, for all its scorched-earth emotion, a film to be loved.” — Variety.Winner, Grand Jury Prize, Sundance 2009.

Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl
Dir: Manoel de Oliveira (Portugal/France/Spain)

At a spry 100 years of age, Manoel de Oliveira is certainly the oldest great film director in the world. The inequities, curiosities and eccentricities of love take on new flesh in this “perfectly formed miniature.”–Screen Daily. Adapted from a short story by Eça de Queirós.

At the Edge of the World
Dir: Dan Stone

Few films offer as dramatic and spectacular a view of the Antarctic Ocean as does Dan Stone’s captivating documentary. Eco-activist Paul Watson and the Farley Mowat, along with her sister ship theRobert Hunter, may be in over their heads when they take on the Japanese whaling fleet…

Around the World with Joseph Stiglitz: Perils and Promises of Globalization
Le monde selon Stiglitz
Dir: Jacques Sarasin (France)

In Jacques Sarasin’s hard-hitting documentary about the perils and promises of globalization, Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz takes a tour of the world which starts in his hometown of Gary, Indiana, and encompasses developing countries like Ecuador and Botswana, as well as industrialized powers like India and China.

The Age of Stupid
Dir: Franny Armstrong (UK)

I hate this film. I felt as if I was watching all my own excuses for not doing anything about climate change being stripped away from me. And it’s tender and funny and wise as well. Can I just pretend I never saw it?–screenwriter William Nicholson. “The most powerful piece of cultural discourse on climate change ever produced.”—author Mark Lynas

Rembrandt’s J’accuse
Dir: Peter Greenaway (Netherlands)

Peter Greenaway’s visually and intellectually compelling docudrama recreates the time, the place and the exceedingly seedy politics that produced Rembrandt’s celebrated masterpiece The Night Watch . As the director argues that the painting is indeed a murder mystery rendered in oils, the film enters the realm of a tour de force.

Face
Lian
Dir: Tsai Ming-liang (France, Taiwan)

Tsai Ming-liang’s hallucinatory, spectacular, intriguing, sexy, musical masterpiece is set almost entirely inside (and underneath) the Louvre Museum in Paris. A Taiwanese director comes to Paris to film a surreal version of Salome with supermodel Laetitia Casta, but becomes enmeshed in a web of spectacularly photographed fantasy.

TIFF 2009 Highlights

Antichrist Lars von Trier, Denmark/Sweden/France/Italy 
North American Premiere
This is a groundbreaking, deeply disturbing and graphic nightmare vision about gender relations from one of the most important and influential directors of the last 30 years. The film is a break from von Trier’s previous work in terms of aesthetics, resembling a Japanese horror movie reimagined by Andrei Tarkovsky. Antichrist features unforgettable and courageous performances by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe. 

Carmel Amos Gitaï, Israel/France/Italy 
World Premiere
History in the Middle East is a complex mix of the present and the past. Then, there is also the personal and Gitaï is uniquely placed to reflect on his own past as a soldier and as the father of a young man caught up in the present conflicts that engulf the region. 

Honeymoons Goran Paskaljevic, Serbia/Albania/Italy 
North American Premiere
Two young married couples take off and travel abroad to the promised lands of better opportunities, but hope collapses when their expectations disappear into thin air and their dreams turn into nightmares. 

Melody for a Street Organ Kira Muratova, Ukraine 
North American Premiere
Two young orphan siblings travel to Moscow in search of their missing father. Scared of being separated and sent to orphanages, they hope to reunite with the last link of their shattered family.

Mr. Nobody Jaco Van Dormael, France/Germany/Canada/Belgium 
North American Premiere
Mr. Nobody tells the story of Nemo (Jared Leto), the world’s oldest man. In 2092, Mars has become a trendy vacation destination and humans have achieved immortality, thanks to advances in genetics. At the age of 120 years, Nemo is the last mortal left on Earth. His death is drawing near, and media from all over the world are eager to cover the event. Nemo doesn’t really remember who he is, and is only able, while under hypnosis, to call up a few snippets of disordered memories. Also starring Sarah Polley, Diane Kruger, Linh-Dan Pham and Rhys Ifans.

Le Refuge François Ozon, France 
World Premiere
The French master returns with this unsettling tale of a rich, beautiful young woman who finds herself pregnant after her boyfriend dies of an overdose. Retreating to a seaside home, she is joined by his brother. 

Vincere Marco Bellocchio, Italy 
North American Premiere
This fictionalized portrait of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini concentrates on his youthful years before he rose to power in Italy. It uncovers the details of his first marriage and the child he had with a passionate woman whom he later totally disowned and abandoned. 

Vision Margarethe von Trotta, Germany 
Canadian Premiere
One of the major auteurs to emerge from the New German Cinema, Margarethe von Trotta returns to the Festival with Vision, a study of the remarkable Hildegard von Bingen, the Benedictine nun who emerged as a Renaissance woman before there was a Renaissance. 

White Material Claire Denis, France 
North American Premiere
A family of French expatriates living in an African country where they own a coffee plantation find that their livelihood is threatened by the outbreak of civil war. They struggle to keep their lives together in the face of rival factions fighting for power and gun-toting child soldiers who have no sympathy for their plight. 

The White Ribbon Michael Haneke, Germany/Austria/France/Italy 
North American Premiere
In Protestant Northern Germany on the eve of World War I, strange incidents begin to occur in a village community and increasingly take the form of a ritual of punishment. This latest work from Michael Haneke won the Palme d’Or for best film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. 

The Window Buddhadeb Dasgupta, India 
World Premiere
When Bimal decides to give something back to his alma mater, he chooses to replace the broken window of his favourite classroom. Plans to pay for this gesture go awry and he cannot bear to tell his fiancée.

The 34th edition of  the Toronto International Film Festival running September 10 through 19, 2009. Over these ten days, 335 films from 64 countries will screen, including 271 feature-length films, 72 per cent of which are world, international or North American premieres and 71 of which are feature directorial debuts.

The B-boy Subculture: whenever they dance, wherever they are in the world

Benson Lee’s film Planet B-Boy (2007) follows the lives of various dance crews around the world and documents their experiences within the B-boy subculture. The documentary focuses on the 2005 Battle of the Year, an annual global competition that culminates with the crowning of the best b-boy crew of the year. B-boying, or breakdancing, began in the 1970s as part of the hip-hop movement in the United States. By the 1980s and 1990s, b-boying had spread across Europe, and then to Asia and South America, with each country adding its own cultural influences to the dance form. The film specifically follows crews from Japan, South Korea, France, and the United States as they prepare for the international competition in Germany. The film includes in depth interviews with the dancers, coaches, friends, and families, as each crew struggles to balance their personal lives with their dance lives.

What I found most interesting about Planet B-Boy is the similar experiences of each dance crew. All of the dancers go through similar struggles: seeking parent’s approval, wanting to build a better life, fighting discrimination. A Korean b-boy dances despite his father’s harsh criticism just as an adolescent b-boy from France struggles to help his mother understand his alternative lifestyle. B-boying has become a shared medium for self-expression. Although they are from different continents, each crew is connected by the b-boy subculture. This belonging to a shared subculture often conflicts with their feelings of belonging to their own country. Each crew strives to win for their country, yet shares the wish to promote the b-boy culture and lifestyle. In the end, these b-boys belong to a culture that has no physical location. Instead, their culture is lived out whenever they dance, wherever they are in the world.

