Investigating Sex
Alan Rudolph
USA/ Germany
2001
107 minutes
35mm
Producers: Alan Rudolph, Greg Shapiro, Nick Nolte, Frank Hubner, Jana Edelbaum
Writers: Alan Rudolph,
Michael Henry Wilson
Just before the Depression rages into the Roaring Twenties, a former academic, Edgar (Dermot Mulroney), tries to come to some kind of understanding of sex. To study the "phenomenon," he brings a handful of artists together at the digs of a wealthy patron (Nick Nolte), and hires a pair of lovely stenographers (Neve Campbell, Robin Tunney) to record what is said.
As the group of surrealist artists and writers gather to discuss sex in this Alan Rudolph ensemble film, loosely based on Jose Pierre's actual 1928-1932 Paris study, the stenographers serve as catalysts for the confessions and conversations, eventually blurring the lines between professionalism and personal interests. Neve Campbell as a prudish flibbertigibbet rises above the banality of the role trappings, while Robin Tunney comfortably plops down as an ornament of worn sexuality. Especially enjoyable is Tunney's performance as a woman with a refreshingly healthy attitude towards sex. Neither "virgin" nor "whore," she has slept with a few men, knows what she wants and how to get it, and rather than begging the man she goes to bed with to love her and marry her, she simply asks him not to analyze it to anyone, whether it lasts or not.
Alan Cumming, Elliot Davies, Terence Howard, and Til Schweizer play some of the artists present, who delve into topics like bestiality, onanism, and menage-a-trois. Their leader, Edgar, is in love with a female demon that haunts his dreams, much to the annoyance of his flesh-and-blood girlfriend (Julie Delpy). Nick Nolte and Tuesday Weld give the film's best performances as Edgar's boozy, sex-crazed sponsors. The characters gather in a modern art-filled room and an orgy practically ensues as they find themselves liberated by the erotically transgressive talk and surroundings. The script by Rudolph and Michael Henry Wilson utilizes the actual session transcriptions to create an overflow of poetic, insightful dialogue.
This film, with The Moderns and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, makes a trilogy of Rudolph works about intellectuals of the 20s, each a bumpy, messy romance buoyed by trademark wittily crafted dialogue and the rapid-fire exchanges of screwball comedy. Go see this if you get the chance.
Expecting
Deborah Day
Ontario
2002
82 minutes
Producers: Thomas Mark Walden, Kirk Johnson, Sharon Petzoid
Writers: Cindy Stone, Karen Hill, Deborah Day & Cast
Victoria Premiere
Quick! What word comes to mind when you hear "labour pains"? How about "party"?
Director Deborah Day delivers a fabulous ensemble film about human dynamics under pressure in Expecting. It's no wonder the film was a hit at the 2002 Montreal Film Festival. It's edgy, witty, free-spirited and sexy, too. And furthermore, Expecting will explode all your expectations about what is possible in improvisational film. It's an inspired idea: design an open-ended script, gather together a talentedcast, then leave the rest to the improvisational muse. After all, delivering a baby - just like acting without a script - is largely (excuse the pun) about extemporizing.
The premise: Stephanie, a single, very pregnant performance artist invites eight of her closest friends and family to a "labour party" to witness her homebirth.
The play-out: As each friend arrives, and as Steph's labour ebbs and flows, the ensemble tour-de-force kicks in, and characters clash, kiss, reminisce, and come to terms with the past and the present. Steph's current boyfriend is a retired stockbroker on a spiritual quest, probably the father of the child. He is irritated by the flakey photographer Gary, a sometime lover of Steph's who secretly plans to spring a marriage proposal at the party. Steph's overbearing sis Anita keeps pushing for a hospital birth, annoying the midwife, Julia, with whom she shares an unsavoury past. Anita and her hubby, Jack, are estranged. Then there's Azaan, the scholarly musician who swears his relation to Steph is purely friendship, and the blonde bubblehead reporter, Dani, who has the hots for Jack, and an ugly tendency to be narcissistic. The crisis mounts with the immanent birth, and the antics pile up: women singing into dildos, African drumming, group toning, and general wanton drunkenness.
The conclusion: a baby, natch.
Day says of the film, "I wanted to follow labour - with its intense contractions followed by periods of waiting or letting up. I wanted the tone to be comedic yet poignant." Expecting has an irresistible urgency and freshness, thanks to the immensely skilled and funny cast which includes Valerie Buhagiar, Debra McGrath, Angela Gei, Barbara Radecki, Colin Mochrie, Karl Pruner, Derwin Jordan and Tom Melissis. It won Special Jury Recognition at the 2002 Montreal World Film Festival and Most Popular Canadian Film at the 2002 Vancouver International Film Festival.
The Montreal Gazette called Expecting " 'The Big Chill' by way of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and early Woody Allen." But what it's really about is the birth of comedy (and drama) happening before your very eyes.
Spider
David Cronenberg
Ontario
2002
98 minutes
Producers: David Cronenberg,
Catherine Bailey, Guy Tannahill
Writer: Patrick McGrath
adapted from his novel
Print Courtesy of Odeon Films
Set in London's East End in the 1960s and 1980s, Spider tells the story of a deeply disturbed boy, Spider (Ralph Fiennes), who sees his father (Gabriele Byrne) brutally murder his mother (Miranda Richardson) and replace her with a prostitute, Yvonne. Convinced they plan to murder him next, Spider hatches an insane plan which he carries through to tragic effect. Years later, Spider, now an adult, is released prematurely into a halfway house, where he receives little care or attention from the landlady, Mrs. Wilkinson. Unsupervised, Spider stops taking his medication and starts revisiting his childhood haunts while mumbling to himself and spinning literal and imaginary webs as he relives his childhood fear.
With Spider, Cronenberg has provided an intricate working of how the mind copes with understanding memories, in the sense of what is reality and imagination. The mind that we enter is that of Spider. As the memories slowly come back, Spider starts to remember the role that a local prostitute (also Richardson) played in getting rid of his mother and setting up home with his father (Byrne). It soon becomes clear that Spider is confused between which memories represent reality and which represent figments of his imagination.
The performances of Richardson and Byrne are the heart of the film, as it is their ability to believably vary the persona of their characters that makes us accept that we are watching someone's memories. Richardson does a fine job in her three separate roles, but it is Byrne who really impresses as he has to provide subtle variations on the same character.
David Cronenberg's deliciously wicked, strangely poetic portrait (adapted by Patrick McGrath from his own novel) of a schizophrenic man at once tyrannized and elevated by Oedipal terrors resonate beyond the merely theoretical, and for once, you feel his pain instead of contemplating it from a distance.
