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.

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.

Fast Food Change: Supersize Me

Writer and director Morgan Spurlock documented the effects of a nation’s love of fast food, and what the consequences to something like this would be, in his 2004 smash-hit documentary Supersize Me. Although this movie was released five years ago, one is able to see the global impact it made, as well as the continuing effects of North America’s fast food eating epidemic. Throughout the film consumers will compare the size of McDonalds meals in the USA compared to the size of meals in say France, or some other part of Europe, only to prove that they would not only consume the food in America as the European chains seem to taste better, but as well because of the amount of food given in America.

 

Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock in Supersize Me (2004)

The sizes of fast food meals have increased, and through the eyes of Morgan Spurlock the viewers see how his thirty-day fast food binge can go horribly wrong. A documentary such as this speaks to a host of people and uses a concept that is understood globally (that of obesity, and fast food chains) and displays it using the medium of film to cross culturally spread the word. By using America as its base for criticism it shows other countries both where they can go as far as obesity and over eating in their own country, as well as shows exactly what an over consumption of fatty foods can do to you.

The effects Supersize Me has made on chains of McDonalds restaurants is clear, although McDonalds does not admit to any affect this film had on their corporation, they have still changed their menu slightly to cater to a healthier lifestyle. Kids meals with apple slices and juice options, as well as salads, and wraps on their main menu. This documentary was meant for global viewing, and it has changed the ways in which fast food chains run their business, it was successful in both showing a global epidemic and well as fostering change. 

Heather Palmer 

Related Posts: Documentary, Society, Global Art Database