Matthew Sy

 

Related Reviews: Cinema, Global Art Database

The babel jungle

Walt Disney was a firm believer in utopias.  In all of his animated movies he strived to create lands that were full of harmony, acceptance and love.  One classic example is The Jungle Book (1967), a movie about a boy who is raised by wolves.  Both he and all the animals can talk to one another and more or less get along.  But what’s more significant than the utopian plots of Disney movies is their attempt at reaching global audiences.  Among many other movies, The Jungle Book was translated into twenty-four languages and distributed across the world. 

Thirty-five years after this movie was released, Pierre Bismuth (a French contemporary artist) decided to investigate Disney’s so-called ‘universality’ further.  Bismuth examined every translation of The Jungle Book and decided which character would best fit with each language.  For example, he decided that the patrolling elephants would speak German.  Except for the elephant general’s wife who would speak French, alluding to when France and Germany worked together in WWII.  He also purposely put Latin languages next to Semite languages in reference to issues in Palestine. 

In this video-installation for Manifesta 4 entitled The Jungle Book Project (2002, video on plasma screen), Bismuth transformed this childhood tale into a tower of Babel.  When God made everyone speak a different language, they could no longer understand one another enough to finish building their tower to heaven.  And when Bismuth made each of the nineteen characters speak nineteen different languages, he achieved a similar effect.  Nobody can understand one another within the movie, nor can those watching.  Both the viewer and the characters in the movie become isolated by which languages they speak.  “By mixing the languages in only one film,” says Bismuth in an interview, “you transform something that should be understandable by each of us into something that is incomprehensible to everybody.” 

Bismuth is pointing out that although we live in a globalized world, we are far from being in a utopia.  Movie companies like Disney may try and push their ideals onto other countries, but we are still divided and isolated by our languages and cultures. 

Kathryn Schmidt 

Related Reviews: Animation, Video, Global Art Database

When Bollywood meets Hollywood

The film Slumdog Millionaire is possibly the most successful collaboration between Bollywood and Hollywood filmmakers in terms of the publicity and acclaim it has received from critics and the public. Yet its success as a big budget film should not eclipse the fact that in many ways it is an exercise in global art practice as well. The story, lifted from a recent Indian novel is brought to life by British filmmaker Danny Boyle incorporates elements of the traditional Bollywood style into the film.

It is an interesting mix of cultures because it involved Hollywood appropriating film styles from an India cultural product that originated from trying to emulate Hollywood type films. It reflects the global flow of culture that Hollywood’s crowning achievement this year is one that borrows heavily from an eastern tradition of filmmaking. It speaks to the surfeit of ideas that has befallen the western culture factory and the need to reach out to other cultures in order to develop new and meaningful narratives. It is a sign of the times that the tide of global culture is now flowing the other way and that for Hollywood to continue to be relevant it must borrow engage in a dialogue with other cultures.

Zorn Pink

 

Related Reviews: Cinema, Global Art Database

A Search for Home: exploring family history

          The film A search for home, an experimental documentary directed by Gillian Greenfeld, tells the story of a young woman traveling to Russia to find out about her family history. There are many aspect of the film that give it a very personal touch. As the viewer, one feels that one is traveling in and out of private and public realms along with the filmmaker. There is little sense of distance between myself as the audience and the world I am entering through the screen.

            The film begins with a serious of shots that include classical art, classical music scores and views of an old city. In the background classical music is playing. The rapid transition from one image to another creates a vivid sense of movement and speed. There are also a few shots of people dancing together on a street at night. Together these shots convey the cultural flavour of another place, and the sense of traveling and distancing one’s self from home or familiarity. As the audience we adopt the filmmaker’s gaze that looks onto these events as a foreigner.

            The opening sequence of scenes comes to an abrupt stop when we are introduced to the filmmaker. The shot is close-up, informal and personal and it takes place in what seems to be the kitchen of someone’s home. The way in which the filmmaker speaks to the camera is much like a visual diary or a homemade video. The quality of the image indicates that the camera is handheld. Later there is a shot of the filmmaker at the airport commenting on her trip to Moscow. The opening sequence of shots introduces the film’s subject for the audience. We know that we are watching a film about a young woman who travels to Moscow to explore her family history. However, this initial sequence is also telling because it establishes the characteristic style of the film.

            The narrative style of the film is more expressive than didactic. The filmmaker doesn’t reveal for the viewer exactly where she is going, whom she is speaking to or why she is doing it. Rather, we learn about what is happening by simply watching a succession of events unfold. Some scenes are not very clearly filmed and yet they successfully evoke a sense of place, the people that are present and the time. For example, there is a scene filmed during a family dinner. At one point the image becomes blurred, the speech is almost inaudible, the movements of the camera are sweeping. Although we can’t recollect exactly what we’ve seen or what has been said the sense of being in someone’s private space, in their home, while they are having a meal, is well communicated.

            Much of the story of the film is told in this manner. The viewer is left with a superficial and brief account of the filmmaker’s experience. Although shots of the music concerts, subway tunnels and trains aid in providing a cultural context, the transitions from one event to another are too scattered and spontaneous. It is difficult to discern the filmmaker’s intention because it lacks clarity. Sub-headings are used to introduce some historical contexts but they are vague and brief. The use of maps would have been helpful for the audience to relate the location of the filmmaker at the beginning of the film and her movement within Russia.

            The use of flashbacks and music, such as traditional Yiddish songs, effectively situate the story in a particular time and space. But it was interesting to note that although many of the shots are taken in a personal manner (close-ups, in people’s homes), I felt very little emotional relation to the people presented in the film, including the filmmaker. This may have been because the camera only spends a short time with each person and therefore does not allow the viewer to relate at a deeper level with the people on film. The viewer isn’t exposed to the complexities of the lives of the people in the film that are necessary for emotional attachment. 

Paulina Rodriguez

MS Paint Adventures

MS Paint Adventures is a web comic that mimics early 1980’s text-command based video games. The comic’s story is driven by a fan based suggestions of what the characters will do next, even if at times the suggestions are beyond logical. 

As mentioned, retro-games traditionally worked on a text based command system. The user would have to type in simple commands in a verb noun fashion, such as get keys or go into cave. The system of these games tended to be fairly small, leaving the computer to not able to understand many of the inputs users placed in, and leaving the user typically frustrated in finding the right words to advance the game. This ‘game’ however has a man behind the machine, Andrew Hussie, who tends to draw three to four pages every other day. Each ‘turn’ in the game is drawn in the aesthetics of Microsoft’s first pixilated paint program, and the story takes twists from a list generated by the fan base.  This has ended up with a hilariously metaphysical comic that plays with the intertextuality of games and web forums. 

Riley Maruyama

Related entries: Anime, Cinema, Cyberspace, Screen Culture Database

Framed Reality II

Braudy’s chapter “Frame in Context” suggests people passively enter into the world of the screen. This screen world engages the feelings of humans, which demands attention. The framing of the screen influences the audience experience and questions the notion of limits. This idea implies that the frame provides restrictions, which determine the relationship the viewer will have with an image and manipulates the overall experience. Outside decisions made by the director control the characters and objects seen. When actors walk outside of the frame they are entering another world that the audience is not included in. Braudy also brings forth the possibility that the frame questions the idea of order. Chaos and order are controlled to impose a perception of the screen world. The frame therefore becomes a trap for the viewer or enters them into a dream world. This choice can ultimately enhance or damage a film. It also influences the relationship of an audience to an image, allowing us to question and unravel how emotion in evoked and experience is constructed. What depictions of reality is an audience willing to accept?