David Cronenberg says, "Spider has the feel of Samuel Beckett confronting Sigmund Freud."
The Heart of Me
Thaddeus O'Sullivan
UK
2002
96 minutes
Producer: Martin Pope
Writer: Lucinda Cox, based on the novel The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Scoffield
Western Canadian Premiere
Print Coutsey of THINKFilm
Novelist Rosamond Lehmann was a sophisticated documentarian of the English upper middle-class. Her literary calling card was often described as "artless emotion." Her novel, "The Echoing Grove," is now the basis for the impeccable chamber drama, The Heart of Me, a glimpse into 1930s and 40s passion and repression.
A distinguished cast, which includes Helena Bonham Carter, Paul Bettany, and Olivia Williams, brings to life this story about two sisters who fall in love with the same man, Rickie Masters (Bettany). Although the conventional Madeleine (Williams) is the one to marry Rickie, it is her bohemian, artistic sister Dinah (Bonham Carter) who really captures his attention, and the two become embroiled in a passionate love affair which creates unimaginable and long-lasting grief. After 10 years, the sisters are reunited and reminisce together about the tragic experiences of the previous years. Employing a flashforward-flashback structure, the film follows the changing emotions and shifting relationship of the two sisters.
Naturally, the scandalous affair flies in the face of social conventions of the time and causes considerable heartache to Madeleine and her mother, who both desperately attempt to restore order to an explosive situation. It is not entirely evident, however, that adhering to the social order is what brings about a solution. Critics have lauded director Thaddeus O'Sullivan's ability to capture the emotional reserve of that period, and the cast must be commended on the elegance and dramatic restraint they bring to the film, so much a part of its artistic achievement. Piers Handling, director of the Toronto International Film Festival praised The Heart of Me as "extremely well-told and beautifully photographed."
Helena Bonham Carter's recent film credits include The Wings of a Dove, Mighty Aphrodite and Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein. Olivia Williams drew attention for her role in The Postman and also appeared in the highly successful film The Sixth Sense. Actor Paul Bettany was nominated for a British Independent Film Award and the London Film Critics Award for Best Actor for his role in Gangster No. 1. He also appeared in Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind.
Director Thaddeus O'Sullivan trained at the Royal College of Art and is well-known for his first feature film, December Bride, which won the Special Jury Prize at the European Film Awards. His most recent film is Ordinary Decent Criminal, a humourous Irish gangster movie starring Kevin Spacey.
Marion Bridge
Wiebke von Carolsfeld
Canada
2002
90 minutes
Producers: Jennifer Kawaja, Bill Niven, Julia Sereny
Writer: Daniel MacIvor
They say you can never go home. But sometimes going home is not about visiting the past, but reshaping the future. Wiebke von Carolsfeld makes an exceptional directorial feature debut with this perceptive drama about three sisters who reconvene in Cape Breton to care for their dying mother.
Agnes (Molly Parker) returns home to Sydney, Nova Scotia, to be with her ailing mother, an alcoholic chainsmoker (Marguerite McNeil). But her presence in the household disturbs the protective peace that has presided there. Agnes's grim-faced sister Theresa (Rebecca Jenkins), who currently lives in the family home because her hubby dumped her, seems agitated at her sister's presence and constantly disagrees with Agnes's suggestions about their mother's care. Since Agnes herself used to be an alcoholic, Theresa does not trust her. The other sister, Louise (Stacy Smith), accuses Agnes of trying to control everything and refuses to participate in Agnes's plans. Instead, she shuts out the world by watching TV. It's a three-way stalemate in a household suffocating on denial, in a claustrophobic small-town. Something has to give.
When Agnes pushes to have their mother brought home to die, the carefully constructed edifice of denial starts to crumble and each sister - as well as the mother - must come to terms not only with the family secrets and failures, but with the fine line between resilience and stagnation. Marion Bridge is an examination of family dynamics and how conflict can lead to forgiveness. As the girls' own mother says, when faced with her impending death: "All we can do is look to see if there's beautiful things in terrible things." This film does just that, and with startling honesty and grace.
Marion Bridge is written and based on a play by Daniel McIvor, one of Canada's most outstanding contemporary playwrights. He writes with a deep understanding of the intricate illusions and alliances that families rely on to stay together or to stay apart. What McIvor has achieved in the script and director von Carolsfeld, cinematographer Stefan Ivanov, and the highly skilled cast have translated to the screen is a moving and exquisite depiction of the small redemptions which are possible in ordinary life.
The film won the Citytv Award for Best Canadian First Feature at the Toronto International Film Festival 2002, propelling von Carolsfeld forward as an "exciting new talent" in Canadian cinema.
Julie Walking Home
Agnieszka Holland
Canada / Germany / Poland
2002
113 minutes
35mm
Producer: Karel Dirka
Writer: Agnieszka Holland
B.C. Premiere
After catching her common-law husband Henry (William Fichtner) in flagrante with another woman, Julie (Miranda Otto) is in a state of emotional crisis. She attempts to protect her twins Nicholas and Nicole from the anticipated pain of an acrimonious separation. Julie's husband begs forgiveness, which Julie seems unable to give. But just as the domestic crisis mounts, their son Nicholas is diagnosed with terminal cancer and the two have to put their differences aside to deal with his treatment. Sadly, he is unable to tolerate the chemotherapy, launching Julie and Henry into a further crisis over science (traditional medicine) versus faith.
In desperation, and yet very much in the belief that non-conventional treatment may heal her son, Julie flies with Nicholas to Poland to seek out a renowned spiritual healer named Alexy (Lothaire Bluteau). By the laying on of hands, Alexy appears to cure Nicholas's cancer. But at the same time, Alexy falls deeply in love with Julie. Although Alexy himself questions whether Julie's love is borne more from a mother's gratitude for healing her son than a romantic inclination, Julie is sure it is authentic love. Upon her return, Henry recognizes that his wife is in love with the man credited for saving his son's life.
"From the beginning, Julie believes her will and love, her belief in herself and the people around her can change the reality," says Holland. "By the end she accepts what human destiny is, that you don't expect things to be better than they are."
Internationally acclaimed writer-director Agnieszka Holland is the author
of numerous award-winning films. As director, her films include The Third Miracle (1999), Olivier, Olivier (1992), and Europa Europa (1990).