Melissa Assalone

Braudy, Leo. “Frame in Context” in: The World In a Frame: What We See in Films. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1976, 51-65.

Related entries: Cinema, Screen Culture Database

CFP: Emergent cinemas and the new cinematic strategies and forms

This is a call for papers to be presented at the annual Film Studies Association of Canada / Association Canadienne d’Études Cinématographiques (FSAC/ACEC) conference to be held in conjunction with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, May 29-31, 2009. Details about this conference can be accessed at <http://www.filmstudies.ca/>.

This panel proposes to analyze the new strategies of film production and cinematic forms of emergent cinemas – non-western (Asian) and peripheral economies (African, Latin American) – have been adopting and changing the conception of contemporary world cinema. In the last few decades, a rebirth and flourishing of cinema has been taking place in parts of East Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. Cinemas from all over the world (Iranian, Mexican, Chinese, Argentinean) have experienced increasing popularization and internationalization of film production with a combination of national and international funds. How can independent and local films survive in an international globalized production?

Filmmakers have been shaping a global grammar of cinematic storytelling and have developed screenplays on an international basis to respond to international grants and audiences especially those from the film festivals. Independent scriptwriters and directors are often granted funding and training on the basis of their scripts from organizations, such as the Sundance Film Institute, Ibermedia and other similar laboratories in Europe. The financial capabilities of digital film have provided a rebirth to Third World cinematography. The DV (digital video) revolution has been a prerequisite for emerging independent filmmakers.

Globalized filmmaking production raises questions such as auteurism, localness, cross-cultural influences, and national cinema. Cross-cultural productions appeal in terms of socio-political themes. From a Western perspective third cinema tends to be more personal, more experimental, and more theoretical. What kind of topics are being dealt in this globalized production, are they embodying global as opposed to local? Should we reevaluate the idea of peripheral cinema?

The papers could be focused on, but not limited to, topics such as:

-       Internationalization of screenwriting

-       Digital video and Intermediality in contemporary “third” cinema

-       Independent film in an international production

-       Authorship and localness in cross-cultural production

-       Third World cinema in a globalized age

-       Post-colonial contexts and transcultural perspectives

-       Cultural borders of nation-states and national cinemas

Please send presentation proposals of 250-300 words as document Word

attachments to Hudson Moura (hudson_moura[at]sfu.ca). Deadline:

January 5, 2009.

The subtexts of The Matrix

The mind boggling film The Matrix, directed by Andy Wachowski, was a successful film with an unforgettable plot. The genre of The Matrix is science fiction/ action. It contains constant kung fu fighting and always leaves you at the edge of your seat. It takes place in the year 2306, where humans no longer control the world, instead machines do. This movie plays on the psyche of the audience, introducing the idea of a paradox universe. The Matrix fits its genre suitably and keeps you entertained from beginning to end because it works your mind. It introduces a complex plot that actually requires interpretation by its audience. Not many movies today can claim to engage the audience as much as The Matrix does.

Keanu Reeves stars as Neo, the computer hacker who is seeking the answer to the question, “what is the matrix?” His search leads him to the wise Morphius (Laurence Fishburne) who explains to Neo the illusion of the so-called reality. The world he is in is the Matrix, it is computer generated world made by the ‘machines’, the machines control the humans and keep constant watch over what they do. Morphius offers Neo a chance to unplug from the Matrix, the only world Neo has known, and go into the real world. The matrix is all digital and can be read like a book on specialized computers. Using this to their advantage, the crusaders for freedom manipulate the matrix and program themselves as if they too were digital computers. Neo takes the offer to see this new digital life that everyone seems to be oblivious to. Neo is now in the real world and must fight for his life against the inhuman government agents who are “no one, but everyone” as Morphius quotes. These agents are actually computer programs that can change into human form, misleading Neo and the others. Morphius is led to believe that Neo is ‘the one’ to save the human race and defeat the agents, yet Neo is skeptical. Neo doesn’t believe in fate, he doesn’t like the idea that he isn’t in control of his own life. Eventually, he is convinced and believes that he is the one. In the end, he defeats the government agents and falls in love with the courageous Trinity. By defeating the agents Neo is one step closer to helping save the human race.

The Matrix is interesting because it plays with the idea of real and illusion. Are we, in fact, living in a matrix of some sorts that we have no knowledge of? This movie lets us explore and ponder that question. Being exposed to this idea is what makes the film engaging, we wonder whether this could really happen or be happening to us. It is a striking movie since we could easily relate to the reactions and choices all the characters make. The characters in the movie are all unique in personality, but they all have one similarity, their curiosity. Each character is unique in their own way. Morphius has a way with words, he easily persuades anyone. He is experienced and wise, and doesn’t give in too easily. Neo on the other hand is determined and doesn’t give up on anyone or anything. He likes being in control of his own life and questioning of everything. Trinity is intelligent and probably just as determined as Neo. The inhuman government agents are monotonous and have no feeling, they are life-less. Their power is way out of Morphius’s control but the only power they don’t have is the power to leave the matrix. They try to gain that power from Morphius and the other crusaders.

The characters fulfill their role suitably but there are still a few flaws. For example, there could have been more scenes showing Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Neo (Keanu Reeves) falling in love, because it happens too suddenly, they hardly knew each other. Morphius (Laurence Fishburne) played his role as Neo’s guide very well. He was very wise and encouraged Neo every step of the way. Sipher (Hugo Weaver) was the one who betrayed the group so he could go back to the matrix. He even killed two of the people who were in the group. Weaver played his role well, because from the beginning we can already see that he doesn’t like the real world, he would rather be in the matrix. It’s his facial expressions and acting style that is convincing. This all foreshadows his betrayal to the group.

Visually, the movie is great, everything is very clear and easily understood. Everything throughout the movie is precise, it doesn’t jump from one place to another. The costumes and make up are also well done. When the characters are in the matrix they have black shiny and futuristic clothes. When they are in the real world, they have ugly rags on. By doing this, one can easily tell when the characters are in the matrix or in the real world. Next, there are really interesting camera angles and shots. Whenever there was some kind of fighting, it was usually in slow motion, which made it interesting and unique. It is unique in the sense that the characters were able to have superhuman abilities in the matrix. The movie would pause and the characters would hover in mid air throughout the action sequence. Furthermore, there are also at least three shots where you look at a scene through a reflection. For example, when we were looking at Neo through the reflection of Morphius’s sun glasses, or when we were looking at him through reflection of a spoon and also a car rear view mirror. Music goes well with the genre, it is all techno and rock. This makes you really feel like it is an action movie. The sound effects during the combat fighting are enticing and appropriate.