The Last Great
Wilderness
David Mackenzie
UK
2002 91 minutes 35mm
Producer: Gillian Berrie
Writers: Alastair Mackenzie, Michael Tait, G. Berrie, D. Mackenzie
Western Canadian Premiere
This auspicious feature debut by director David Mackenzie and starring his brother Alastair Mackenzie, is described as a Scottish road movie that is not a road movie and not really Scottish.
As we all know, "road movie" is filmese for "detour from planned itinerary," and naturally, The Last Great Wilderness delivers in this department. Charlie (Alastair Mackenzie) is driving north to Skye, where his wife has shacked up with a pop star, much to his disgust. To appease the aforementioned disgust, Charlie the cuckold plans to burn their house down. In the way that the disaffected attract each other, Charlie bumps into Vincente (Johnny Phillips) at a service station. Vincente is a cuckolder-gigolo with a dubious Spanish accent who is on the run - supposedly - from the gangland boss whose wife he slept with. He desperately needs to cut out of the country, contract castration hanging over his head and all.
The two road warriors end up running out of gas on a deserted country road and seek refuge in an inn with strange inhabitants: a recovering sex addict, an agoraphobic, a struggling pedophile and a slip of a girl who flickers in and out like a ghost. Spare, ambiguous dialogue, sulphuric lighting, and handheld camerawork conspire together to create an eerie filmic ambiance. What could be more spooky than having your plan go awry in those wild expansive moors and in the company of weirdoes?
But there's a hint of the tongue-in-cheek in the enterprise. This genre-busting feature--one review called it half Psycho, half Rocky Horror Picture Show - seems to subvert its own intentions and keeps the audience on edge with its alternating horror and humour. It also has a great soundtrack in the form of The Pastels and Jarvis Cocker of Pulp (who is the purported adulterating popstar we never see).
The Quiet American
Phillip Noyce
Australia/USA
2002
101 minutes
35mm
Producers: Staffan Ahrenberg, William Horberg, Anthony Minghella, Sydney Pollack
Writers: Christopher Hampton, Robert Schenkkan, based on the novel by
Graham Greene
Print Courtesy of Alliance Atlantis
Director Phillip Noyce's vividly detailed and richly atmospheric adaptation of Graham Greene's novel about early U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War may be the most important movie of the year. But don't let that scare you away: It's also one of the year's most arrestingly entertaining and impressively acted dramas for grown-ups. Michael Caine offers one of his finest performances as Thomas Fowler, a British newspaper correspondent who does the right thing for the worst possible reasons while confronting a seemingly ingenuous gung-ho American do-gooder (Brendan Fraser) who wants to "save" Fowler's Vietnamese mistress (Hai Yen Do).
Fowler is a wistfully cynical British journalist who has fled an arid marriage in England to live in Southeast Asia, where he is reporting on the Vietnamese fight for independence from French colonial rule. His attitude toward the political turmoil swirling around him is one of studied detachment bordering on disinterest. Only when Fowler is in danger of being summoned back to England does he bestir himself to go into the field and pursue a story juicy enough to keep him at his post.
But beneath his worldly facade lurks a streak of romantic fatalism. Fowler is hopelessly besotted with Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), a beautiful former dancer who embodies the Asian feminine stereotype of compliance and impenetrable erotic mystery. Although Phuong lives with Fowler and is financially dependent on him, the relationship can last only as long as he keeps his job. Although he would love nothing more than to take her back to England, his wife adamantly refuses to grant him a divorce.
Enter Pyle.
No sooner has Fowler introduced Pyle to Phuong than Pyle falls madly in love with her. Pyle's campaign for Phuong has the support of her avaricious older sister Miss Hei (Pham Thi Mai Hoa), who sees him as a bright marital prospect for Phuong.
After Fowler is caught in a desperate lie and Phuong abandons him to live with Pyle, the two men maintain a civilized friendship. Despite their shared passion for the same woman, the movie implies that both view her as a precious toy who can be bartered in a sporting may-the-best-man-win atmosphere. And in the film's most dramatic scene, Pyle saves his rival's life after the two find themselves stranded on the road between Phat Diem and Saigon and take refuge in a French watchtower that is raided by Communist forces.
The movie is ultimately more interested in the characters' relationships than in their politics, and it does a superb job of evoking the psychological world of Graham Greene in which the truth of any situation tends to be hidden and riddled with ambiguities. Here is a fantastic piece of cinema that inadvertently stands in opposition to the patriotic jingoism that has taken over the US.
Leaving Metropolis
Brad Fraser
Ontario
2002
90 minutes
Producers: Ken Mead, Paul Stiles, Kim Todd
Writer: Brad Fraser
B.C. Premiere
Pecks in primary colours smash headlong into passion. Playwright Brad Fraser (Unidentified Human Remains...) brings his controversial style to the big screen with his feature-film directorial debut about love and sexual honesty. Based on his play Poor Super Man, the film concerns an acclaimed gay painter named David (Troy Ruptash) who takes a job as a waiter in a smalltown cafe in order to get back in touch with the real world.
The cafe is owned by a couple, Matt (Vincent Corrazza) and Violet (Cherliee Taylor). David makes himself indispensable in the restaurant, offering suggestions to improve business and endearing himself to both Matt and Violet. The three share an interest in comic books and discuss the current controversy over Superman's marriage to Lois Lane. Matt's wife, Violet, thinks it strange that Lois never figured out who Clark Kent "really is."
It's true, as one character says, that "we all lie when we have to," and yet it's also true that when lying causes deceit, it poisons relationships. But to make matters further complicated, sometimes honesty, too, can be injurious. When David falls in love with Matt, a straight married man, relationships and friendships start to unravel.
As in his award-winning play, Unidentified Human Remains, Brad Fraser proves once again in Leaving Metropolis that he boldly treads in the murkiest places of the human heart. The film contains explicit love-making scenes, both gay and heterosexual, attesting to Fraser's trademark full frontal frankness when it comes to sexual orientation. Knife-polishing never looked so erotic and symbolic.
Running throughout the film is the subtext concerning Superman and the lies that are necessary to sustain his existence. In fact, the work was filmed in an intentionally bold visual style reminiscent of comic books, using primary colours, which gives the film a sort of pop art, urban grit feeling. "Sometimes we used light in a theatrical way, changing the background, changing the colours in the foreground as the actors moved around from one part of the set to another, to convey emotion or to convey changes of states that were happening to them," says DOP Daniel Vincelette. As a result, the film glows with vibrant blues, reds, and yellows.
Even the dialogue at times has the nuances of the comic book-snappy and pithy. But underneath witty lines like, "the computer's my personal vibrator" and jokes about genitalia, lurk the uncertainties about love and being loved.