The purpose of the film is to get the audience thinking. The writer is trying to get the audience to wonder, are we in the matrix right now and we don’t even know? The best aspect of this movie is that it is so enticing. That is what makes it so engaging, the audience wants to learn about the matrix. They are just as curious as Neo was. They are with him every step of the way, completely glued to the movie screen. The audience loves the suspense. In conclusion, this movie is one of my favourite movies. It is stimulating and leaves you thinking a long time after the movie is over. Although I dislike sci-fi movies, this is definitely an exception. The Matrix is the integration of these ideas that has provoked the society to watch the movie again and again in the attempt to flesh out even more subtexts to the movie. The Matrix is also successful in that it plays on our cultural memory, teasing out those thoughts and ideas that our culture shares in common.

Ruky Abdulai

Related entries: Cinema, Screen Culture Database

Buster Keaton: Sherlock Jr. dream sequence

A sequence in Buster Keaton’s 1924 film Sherlock Jr. illustrates this early filmmaker’s awareness of the nature of framing, the screen, and virtual space. In this sequence, the main character, a projectionist, dreams of stepping into the virtual space of the cinema screen as though it were just another room. He passes through the cinematic fourth wall of the film within the film and interacts with the  characters there, inadvertently giving his audience a glimpse of future screen-immersive technologies like virtual reality. This sequence not only demonstrates Keaton’s understanding of the limits and possibilities of his medium; it is an early manifestation of a desire we still have not successfully fulfilled — the desire to create a virtual space indistinguishable from reality, into which we can fully immerse ourselves. 

Nancy Shaw

Framed Reality

The famous musical Rent, has been filmed while being performed live on a Broadway stage and released for audiences to view in the movie theatre. The live aspect of theatre involving possibility and risk has been captured into one performance on film. The experience of seeing the show live or on film is completely different. Although the production has been edited with shots taken from multiple angles, what has been lost is the entire picture of the show. Close ups of theatre performance show the actor projecting to a large audience, not the intimate frame they are forced into. If the theatre can be considered a space where intermediality can take place what happens when it is then put to film? How does one art form collaborate or fit with others? While watching this film many people may consider the performances to be over-acted, however, the same assumption would not be true in the large theatre. How is the experience altered in this new setting? Can one truly get the essence of a stage performance from a film?  If the situation was reversed a film on stage would also have problematic areas.  It is an interesting issue to be experimented with in our contemporary society.

Melissa Assalone

 

Videodrome: you are what you see!

It is perhaps most satisfying to contextualize Videodrome as a response to the advent of the home video in the early 1980’s. The film was released in 1983, right around the birth of the household VCR, and the limits of this new technology was still an unknown as were the ultimate effects it could have on its viewers. Director David Cronenberg uses the “what if” of this new technology and its effects on viewers as the backbone for the film’s fascination with dominant and submissive roles, which we, as spectators, play with the fictional character on the TV. In this sense, Videodrome is a highly self-reflexive and innovative creation. It poses questions to the characters within the film (as well as the real life audience) by asking whether film is so influential that it physically becomes part of the individual who watches it and is enamored with it.  

 

“The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye; therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those that are watching. Therefore television is reality and reality is less than television,” says Barry Convex (played by Leslie Carlson)

 

It is here that Cronenberg’s fascinations with the possibilities of technology merge with his signature use of flesh and gore. In the film, the power from the videodrome videotape forms a tumor in Max’s (protagonist) brain, allowing the creators of videodrome to control Max just like a video recording device. In addition, Max’s stomach is also mutating into a large vertical slit that resembles a vagina and functions as a mind controlling VCR. The slit is large enough for a human hand to insert a tape into Max’s stomach, directly programming him to perform specific (violent) actions. The slit’s vaginal resemblance emphasizes the violent sexuality within the context of the film, adding to the notion that videodrome, and cinema as a whole, are both forceful forms of manipulation bordering on assault. This violence is not merely reactionary to having watched the videodrome tape, but rather compulsory. The mutations in Max’s body also signify that perhaps people are not solely influenced by cinema, but also transformed by it, suggesting that cinema provokes physical experiences beyond just seeing. If diet campaigns claim, “you are what you eat,” then Videodrome examines the exchange of violence between spectator and screen, questioning whether are not “you are what you see.” 

Bryce Brentlinger

A sensitive touch to a sensitive story

Love for Sale: Suely in the Sky is the story of a young woman who has returned to her small hometown after having spent many years in São Paulo. Arriving by bus with only her baby boy and a couple of travel bags in hand, Hermila settles into her grandmother’s home, and awaits the arrival of her husband. Some time passes, and after numerous phone calls to São Paulo, a few odd jobs, several nights drinking and dancing to pass the time, and a couple of trips to the bus depot, Hermila comes to realize the difficult truth that her husband is not coming. Left with few options, she begins to feel very lonely and isolated. Desperate to make a change for herself and for her baby, Hermila decides to start a raffle in hopes to make some quick money. The hook – she’s the prize. Hermila takes on the name ‘Suely’ for her raffle, and with a few tickets sold and word out on the street, Suely has all the men in town trailing after her for “one night in paradise.” Wondering if she has gotten herself in too deep to get out, Hermila has some serious thinking to do.

Although this film presents a harsh reality to viewers, it manages to transcend the uncomfortable feeling one might experience in light of its gritty content and themes, to arrive at a place of hopefulness and optimism. It does so through its true-to-life characters, poignant performances, and its aesthetically pleasing cinematic beauty. Directed by Karim Aïnouz, produced by Walter Salles, and with cinematography by Walter Carvalho, this film is bound exceed expectations with such a masterful team. Together they provide a sensitive touch to a sensitive story.  

Kelsey Jonhson

(Intermedias reviewer at 1st Brazilian Film Festival of Vancouver)

 

 

Love for Sale: Suely in the Sky
(O Céu de Suely, Brazil, 2006)

Brazilian cinema arrives today in Vancouver

A great variety of the recent Brazilian film production will be presented at Vancity Theatre until October 26th. The 1st Brazilian Film Festival in Vancouver includes 15 films and a special tribute to cinematographer and filmmaker Walter Carvalho.

Walter Carvalho in "Enlightened" (Iluminados) directed by Cristina Leal

Currently considered one of the most renowned Brazilian cinematographers, Walter Carvalho, will be honored by the Festival. With more than 60 films, including features and shorts, and a résumé with more than 40 awards, Walter has worked with some of the most important Brazilian directors such as Walter Salles, Glauber Rocha, Ruy Guerra and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. On October 25th the audience will have the chance to learn more about Walter Carvalho’s professional trajectory in the master class The Image of Brazilian Cinema. His methods, techniques, inspirations and future projects are some of the topics that will be addressed by the cinematographer.

The seminar Co-production: Brazil/Canada will bring together Brazilian and Canadian producers to address the development of international co-productions on October 24th. Topics discussed will be: models of co-productions, marketing, cultural exchange and the possibility of new business between Brazilian and Canadian markets. Both the seminar and master class are free.

Rodrigo Santoro, André Moraes, Jair Oliveira and Selton Mello in "Out of Tune"

The opening film is Out of Tune (Os Desafinados) directed by Walter Lima Jr. The film is a portrait of the groundbreaking Brazilian musical movement (called Bossa Nova) that launched the careers of such music greats as Tom Jobim and João Gilberto in the 1960s.

Watch the trailers

Check the list of films here

Couscous and Exile

With his exceptional latest film, The Secret of the Grain, Abdellatif Kechiche, provides viewers with a rare glimpse into the kind of raw family life we seldom see depicted onscreen. The film revolves around Slimane, an aging, divorced North-African immigrant in France and his divided, diasporic family. After being made redundant at work, Slimane makes an odd choice, deciding to use his severance money to create a restaurant on a boat, featuring his ex-wife’s famous fish couscous, and in the process ends up creating the sense of unity that his family was missing.

Rym (Hafsia Herzi) and Slimane (Habib Boufares)

The unpolished (and at times almost crude) camera work draws us in with its voyeuristic, documentary feel.  We witness loud, incessant talking and bickering, and intergenerational conflict, but it is the relationship between Slimane and his girlfriend’s daughter, Rym that is most interesting. Rym becomes the driving force behind the restaurant, and comes to understand Slimane in a way his “legitimate” children never do. This seemingly simple plot is deceptively complex, as we realize this restaurant is less about Slimane’s goals and more about leaving some sort of legacy for his children. We come to understand Slimane’s experience as an immigrant. As his friend tells Rym, after experiencing the feelings of exile and solitude that go along with leaving your homeland in the name of a better life, there comes a time when you look to your children and ask yourself if it was really worth it. Both insightful and jarring, The Secret of the Grain is a film of surprising depth, well worth the abundance of critical acclaim it has received. 

Meg Allan 
(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2008)

The secret of the grain (La graine et le mulet, France 2007)

Dir. Abdellatif Kechiche

End of an Era

Though more than capable of standing on its own, Modern Life is Raymond Depardon’s final instalment in his three-part documentary series depicting the changing face of French rural life. While the prospect of following the antics of aging, French farmers may seem less than enthralling to the average movie-goer, what Depardon offers is an honest and straight-forward portrait of those people “of another age” caught in the midst of a changing world that is in the process of rendering them obsolete.

 

Depardon's documentary Modern Life

 

The patient camera work reveals just as much about the filmmaker and his respect for his subjects as it does about the subjects themselves.  Tightly-framed, long-shots linger just long enough for us to realize the contrast between what is being said verbally and what the tired, uneasy bodies of these farmers are trying to tell us. When one farmer, tells us, “It’s the end,” we know it is not just the end of his own life that he is referring to, but the end of a way of life. Whether the problem of modernity is indeed a problem or not, Modern Life is a testament to these people, standing fields apart from everything else this year.

Meg Allan 
(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2008) 

Modern Life (La vie moderne, France, 2008)

Directed by Raymond Depardon

Son of a Lion: an insightful experience

 

Son of a lion (dir. Benjamin Gilmour)

Benjamin Gilmour’s insightful film, Son of a Lion, gives viewers a glimpse into the life of Sher Alam Afridi and his young son Niaz, who live in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, and earn their livelihood by manufacturing and selling weapons. Having to deal with the burden of his wife’s death and having to raise his son in such a volatile time, Sher Alam Afridi is very hard on his son. Niaz, a very sensitive and smart boy, is not at all interested in the family trade. With few friends, Niaz is lonely, and wants nothing more than to go to school and leave the guns behind him. He is especially desperate to be enrolled in school this year, being that he is already eleven years old and it may just be his last chance. He thus turns to his open-minded Uncle, who tries his best to persuade his stubborn and traditional brother to allow the child to get an education.

 

With mention of 9/11 and the hold that America has on the world, this film becomes somewhat of a testament to the true realities and mentalities of these people. It is as if Gilmour is trying to displace the Western unforgiving perceptions of Muslims by taking a closer look. His characters are sensitive, engaging, and complex – and they invite us to feel a connection with them, and the world they live in. This in itself is an opportunity we should feel privileged to experience.

Kelsey Johnson
(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2008)

Son of a Lion (Australia/Pakistan, 2007)
Directed By: Benjamin Gilmour

Dance With A Dream

Ari Folman’s animated documentary, Waltz With Bashir serves as a personal investigation of Folman’s own deeply troubled relationship with the role he played in the first Lebanon war. Where the horrific images of war continue to haunt the men he served with, Folman is left with no concrete memory of the acts he committed. Instead he is plagued only with fragmented, dream-like pictures that he can’t quite make sense of. While the act of interviewing other soldiers serves to illuminate the disturbing portrait of what has taken place, no one truth comes to the surface and we are ultimately left with a reminder of both the selectiveness and the inconsistency of memory.

 

Waltz with Bashir

Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of Waltz With Bashir is that for such a personal film, Folman maintains an eerie distance from his subject-matter. Though the notion of living with the horrible acts committed and witnessed in wartime is difficult enough, Folman’s role as ex-soldier is further complicated by the fact that in assuming the position of the oppressor, he has taken on a role that he associates with those who persecuted his own family in Auschwitz. Waltz With Bashir is not only a document of the traumas humans endure, but the traumas that are passed down to us from others. Though Folman clearly gains some insight from his self-examination, it is clear that there are gaps in his consciousness that will never fully be revealed. 

 

Meg Allan

(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2008)

Waltz with Bashir (Vals im Bashir, Israel, 2008)

Directed by Ari Folman

‘Addicted to Plastic is frightening and enlightening’

Ian Connacher’s personally funded crusade to find answers and solutions to our unconscious and destructive plastic obsession is rightly documented in his first and successfully engaging film, Addicted to Plastic!  Waking up one day with a real concern about his seemingly ‘plasticized world’, Connacher decides to embark on a significant journey. Roughly 2 years on the road, more than a dozen countries visited, and countless alarming encounters with plastic products in any and every shape or form, Ian makes a worthy effort to bring to light the ‘plastic hell’ that we have created for ourselves. Making use of witty educational cartoons, ‘what if?’ satirical experiments, exciting live footage, and informative interviews, this documentary successfully maintains the attention of its eager viewers.

From oceans to landfills, recycling depots to chemistry labs, and India to Ontario — this film covers some serious ground and answers some critical questions. Impossible to leave this film unaffected, viewers will hopefully think twice about their everyday plastic use, and look towards creative alternatives and solutions. Thankfully this film leaves us with some insightful and innovative solutions in the face of a truly frightening reality. In my opinion, this film is one product that should be consumed by all.

Kelsey Johnson
(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2008)

Addicted to Plastic! The Rise and Demise of a Modern Miracle (Canada, 2008)

Directed By: Ian Connacher 

‘Happy-Go-Lucky a go see’

Mike Leigh’s contagiously comedic film, ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’, follows the everyday life of the innately bubbly Poppy, a primary school teacher from London. A young woman so endearing and intriguing, at times it is difficult to take your eyes off her – even after 2 hours of her fun loving optimism. When Poppy’s bike is stolen, she of course looks to the bright side and decides to take up driving lessons. The story positions itself here, as Poppy’s ‘happy-go-lucky’ attitude clashes with her new driving teacher’s uptightness. Scott continues to puzzle Poppy during their weekly lessons. Unsure of how she should to respond to his strict ‘no fun’ teaching style, she reacts only with the usual chatter and quick wit. These entertaining encounters ‘drive’ the film’s drama, with other lighthearted moments finding their way into the plot.

 

Sally Hawkins (Poppy)

Sally Hawkins’ performance as Poppy is simply brilliant and deserving of the Best Actress prize she received at the Berlin Film Festival. Her energy seems to fuel the other performances which are also noteworthy, with some of the richest dialogue coming from Scott in his many spit-spat rants. If nothing else, this film will leave you with some great quotable lines, a smile, and a rejuvenated appetite for life.  