Fraser adapted his highly successful play Unidentified Human Remains... into a screenplay and in 1994 it was released as Love and Human Remains. It was the first English-language film of Denys Arcand's career. This time around, Fraser wanted to try his own hand at directing, and his theatrical sensibilities and unflinching instincts shine through in Leaving Metropolis.
Lucky
Steve Cuden
USA
2002
83 minutes
Producers: Steve Cuden,
Michael Emanuel, Stephen Sustarsic
Writer: Stephen Sustarsic
B.C. Premiere
Get ready for a whole new twist on "getting lucky." Best Feature winner at the New York City Horror Film Festival 2002, Lucky takes horror to a whole new level you never thought possible - or funny.
We're in the littered house and twisted mind of a cartoon writer running on empty. His name is Millard Mudd and his name IS mud, because he can't pump a single line of intelligent writing out of his beer-fuelled mind. Meanwhile, impatient clients keep knocking on his door and the empty beer cans are piling up to ankle level.
On the verge of snapping - or maybe already having snapped - Mudd jumps into his car to go for more beer. But he's not the only one going for a ride. Hold on, folks, the lines dividing reality from unreality are about to be blurred. As he drinks and drives, Mudd muses about paradoxes: "For every reality, there's an unreality." Then, wham! he hits a dog - Lucky. The poor thing looks a bit stiff, but Mudd takes him home and manages to bring him back to life. The mutt is so alive, in fact, he talks (the voice of David Reivers).
This new "reality" - Mudd's wiseguy canine - proves an inspiration. With the help of Lucky, Mudd taps into a deep vein of screwy creativity. But as Lucky becomes increasingly dictatorial he seems to provoke Mudd's darkest impulses. Soon the hapless writer is indulging in sadistic fantasies with girlfriends - or perhaps fantasy girlfriends, we're never quite sure - creeping around in the dark burying things, and spooking us with his sicko thoughts. Things devolve to the depraved, until Mudd realizes he must extract himself from Lucky's emotional grip and find his way back to reality.
Lucky is a strange concoction of psychosis and goofiness that'll have you squirming in your seat one minute and laughing the next. Director/producer Steve Cuden says, "stylistically, we were after a film noir look, slightly off-kilter, to make the viewer feel just a little uneasy," and with its broody red and blue-infused lighting and comic voiceovers the film imparts just that. It's queasy comedy. B-movie Faust.
As Mudd, Michael Emanuel strikes that paradoxical balance of psycho sadist versus schlub that keeps us rivetted to the story. He should also get credit for Most Credible Performance Opposite a Dog.
Lucky is an independent movie filmed in nine days using high-end digital video, almost all shots handheld, a remarkable achievement by DP Byron Werner. Thanks to the ironic tone of this film, and Steve Sustarsic's clever if twisted script, you'll be shocked at what makes you laugh and just plain shocked when you can't laugh.
The film won Best Director at the NoDance 2002 Feature Competition, Best Actor at the 2002 Firelight Shocks Film Festival, and Best Writer/Actor at the B-Movie Theatre Film Fest 2002.
Saint Monica
Terrance Odette
Canada
2002
35mm
82 minutes
Producers: Sharon McGowan,
Peggy Thompson
Writer: Terrance Odette
Director/writer Terrance Odette has always been interested in people's need for spiritual sustenance. His compassion for this very human need shines through in the captivating feature film, Saint Monica.
Saint Monica is about a 10-year-old Portuguese-Canadian girl named Monica (Genevieve Buechner) who has a special reverence for Catholic saints and icons. And angels. She lives in Toronto with her recently separated mother Icelia (Brigitte Bako) and deadbeat but kind-hearted Uncle Albert (Maurizio Terrazzano). It is Monica's most heartfelt desire to be an angel in the annual Portuguese Procession of the Blessed Virgin. But because she and her mother moved outside the parish borders, she is excluded from the angelic ranks. Disappointed, she steals the largest pair of angel wings, those of the archangel, only to lose them on the streetcar. The wings turn up in the hands of a local homeless woman named Mary, but just as the wings have a special meaning to Monica, they also have a special meaning to Mary and she does not want to part with them. Mary believes she is the Virgin Mother and can communicate with God, and in her troubled mind, the wings become part of a complex and dangerous ritual she is compelled to carry out.
Through her attempts to recover the wings, Monica comes to understand the mostly mute woman, who shares with the girl a fascination for Catholic saints and rituals, a natural spirituality, and perhaps, a slight sense of abandonment. At home, relations between Monica's mother, her uncle, and her estranged father are tense, and money is tight. On top of that, Monica's strange habit of always poking a hole in the window screen has angered the landlady, who is threatening eviction.
Mary ends up in the hospital around the same time Monica is asked to replace one of the angels in the parade-if she can return the wings. Faced with the dilemma of dealing with Mary's incarceration in the psych ward or accepting the offer which would make her dream come true, the little girl comes up with an interesting response.
Natural performances by all the leads make this a genuine film with a deeply affecting spiritual message. Genevieve Buechner as Monica captures the inner spiritual yearnings of her character wonderfully, and with experienced actress Clare Coulter as Mary, the two create a calm synergy that belies words. Tying the film together and enhancing its emotional moments is a haunting Fado score created by Portuguese Canadian Carlos Lopes and also featuring songs by Dona Rosa and Nelly Furtado.
Saint Monica is Odette's second feature film (his first was the award-winning Heater and his second exploration into the theme of homelessness and the mystery of spiritual life.
Standard Time
Robert Carey
USA
2001
99 minutes
35mm
Producers: Jubilee Productions LLC
Writers: Robert Carey and Isabel Rose
Canadian Premiere
Forget cynicism. Forget stark realism. Think back to the pre-Dogme world of film when fantasy and romance were the order of the day and characters broke out into song and dance to express their emotions.
This is the world of Standard Time, a film steeped in the nostalgia of 1940s and 50s Hollywood Technicolor movies. Formula reigns supreme: we know what will likely happen and to whom. It's not about novelty but a delicious inevitability unfolding to an ideal conclusion. What captures our attention is how all the plot elements adhere to the formula. In this sense, the film is like a long, satisfying courtship with a predictable yet satisfying result.
Billie Golden (Isabel Rose) is a woman fascinated by the glamour of an era long past. She dresses like Audrey Hepburn or Rita Hayworth and envisions a luxurious life as a cabaret singer entertaining upper crust New York in a velvety milieu of champagne and cocktails. In reality, she's a waitress who lives with her widowed alcoholic mother in a trashy rowhouse in Queens. She does sing, but in a cheesy, two-bit lounge full of wash-ups, where her crooning skills are barely appreciated and the owner threatens to dump her. What's a glam girl do?