Kelsey Johnson
(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2008)

Happy-Go-Lucky (United Kingdom, 2008)

Directed By: Mike Leigh

Moving Beyond the ‘Protective’ Screen

(Warning: spoilers for the movie ‘The Ring’) 

The movie, The Ring a remake of a Japanese film, is a horror movie about a cursed VHS tape that if one watches then that person will die seven days later. The cursed tape has very disturbing images on it that do not seem natural. In one image a woman turns and looks directly out of the screen and her eyes seem to pierce the viewer’s soul. In another part of the movie after the main character has viewed the cursed tape she stands on her apartment’s balcony and looks across to the other apartment building where almost everyone has their television set on. Western society is surrounded by all different types of screens, from television sets to computers to iPods. We take for granted that we are the ones in control of these screens; we do not think that anything inside that screen could hurt us. But, what if something could? What if something could emerge from a screen to hurt us? That is the twist that happens at the end of the movie. The spirit of a little girl that was murdered by her mother figured out a way to haunt, torment and even kill the living by using the video tape to tap into people’s psyches. In truly horrifying ending she slowly crawls out of a well, slowly walks towards the screen and the actually climbs out of the screen. Her body still appears to be an old grainy movie image however. The movie terrified people in movie theatres all over North America and I believe it is because no filmmaker had ever thought to play around with the concept of that elusive invisible screen that separates the world from those boxes that we stare into daily. One might ask themselves, am I really that safe from the constant flickering images? 

Tara Turley Dean

More reviews on Screen Culture

 

Growing Op Far From Ordinary

Michael Melski’s film Growing Op is a not your typical suburban family tale. Quinn Dawson, the film’s self-doubting protagonist, feels anything but normal in his neighbourhood. While other teenagers his age are going to public school, hanging out with friends, or going to parties, Quinn is either being home schooled by his loveable mom, played by Rosanna Arquette, tending to weeds outside to make some extra cash with his local gardening business, or at home trying to deal with some other types of weeds – marijuana plants that is. Although his home looks picture perfect from the outside, you just have to step through the front door, which is safeguarded by numerous locks and deadbolts, to realize that this family is far from ordinary. You guessed it – Quinn lives in a family-run, grow-op.

Steven Yaffe and Rachel Blanchard

Feeling left out of the real world, Quinn is eager to make a change in his life. Fortunately for him, an opportunity appears right in front of him in the form of a beautiful blond who has just moved in across the street. This might sound cliché, but fortunately for the modern movie-goer who is looking for something a little smarter, Melski pulls out a few tricks from his sleeves and manages to go beyond the cookie cutter ‘coming-of-age, girl-next-door, suburban teen drama’ we’ve all seen before. With great performances from virtually the entire cast, and a satirical sensibility that anyone could appreciate, this film is definitely worth your time.  

Kelsey Johnson

(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2008)

Growing Op (Canada, 2008)

Directed By: Michael Melski

The things we go through for love

Jacques Doillon’s film, Just Anybody, follows the four day journey of a somewhat emotionally lost young woman named Camille, who is committed to finding something meaningful in her relationship with Costa, a man who has apparently just sexually assaulted her. Camille travels from Paris, where we assume they met, to a small seaside town where Costa is staying with his aging and seemingly unstable father. Upon arrival, Camille meets a local cop who is immediately attracted to her, and vice versa. Cyril has known Costa since childhood, and is worried about Camille’s interest in him, as he is a well-known criminal in town. Camille, however, has no interest Cyril’s warnings, and proceeds to dig deeper into Costa’s life, hoping and believing that he is the love that she has been looking for. It seems, however, as if her attraction stems only from her personal need to save him from the destructive life that he has created from himself. This conquest leads her down a bumpy road, as the three find themselves caught up in an array of reckless situations.

For the most part, it is difficult to understand these characters and their motives, but at the same time you might find yourself feeling sorry for them. They seem so completely misguided and even childish, that at times it is difficult to sit back and watch them mess things up again and again. Although frustrating, the film nonetheless boasts some noteworthy dialogue and acting, and Doillon’s thematic philosophy relating to the difficulties of love is candid. His film is a testimony to the peculiar things that love will make us go through—and the things we will go through for love.

Kelsey Johnson
(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2008)

 

Just Anybody (Le Premier venu, France-Belgium, 2008)
Directed by Jacques Doillon 

Every Step

 

Kore-eda Hirokazu’s “home drama” Still Walking contains much of the tension, humour, and subtle (or not-so-subtle) admissions of regret you might expect to find in any depiction of a close family reunion. However, this premise is complicated by the fact that the gathering serves as an annual commemoration of the untimely death of the Yokoyama family’s oldest (and perhaps best-loved) son. At times, humorous and heartfelt, and at others quietly devastating, Hirokazu skilfully captures the complexity of a family out of synch, but ultimately bound together.

While we experience this story through the eyes of the youngest son, Ryota, it is Harada Yoshio’s portrayal as the angst-ridden elderly patriarch that truly stands out. As a retired doctor, now reserved to the domestic sphere, we see him almost out of his element in his own home, unable to adjust to an identity that is separate from his career, while his wife (who is teased for having never worked) thrives as domestic ruler. The long, ponderous shots that linger on Yoshio’s every step, as he slowly but surely climbs the massive staircase leading to his home allow us to carefully consider the less obvious complexities of his character. Stunningly simple, Still Walking is a finely-crafted example of near-perfect understatement.

 

Meg Allan

(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2008)

 

Still Walking (Japan, 2008)

Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

Tulpan: a truly poetic depiction

 

Sergey Dvortsevoy’s first fiction feature film, Tulpan, gives viewers a glimpse into the life of a young Kazakh man named Asa, recently returned from his obligatory naval service to join his sister and brother-in-law in a traditional nomadic life as sheepherders in the arid Kazakh steppe. Before Asa can have a flock of his own, he must find a wife, and is set on marrying the only available local woman, Tulpan, the mysterious daughter of a neigbouring family, whose face is never revealed. However, as a result of her stubborn parents and her dislike of his large ears, Asa is rejected by Tulpan and is completely disheartened. Suddenly, his worldly dreams seem out of reach and Asa is left to grapple with life and his decisions.

Heartwarming and perceptive, Tulpan is worthy of the Prix d’Un Certain Regard it won at this year’s Cannes film festival. Dvortsevoy’s first fiction film after a string of noted documentaries, he uses his naturalist techniques and aesthetics to portray this story in a realistic light. It is almost as if he is a viewer himself, only filming what unfolds in front of him. With plenty of intriguing and quirky characters (and animals), his camera captures the lighthearted moments that play out across this harsh landscape – a truly poetic depiction.

Kelsey Johnson
(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2008)

 

Tulpan (Kazakhstan, 2008)
Directed By: Sergey Dvortsevoy

Blinded by the light

 

Blindness begins with an unknown city, where life carries on as usual. Frumpy doctors’ wives go unappreciated, anonymous sexual encounters take place in expensive hotel rooms, and much of the everyday circumstances of common people remain utterly invisible. But when an inexplicable, whitening blindness begins to affect the population, things change fast. An undiscriminating sense of fear takes over, and those afflicted are quarantined and left to suffer the miserable conditions of a food-rationed internment camp. Among them, one woman (Julianne Moore) still sees, concealing her vision to avoid separation from her blind husband, ultimately serving as both surrogate mother and saviour to those within her quarters. 