She attends numerous vocal auditions, but never gets the call-back. Suddenly, her fantasy world is taking a thrashing. Should she continue to follow her dreams or give up the fantasy and settle for a safe domestic existence?
While she weighs this problem, there are two men in her life. One is successful lawyer and former high school hunk Greg (Cameron Bancroft), who is eager to make her "Mrs. Ellenbogen." However, he often advises her not to "dress in funny costumes." The other is a carefree itinerant musician and piano teacher (Andrew McCarthy) who seems to get under her skin. Predictability takes a bit of a detour at first, until Billie heeds the advice of a seasoned professional singer (sizzling cameo by none other than Eartha Kitt).
Filled with lush cinematography, costumes, lighting, props, and plot formulae that recall an earlier film era, Standard Time is a throwback with a difference. Its main story is actually set in contemporary Manhattan. And if Billie's nostalgia for a world of dreams and romantic fulfillment are realized in a way that is credible in modern terms, it's because some human struggles are timeless.
Amazingly, the film strikes a nuanced tone: it manages to combine the artificiality of a romance film (and even includes a mini Busby Berkeley-like dance sequence) with a hint of irony and an overlay of realism. Along the way, it makes reference to musical standards and classical movies such as Breakfast at Tiffany's and Easter Parade.
The lead of Standard Time and one of its co-writers, Isabel Rose, received the award for Best Up and Coming Actress at the San Diego Film Festival. The film is directed by Robert Cary, who also co-wrote the script.
Women Without Wings
Nicholas Kinsey
Canada
2002
109 minutes
Producer: Nicholas Kinsey
Writer: Nicholas Kinsey
B.C. Premiere
"A woman can be a man, but a man can never be a woman. A man is a woman without wings."
Women Without Wings opens ominously: a waitress collapses, there is a power outage, a car runs out of gas. Something is not working in Marije's life.
The film, written and directed by Nicholas Kinsey, is an intriguing look at how foreign cultures can sometimes speak to our deepest selves. It centres on Marije (Katya Gardner), a young cocktail waitress, who seems to be drifting through her life with no real purpose. She's stuck between and ambivalent about two men who represent two very different worlds: one is a stuffy lawyer who loves security (Lowell Gasoi), and the other is a cocaine-snorting drifter (Christopher Dyson). One day, she asks the lawyer boyfriend, Murray, "Do you ever wish you were doing something else?"
When her mother receives a letter form Albania informing them of the death of Marije's grandfather, Marije decides on the spur of the moment to go to the funeral, since her mother is too ill to travel. She neglects to mention this to her two love interests.
In Albania, Marije steps back into a world of ancient blood feuds and entrenched traditions. Strangely, she prefers this world to the one she left behind. Why? She doesn't quite know herself, but once she's in northern Albania something takes hold of her, urging her to stay. She gets caught up in the vicious cycle of tribal revenge, the very thing that claimed her grandfather's life. At first she finds this lifestyle of endless laws about marriage, death, and revenge tedious and stifling. But her aunt insists, "If the laws are not respected, blood will flow." "But you have to have some control over your life, your fate!" she argues.
What she comes to realize as time passes in the empty mountains of Albania, is that somehow her fate lies here in this tiny village, in this vast landscape, not in Canada. She eventually decides to become a "vowed virgin," a woman who lives her life as a man, never marrying and never having children.
You won't soon forget the stunning scenery of Women Without Wings or the compelling legends, songs, and stories told by the inhabitants of the small village where Marije stays. Or Micheline Lanctot's fascinating portrayal of a woman-Marije's aunt-who lives, walks, and talks like a man, a "woman without wings."
The alluring film score is by Aleksander Peci, one of Albania's finest contemporary composers.
Bug
Phil Hay & Matt Manfredi
USA
2002
85 minutes
Producers: Lysa Hayland,
Kate Margolis, Brian Gerber
Writer: Matt Manfredi
Canadian Premiere
Filmmakers Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay raid the quirk file for this idiosyncratic pilgrimage through the serendipitous streets of L.A.
The duo, who created the hugely successful Crazy/Beautiful and The Tuxedo, make their directorial debut with the irrepressibly funny comedy Bug. Among those in the cast are Jamie Kennedy (Scream), Brian Cox (Rushmore), Ed Begley Jr. (Get Over It, Best In Show), Sarah Paulson (What Women Want), John Caroll Lynch (Gone in Sixty Seconds) and Michael Hitchcock (Best In Show).
"I thought it would be really fun to do a film in Los Angeles about a small cross-section of people where all the characters were really different, then go crazy with the possibilities of how their lives are impacted by one another’ directly and indirectly," said Manfredi. The result? An ant's nest of intersecting events begins with a boy crushing a cockroach on a sidewalk. After this mundane act, the hapless characters who scurry through life in claustrophobic Silverlake are launched on a variety of interconnected Everyman struggles with fate, fluke, and destiny.
The cast of characters includes a fortune-cookie writer who writes malevolent fortunes, a blue-collar guy who seems to get punished for carrying out good deeds, a vindictive meter maid, a germ-phobic restaurateur, a man reduced to telephone customer service to pay his mortgage, and a cable serviceman convinced that a fortune cookie message has determined his future. They all rush about in a sort of collective neuroses, sometimes crossing paths, in their attempts to fend off debt, germs, suitors, self-doubt, and parking tickets. Ed Begley Jr's arm makes mysterious cameos. A man in a ridiculous bug costume contemplates suicide. A germophobe is condemned to live inside a bubble. These things and people are all connected though a wonky kind of determinism which rolls through the streets of Silverlake like an out-of-control snowball, gathering more and more connections until the film reaches an unexpected conclusion.
Any film that can pull off the improbability of a pig getting killed by a random bullet that falls from the sky in front of a doughnut shop has got the quirk genre wrapped up.
Critic M. Gould called Bug a darkly comic riff "reminiscent in tone and structure of Richard Linklater's cult classic Slacker." Whatever you call it, Bug gets under your skin with its ticklish humour and burrows straight to your Everyman heart.
Bug took home the Audience Choice Award at the 2002 Santa Barbara Film Festival and the Best Feature award at the New Orleans Film Festival. It is currently infesting film festivals worldwide.
Talk to Her
Pedro Almodovar
Spain
2002
112 minutes
35mm
Writer & Producer: Pedro Almodovar
"(Almodovar's) great pictures are like arias played on a Theremin, possessed of a special kind of nervous-making beauty." Stephanie Zacharek in salon.com
Hailed by The New York Times as the most mature work he has ever brought to the screen, Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her is a paean to loneliness and connection. In this film, Almodovar reigns in his campy tendencies and explores the remoteness of human interaction, and yet also its tender possibilities.
Talk to Her begins where All About My Mother left off, with the camera focussed on a gold and pink stage curtain. But the curtain comes up on a film of an entirely different scope and sensibility than his previous feature. It reveals a pair of female dancers, moving ethereally to the music of The Faerie Queen. They seem transfixed, a bit robotic. In the audience, two men sit side by side, Benigno (Javier Camara) and Marco (Dario Grandinetti), watching the performance, but they are not together. One is moved to tears.
By chance, the two men meet again, this time at a private clinic where Benigno works as a nurse. Lydia (Rosario Flores), Marco's girlfriend, lies comatose in one of the clinic beds, after being gored by a bull. She is-or was-a bullfighter. In another bed is the woman Benigno cares for both professionally and romantically: Alicia (Leonor Watling), a young ballet student, also in a coma. The two men connect through their shared fates, and after Marco confesses his inability to touch Lydia, Benigno urges Marco, "talk to her."
As Almodovar himself says, "[The] two women in a coma..., despite their apparent passivity, provoke the same solace, the same tension, passion, jealousy, desire and disillusion in men as if they were upright, eyes wide open..." Through flashbacks, and other narrative devices, the film draws in the details of these four characters and their relationship to each other.
The theme is as much about disconnection as connection. Marco's prior relationship was only successful when the couple were on the run, unrooted. Benigno, on the other hand, has what he thinks is a profound connection with a woman who is essentially disconnected by virtue of being in a coma.
A lyrical loneliness pervades the film. Marco seems marooned by his loss of Lydia, Benigno feels lonely after the death of his mother. And, of course, there is the loneliness of being suspended in a vegetative state, present yet unable to participate in life.
Talk to Her feels less like a movie and more like an enchantment. One has the sensation of having been to the theatre, ballet, opera, concert, and movies all at once, and yet the story is not disjointed. When it's over, it's like waking from a deep sensuous dream. For this, both the cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe and editor Pepe Salcedo must also be credited, along with Almodovar, who directs and wrote the script.
Flower & Garnet
Keith Behrman
British Columbia
2002
103 minutes
35mm
Producer: Trish Dolman
Writer: Keith Behrman
Thanks to a meticulously crafted script which pays attention to how action, dialogue, silence, image all contribute to the story, Flower & Garnet is a beautiful and impressive first feature from director Keith Behrman. Behrman also wrote the screenplay.
This is a film sure of its goal, and which reaches that goal with artistic and dramatic honesty. The direction and acting are masterful, complemented by cinematographer Steve Cosen's sensitive eye for landscape and lighting.
The story centres on eight-year-old Garnet (Colin Roberts), a melancholic and somewhat delicate eight-year-old who has been raised by his sister Flower (Jane McGregor) after their mother died giving birth to him. Their father Ed (Callum Keith Rennie) is uncommunicative and has only a tentative attachment to Garnet. Grieved by his wife's death, he is unable to give to Garnet the affection he needs and has left much of the parenting of his son to his daughter. The film spends time showing us the particular world that gentle Garnet inhabits, the things that comfort him, the way he approaches nature, and his deep attachment to his sister. Flower, however, is now a teenager and feels that Garnet's love has become a burden. On her brother's birthday she encourages her father to buy his own present for Garnet for once.
Proving that he has little understanding of his son's temperament, Ed gives Garnet a BB gun,--this for a son who objects to killing an ant--and finally starts to show affection when his son exhibits skill as a marksman. But this introduction to shooting for sport unwittingly pushes the already fragile Garnet into treacherous emotional territory. When Flower gets pregnant, she decides against Ed's wishes to keep the baby, challenging Ed to now accept responsibility for parenting his own child. A rift develops and Flower decides to move out, leaving Garnet bereft. With his sister and mother figure absent, Garnet becomes increasingly withdrawn, and in his child's mind associates his sister's giving birth with dying. This childlike logic, combined with his new fascination for guns and lack of attachment to his father, make a volatile situation even more dangerous.
The gentle tone and depth of emotion in Flower & Garnet make it an utterly convincing film. Director/writer Behrman has encapsulated in 103 minutes, a small family's evolution from grief to healing. The excellent cast also includes Dov Tiefenbach in a mildly comic role, and Kirsten Thomson. Jane McGregor recently won the Artistic Merit award from Women in Film and Video Vancouver in part for her performance in Flower & Garnet.
Keith Behrman is a recent Canadian Film Centre graduate whose CFC short film Ernest received Honorable Mention for the NFB John Spotton Award.
Touch & Go
Scott Simpson
Nova Scotia
2002
104 min.
Producer: Graeme Gunn
Writer: Michael Melski,
Craig Cameron, Bill Niven
B.C. Premiere
Halifax filmmaker Scott Simpson (Terminal Lunch, December, 1917) brings us his first feature with the fresh and funny Touch and Go. Darcy McManus (Jeff Douglas, aka Molson's Joe Canadian ) is 28 going on 15 and has it all a great circle of friends, boyish good looks and charm to spare and a carefree summer job as a tour guide in Halifax. But it's all coming to an end as his best friends move on to real careers, he's noticing his first gray hairs and his tour business is going under.
Little does Darcy suspect the karma tornado that's coming to take away his friends and over-extended adolescence. Steve can't make rent and is thinking of moving back into his frat house. Lynn (Patricia Zentilli from New Waterford Girl and LEXX) is getting a real job doing I.T. in Minneapolis. Peter's singing career is not only nose-diving faster than the pantomime Titanic he sinks on stage every night but Peter's one-night fling with a theatre critic threatens to take his relationship with Lynn down for the count, too. And best of all, the family bus is about to have its final breakdown just when granddad is desperately hoping for off-season traffic to stay afloat.
What's poor Darcy going to do about all this? Hang out on the Halifax docks and go skateboarding with a teenaged philosopher named Trish, for starters. Because, after all, he's still got to figure out how to convince Lynn that his love is something more than platonic before she's gone forever.
On_Line
Jed Weintrob
USA
2001
85 minutes
35mm
Producers: Tanya Selvaratnam, Adam Brightman
Writer: Andrew Osborne, Jed Weintrob
The Internet is all encompassing. It is used to make millions, to locate libraries of useless knowledge, to invade the privacy of others, and for many lonely souls, to provide sexual gratification.