Fernando Meirelles’ representation of a city devastated by blindness is a film that you will feel with your entire body. Through the washed-out, obscured images we see from the perspectives of the increasing blind population; we not only witness the descent of any form of social order, but physically feel the effects of this breakdown, as our own senses are enhanced in the absence of direct images. 

Meg Allan 
(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2008)    

Blindness (Brazil/Canada, 2008) 
Directed by Fernando Meirelles 

Chico Teixeira Alice’s House director: Delicately filming brutal lives

Director Chico Teixeira and actress Carla Ribas (Alice)

What is the story that you wanted to tell with Alice’s House?

I’ve always wanted to tell a story that was simple, without death, without heroes, nothing, except ordinary people, like you and I. The film is basically about a woman’s everyday life in which she alludes herself and makes the same mistakes repeatedly. It’s a film with small actions, intimate internal movements, with daily frustrations, nothing is safe, and nobody knows where they go in that house, it’s an enormous emptiness. I would also like to talk about the pettiness in relationships, about very fragile family ties, which deteriorate and break up at any moment.

Le silence littéraire de Chouga

 

Ainur Turgambayeva (Chouga, 2007)

 Chouga, du réalisateur du Kazakhstan Darezhan Omirbaev, développe son approche de la littérature par la construction filmique du temps. Cette très belle réussite d’adaptation littéraire, sans pour autant devenir un livre/texte filmé, est une transposition temporale du roman Anna Karénine de Tolstoï de la Russie des Tsars des ex-colonies soviétiques (le Kazakhstan est devenu indépendant en 1990). Le rapport argent et tradition sociale a autant changé qu’il s’est laissé préserver par une pratique de caste familiale, ce qui aide à donner au film une concrétisation du temps présent sans perdre la construction des situations dramatiques originales du roman. Par contre, ce qui est intéressant dans cette adaptation et qui pour d’autres pourrait devenir un défaut du film, est que l’intrigue romanesque devient toile de fond en soulevant le poids dramatique des personnages du film et en donnant la place à ce passage inexorable et silencieux du temps.

La caméra s’attarde sur des petits gestes des mains, des regards ou le temps que l’on voit passer sur l’horloge. Le temps ainsi se construit lentement dans les plans, surtout par de faux raccords d’une séquence à l’autre. Le montage, bien qu’il suive la chronologie des images, fait des sauts temporels importants en construisant ainsi le film par des tableaux dans lesquels les cultures occidentale et orientale se confondent. Des tableaux qui portent le mouvement des trains, des voitures, des attentes, et des lieux de passages et de transitions, des couloirs, des routes – une belle transposition imagée du parcours de la protagoniste (excelente, Ainur Turgambayeva) entre la passion d’un jeune riche et l’obligation familiale envers son fils et son mari.

Emily Tang’s “Perfect Life” wins the VIFF’s Dragons & Tigers award

 

Perfect Life (2007)

Sweet Food City (2008)

Perfect Life (Wanmei Shenghuo) directed by Emily Tang from China was considered the best picture by the VIFF’s jury “for the way it captures the harshness of Chinese reality through its fictional protagonist, and for the subtlety of its wonderfully free storytelling.”Perfect Life, produced by Chow Kuang and Jia Zhangke, depicts an unexpected and brief encounter between two women: a repressed 21-year-old from a broken home and a divorced mother-of-two, also from China but living in Hong Kong and fighting for alimony from her ex-husband. Across these two counterpointed lives, Tang constructs a thoughtful panorama of desires and hopes.

Each year, VIFF gives the Dragons & Tigers award to the best first or second feature-length film by an emerging Asian director.

Dragons and Tigers awarded a special mention for German + Rain directed by Yokohama Satoko from Japan. The jury considered the main character disturbing but unexpectedly fascinating. The film has taken with naturalistic performances from the entire cast, composed a strangely moving film. Another special mention was for the “incredible location, and the very clever way” Sweet Food City (photo) directed by Gao Wendong from China, combines elements of documentary with fiction.

Highlights of the 27th Vancouver Film Festival 2008

 

Blindness (Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Yoshino Kimura and Alice Braga)

Vancouver International Film Festival is starting today with an amazing selection of films coming from all over the world that will be screened during the next two weeks. Vancouver became one of the most celebrated North American film festivals for East Asian (Dragons & Tigers) and Canadian films. The Festival will be opened by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelle’s Blindness, a film based on a novel by Portuguese Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago.

The closing gala screening will be The Class (France) directed by Laurent Cantet winner of the French prestigious Palme d’Or. Also acclaimed earlier this year at Cannes were Three Monkeys (Turkey), by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (best director), Il Divo (Italy), by Paolo Sorrentino, A Christmas Tale (France) by Arnaud Desplechin, Tulpan (Russia/Kazakhstan), by Sergey Dvortsevoy, Cloud 9 (Germany) by Andreas Dresen, Hunger(UK), by Steve McQueen, and Next Floor (Canada), a short by Quebec’s Denis Villeneuve, which won top prize for shorts at Cannes. Sundance prize winners include Captain Abu Raed(Jordan/USA), by Amin Matalqa, and Ballast (USA), by Lance Hammer. Winners from the Tribeca Film Festival include Let The Right One In (Sweden), by Tomas Alfredson, My Marlon And Brando (Turkey), by Hüseyin Karabey, and Old Man Bebo(Spain), by Carlos Carcas. Berlin Film Festival winners include The Song Of Sparrows (Iran), by Majid Majidi, Happy-Go-Lucky (UK), by Mike Leigh, I’ve Loved You So Long (France), by Philippe Claudel, Corridor #8 (Bulgaria), by Boris Despodov, Revanche (Austria), by Götz Spielmann, Be Like Others (Iran/Canada), by Tanaz Eshaghian, and Sita Sings The Blues (USA), by Nina Paley.

Check out below some of VIFF’s highlights this year:

24 City (Er Shi si cheng ji, China, 2008, 107 mins)
Directed By: Zhanke Jia
24 City tells a number of stories about the deep-rooted social revolution going on in China today. It is set in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, in a luxury apartment complex called 24 City being built on the site of Factory 420, a former airplane engine plant. Jia’s cameras capture the last days of the factory by zeroing in on the people who used to work there and the people who will move into the new apartments. In a series of five strikingly photographed interviews with retired workers from the factory’s early days 60 years ago to its present, what unfolds is a series of personally inflected vignettes of China as it moves past the Korean War through the political campaigns of Communist Party rule right up to the full-throated capitalist present. Jia’s film asks what gets us closer to truth: documentary or fiction?

Blindness (Brazil, Canada, Japan, 2008, 118 mins)
Directed By: Fernando Meirelles
What would happen if you woke up one morning and couldn’t see anything? This is the premise of Blindness, directed by Fernando Meirelles (City of God), and adapted from Nobel prize-winner José Saramago’s masterful novel by Don McKellar. When a mysterious pandemic descends upon an unnamed city (the megalopolis 18 mi people – São Paulo) without warning or reason, the entire population is plunged, not into darkness, but its opposite. The “white sickness” (so-called because its victims see only a milky blankness) institutes a state of virtual martial law. Under armed guard, those afflicted by the pandemic are rounded up and warehoused in bleak concentration camps. When a doctor (Mark Ruffalo) contracts the disease, his wife (Julianne Moore) accompanies him to the internment camp, despite the fact that she’s the only one that still can see.