John Roth is a shy computer nerd who hasn't gotten over being dumped by his fiancée. Together with his old college roommate, Moe, they start up Intercon-X.com, an adult web site, in their Manhattan apartment. Through Intercon-X, clients are connected to live, erotic chat sessions with Internet sex workers such as Al, a reclusive celibate, and Jordan, a gorgeous day trader who is hip to the latest New York clubs.
Getting up his nerve to become a client of his own company, John logs on to Intercon-X to chat with Jordan. After taking computer sex to a new level, John and Jordan agree to a live meeting. Their "relationship" is soon complicated, however, when Moe and his new girlfriend, Moira, attend the meeting. That's when the fireworks begin.
Director Jed Weintrob's On_Line employs groundbreaking technology, using a creative mix of digital filmmaking techniques to tell this cyberspace romantic comedy-a tale that connects the confused lives of strangers searching for love in a world of confusion and anonymity.
Roger Dodger
Dylan Kidd
USA
2002
105 minutes
35 mm
Producers:Anne Chaisson,
George VanBuskirk, Dylan Kidd
Writer: Dylan Kidd
Print Courtesy of Odeon Films
Set against the bright lights of Manhattan, Roger Dodger is a comic, urbane look at the modern male ego at war in the singles scene trenches. Campbell Scott, in a brave, hilarious and utterly convincing performance, stars as Roger Swanson, a hopelessly cynical advertising copywriter with a razor-sharp wit who believes he has mastered the art of manipulating women. But Roger's seemingly foolproof world of smooth talk and casual sex begins to unravel when he is paid a surprise visit by his teenage nephew, Nick (talented newcomer Jesse Eisenberg). Hoping to settle once and for all the issue of his virginity, Nick begs Roger to school him in the art of seducing women. Welcoming the challenge, Roger guides Nick through the city's wild nightlife for an all-night crash course, only to realize that he still has something to learn about what women, and men, really want.
The role of Roger is a small coup for Scott, who is normally the quintessence of earnest sincerity on the screen. With a teaspoon of vinegar added, the same qualities this brilliant actor uses to project an empathetic sensitivity curdle into something smarmy and ferretlike, and his rich oratorical voice assumes the wheedling, coercive tone of a snake oil salesman. Watching his performance, Scott is a soulful actor,who makes Roger indelible by inflecting him with a hint of tragedy.
A witty stylish film written and directed by Dylan Kidd, Roger Dodger features Isabella Rossellini as Joyce, Roger's boss and sometime girlfriend, as well as Jennifer Beals and Elizabeth Berkley as two single women who give Roger and Nick an experience they'll never forget. With sharp and clever dialogue, Roger Dodger provides insight into the way some men think about women, one man's philosophy on the pursuit of amour as well as equal time for frank thoughts from a woman's point of view.
Final Draft
Oren Goldman, Yariv Ozdoba
USA
DVCAM
2002
101 minutes
Producer: Scott Rosenfelt
Writers: Oren Goldman, Yariv Ozdoba
This film's got heart, wit, and wicked one-liners. It's not easy to pull off a self-referential film about two struggling screenwriters these days, an idea that seems to proliferate in script agents' In boxes. But Oren Goldman and Yariv Ozdoba do the deed with panache. Maybe even "chutzpah."
In fact, Goldman and Ozdoba are a crack acting team, too. They play two friends and struggling scriptwriters, Harry and Marty, who are eager to break into Hollywood. The big time's still a ways off though, so in the meantime, they edit bar mitzvah and Jewish wedding videos, hoping for the occasional glimpse at a nipple.
Marty is an anti-social realist. Harry is a passionate idealist. Marty is a dyed-in-the-wool Jew who grew up in Israel. Harry is an American Jew from Brooklyn. Marty gets regular cheques in the mail from his parents. Harry has a job teaching Israeli folk dancing.
Marty's big thing is honesty at all costs. For this belief, he pays. Harry's big thing is the Holocaust and anti-semitism, which he believes to be at the root of many evils. Harry's not big on change. Which explains why he continues to delude himself that he can get back together with his ex-girlfriend, Rachel (AKA "the succubus"), even though every time he visits her some beefy schmuck seems to be hanging off her.
After successfully producing a K-Tel-style TV ad for a yarmulke called the "Keepa Keepa," the two come into a lucky break, thanks to a "Misney" Studios connection through their dope (and vitamin) dealer, Chad, who is a main supplier for the head honcho at Misney. (A cameo by Chad's dope buddy Josh is as accurate a take on stoner humour as you can get).
So they've got the big break, but no idea. A frenzy of scriptwriting ensues-mostly dreck-as well as a frenzy of new love. Harry scares himself by expressing interest in Helga, a German girl who signed up for his Israeli dance class. Marty is smitten by Alison, a fellow acting student who is smitten by Marty's unwavering honesty. Somehow, the pressure of the script gig and the new girlfriends drive the two friends apart. Harry castigates Marty for his willingness to compromise by writing fluffy scripts for Misney and "feeding the industry machine."
A year later, Harry admits he's just been making "very small movies" (read stinkers) that are "a little too dark." "Dark comedy?" asks Marty, sympathetically. "No, we didn't have enough money, so you couldn't see any of the actors." In the end, Harry wonders what's worse, feeding the "machine" or having no machine at all. One thing's for sure: feeding a friendship is worth the effort.
Final Draft is a wisecracking movie with a whiff of good old-fashioned Yiddish wisdom.
Leo
Mehdi Norowzian
UK
2002
103 minutes
35mm
Producers: Massy Tadjedin, Erica
August, Sara Giles & Jonathan Karlsen
Writers: Massy Tadjedin & Amir Tadjedin
Western Canadian Premiere
Leo rises again-Leopold Bloom, that is, he of the prolific James Joyce novel Ulysses. Just as Joyce found much literary fodder in Homer's classic, filmmakers have turned to Joyce's modern odyssey for inspiration.
Joseph Fiennes (Shakespear In Love, Elizabeth) plays Stephen, a literate killer fresh out of prison in advertising director Mehdi Norowzian's enigmatic feature, Leo, also starring Elisabeth Shue. There's two parallel stories here, set in the American south, and they go like this: The first, which takes place in the 1960s, concerns a young mother named Mary (brilliantly played by Shue) who suspects her husband of cheating on her, and as a result, denies her son love and attention (she suspects he is the product of her own adultery). Her son is named Leopold Bloom, after the character in Joyce's novel. The second story focuses on a talented writer (Fiennes) who is released from prison after serving 15 years for murder and lands a job at a diner/motel. Sam Shepard plays the diner's manager, Vic, and Dennis Hopper plays the psychotic owner, Horace, who has a knack for dredging up issues from Stephen's past. Deborah Kara Unger plays a diner waitress. What a cast!