Adoration (Dir. Atom Egoyan)

Adoration (Canada, 2008, 100 mins) Directed By: Atom Egoyan
When a high school student named Simon (Devon Bostick) casts himself as the surviving child of a would-be terrorist in a class assignment, he begins a dizzying journey into his own family’s mysterious past. Atom Egoyan’s 12th feature employs a fractured chronology that interweaves multiple narratives and characters into a web of connection, as fraught and delicate as the web of a spider. After his French teacher Sabine (played by Arsinée Khanjian) convinces Simon to present his essay as a true story, his decision to continue the deception online creates a virtual firestorm. Soon the clamour of competing voices and opinions has reached near bedlam. Everyone has an opinion, and the need to voice it as loudly as possible. But is this merely democracy (facilitated by the internet) in action, or something more insidious?

C’est pas moi, je le jure! (Canada, 2008, 110 mins)
Directed By: Philippe Falardeau
Philippe Falardeau delivers a highly sophisticated, often hysterically funny work that may also be his most accessible to date. Set in 1968, the film focuses on ten-year-old Léon (Antoine L’Écuyer, in a phenomenal debut), a dedicated hellion whose pastimes include failed suicide attempts, vandalism, theft, running away and breaking and entering. The film is a touching and amusing meditation on changing mores and family structures. Léon’s best friend Lea is being raised by her alcoholic uncle, and may be as troubled a child as he is. Like Léon, she is in search of an absent parent.

Café de los Maestros (Argentina, Brazil, USA, 2007, 90 mins)
Directed By: Miguel Kohan
Argentina is undergoing a resurgence in their national music form, the tango. Nowadays it is even “cool” for kids in their late teens and early 20s to spend a night in Buenos Aires’ cavernous La Catedral practicing their tango moves instead of dancing to the latest cumbia or hip-hop or electronica styles. In this documentary, director Miguel Kohan and Brazilian producer Walter Salles choose to focus on the other end of the age spectrum – Café de los Maestros chronicles the gathering in Buenos Aires of the greatest living legends of this formidable musical genre. These extraordinary men and women, ranging from 70 to 95 years old, reveal the mysteries and essence of this deliciously melancholy and sexy music.

The Class (Entre les murs, France, 2008, 128 mins) Directed By: Laurent Cantet
Welcome to another year of French class; my name is François, and you are all skanks. Laurent Cantet’s latest feature is based on a simple concept: go inside the walls of a tough, racially mixed Parisian high school in the 20th arrondissement, enter one contentious classroom for a year, and watch the fireworks. Based on the novel Entre les murs, a fictionalized version of the life of its author, teacher François Bégaudeau, The Class developed out of months of workshops and rehearsals. Shot on HD without a script, using three cameras at once – like filming a tennis match – this is a docudrama that feels completely real. Palm d’Or at Cannes 2008.

The Desert Within (Desierto adentro, Mexico, 2008, 112 mins) Directed By: Rodrigo Plá
Religious madness and protective love that turns to hatred combine for an intense mixture in Rodrigo Plá’s The Desert Within. The film, which nearly swept the awards at the Guadalajara fest [traces] the logical downward spiral of a guilt-ridden father’s attempts to make amends with God. The premise is a parent, tempting fate out of the desire to get his newborn baptized, would conclude that God wants him to take his family deep into the desert to build a church.

Hunger (United Kingdom, 2008, 100 mins) Directed By: Steve McQueen
A film of uncommon power and artistry, Hunger is a staggering look at life in Northern Ireland’s infamous Maze Prison, focusing on the six-week-long hunger strike by IRA leader Bobby Sands. In his feature debut – winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes – Turner-prize winning artist Steve McQueen envisions the body as a site of political warfare, casting Sands’ last days as a Passion Play starring German actor Michael Fassbender as the perfect Jesus. Though the story of the IRA has been told before, McQueen’s version is uniquely personal and completely unforgettable.

Maman est chez le coiffeur (Mommy Is at the Hairdresser, Canada, 2008, 97 mins) Directed By: Léa Pool
In her new feature, a sumptuous 60s period piece, veteran Québec filmmaker Léa Pool (Emporte Moi, The Blue Butterfly) continues to tackle the intricate space in which children start to make sense of people’s positions and responsibilities (including their own) within a community. Suffocating and incapable of dealing with her family and her increasingly distanced husband (Laurent Lucas) – whom she suspects is having an affair with another man – a mother (Céline Bonnier) leaves her family to restart her life as a television anchor in London, England. We follow her three children as they try to cope with the abandonment in different ways. Much in this small community remains repressed or unspoken, yet everyone paradoxically puts their noses in everyone else’s business.

The Secret of the Grain (La graine et le mulet, France, 2007, 151 mins) Directed By:Abdellatif Kechiche
Winner of the César (the French Oscar) for Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Most Promising Actress, Tunisian-born Abdellatif Kechiche’s (L’esquive) multi-layered and hugely absorbing new film also captured the Special Jury Prize and the International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival. North African immigrants in Sète, a crumbling port town in southern France. Its protagonist is a weary, divorced, impoverished 60-year-old shipyard worker whose fractured family comes together around his dream of opening a floating restaurant based on his former wife’s culinary specialty, fish couscous. The film, which explores generational differences and psychological baggage within this extended family of émigrés, is an extraordinarily rich and human ensemble piece filmed in a rough documentary style.

Serbis (France, Philippines, 2008, 94 mins) Directed By: Brillante Mendoza
Brillante Mendoza follows last year’s Foster Child and Slingshot with the story of an epically dysfunctional family inspired, he says, by a real one. The Pineda family operates a decrepit cinema (called “Family”) in a provincial Filipino town, screening tenth-run double bills of softcore sex movies. They also live on the premises. The matriarch Nanay Flor (Gina Pareno, The Bet Collector) is suing her bigamous husband for support and expecting the court’s decision any time now. She’s helped with the running of the cinema by five younger people: her daughter and son-in-law, her adopted daughter, and two nephews, one of whom is shirking his responsibilities to a pregnant girlfriend. Meanwhile the cinema itself attracts few but men looking for male and transvestite hookers, who ply their trade in the lobby and on the stairs.

Suivre Catherine (Canada, 2007, 93 mins) Directed By: Jeanne Crépeau
Who wouldn’t like to live in Paris for a whole year? That’s the simple plan director Jeanne Crépeau launches at the age of 40, invited by Catherine, a Parisian filmmaker she meets in Montréal. In this witty film diary, Crépeau shares her somehow hilarious walks along the Seine, her astonishment at the maze of red tape, her ill-concealed terror behind the wheel in Paris traffic and her joy at entering a new community. She also undertakes an academic dissertation on the 1996 Jacques Doillon film Ponette and its extraordinary 4-year-old star, Victoire Thivisol, which is a lot more fun than it sounds. Crépeau’s travels take her to Normandy, Venice and Lisbon, and in each location she perceives something new about things big and small, imaginary and real.