Moving deftly between the two story strands, the film gradually and in a very inventive fashion links them together, with both main protagonists having to face up to their troubled pasts. Using Joyce's novel as a reference point, British director Norowzian, an Oscar nominee with his 1999 short, Killing Joe, has snagged a stellar cast and created what's been hailed as "a visually striking, complex and involving puzzle of a feature" (London Film Festival).
Norowzian admits he's "attracted to the stuff that allows me to be a bit lyrical. It's what I call, without sounding pretentious, the power of visual poetry." The director and his cinematographer Zubin Mistry achieve this filmic poetry with an assured, languid style, hinting at influences of Sam Mendes and Conrad Hall.
Critic Rich Cline called the film "gorgeous" and cited the ingenious contrasting of the sunny domesticity of Mary's early life with Stephen's more impressionistic experience and Mary's subsequent descent into self-destructive guilt and paranoia.
Intriguing and delicately structured, Leo is Norowzian's feature film debut.
Want
Michael Wohl
USA
2002
95 minutes
Beta SP
Producer: Divi Crockett
Writer: Michael Wohl
World Premiere
This provocative digital feature from digital video guru and director Michael Wohl goes deep into the trenches of dot.com hell, spinning a tale of addiction, greed, and spiritual vacuity.
It's the height of dot-com mania in Silicon Valley. Just as in the Gold Rush of bygone days, everyone's out to strike it rich. The only difference is that now the money's bigger and the world in which this money is made is virtual. Trey Segal (Barry Alan Levine) is a software engineer who--like everyone else--dreams of starting his own company and cashing in. His buddy (Michael Wohl in Gene Wilder-esque splendour ) is bent on developing a website that will make him millions no matter what the social cost. The key is: find what people want.
Trey wants the big bucks, but he also wants-or needs-some spiritual sustenance. His life lacks meaning. He is disconnected and isolated, and his lack of direction is leading to a destructive and potentially addictive web porn habit. He's also fixating inappropriately on a female co-worker. Through the course of the film, his condition deteriorates and he begins committing increasingly dangerous acts.
Trey's family life isn't great, either. He often visits his clown-like TV-addicted mother in surreal sequences where he communicates his latest dot-com idea (over sounds of a hysterical game show), only to be brought back to reality with his mother's practical, if old-fashioned suggestions for "sensible" career choices. His father, on the other hand, is a street bum destined to drink himself to death, who insists that Trey is not idealistic enough.
But more than just a story, the visual style of Want captures the intensity and whacked-out ethics of the dot.com world. It alternates a kind of herky-jerky freneticism (which conveys the hyped-up corporate culture) with warped slow-mo sequences which hint at Trey's mental paralysis and the vacuity of his urban environment. Want illustrates Trey's deteriorating mental state by becoming progressively more subjective and utilizing techniques as varied as rear-projection and anime-style animation. Digital footage is supplemented with images captured on alternate media such as 16 mm film, security cameras, and old TV studio cameras. In addition, there are constant auditory and visual messages crowding the film, conveying the influence of marketing messages and their occupation of public spaces.
Michael Wohl, in addition to being principal designer of the award-winning software Final Cut Pro, is an accomplished director, winning the coveted CINE Golden Eagle award for his 1993 fictional documentary Theatereality.
Open Hearts (Dogme)
Susanne Bier
Denmark
2002
113 minutes
BetaSP
Producers: Vibeke Windelov, Jonas Frederiksen
Writer: Anders Thomas Jensen, story idea by Susanne Bier
Western Canadian Premiere
Danish cinema continues to startle the film world with its Dogme-inspired clarity of perspective and highly skilled realism. At its best, the principles of Dogme pare down the story to its most naked and therefore most real. Director Susanne Bier's Open Hearts is the latest entrant into this revitalized period of filmmaking in Denmark, and the film is winning acclaim worldwide for its artistic achievement.
Cecilie (Sonja Richter) and Joachim (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) are two young lovers soon to be married. But fate steps in one morning and shatters their plans for the future when a car hits Joachim, paralyzing him for life.
The driver of the car is Marie (Paprika Steen), mother of three children and wife to Niels (Mads Mikkelsen), who is a doctor. Distraught that Joachim has shut her out as a result of bitterness over his condition, Cecilie ends up turning to Niels for comfort, at first with Marie's blessing. Over time, however, the two develop a romantic attraction which threatens to complicate Niels' family life. Niels' infidelity opens wounds, and yet as painful as the love affair is to all involved, he chooses to follow his heart.
Bier and her cast penetrate to the emotional core of this drama, achieving an authenticity that makes the film at times seem utterly real. The cast includes some of the best actors and actresses in Danish cinema, including Nikolaj Lie Kaas (The Idiots), Paprika Steen (Dancer in the Dark, Mifune), Mads Mikkelsen (I am Dina), Birthe Neuman, and Sonja Richter. Mikkelsen, especially, is impressive as the husband and turns in a heartwrenching performance.
Mike Goodridge of Screen International wrote, "Eliciting painfully true insights into human relationships from her tragic scenario and her extraordinary actors, the director reaches dramatic heights usually only scaled by rare masters like Mike Leigh or...Lars Von Trier."
Not surprisingly, Open Hearts has been chosen as the Danish candidate for the Academy Awards' best foreign language film Oscar.
Cradlesong
Darlene Naponse
Canada
2002
72 Minutes
DV Cam
Producer: Niki Naponse
Writer: Darlene Naponse
Part musical, part experimental narrative, Darlene Naponse's tenderly crafted first feature is as elusive as it is intriguing. A musically inspired stroll through the Whitefish Lake Ojibway First Nation, which serves as the backdrop, Cradlesong is that rare kind of film that keeps you interested-and guessing-on its own terms.
Naponse knows what she is after and never betrays the deliberate pace or the uniquely beautiful and original style that she establishes from the first frame. Presenting young musicians falling in love with law students, aunties creating nourishment in the presence of Ojibway language, and teleported Indian guys pontificating the ability to travel freely, Naponse knows how to tell a story.
Through originally composed songs, we witness the modern creation of an ancient practice: using music to express story and emotion. Naponse is the newest voice in a long line of Native women filmmakers redefining cinema from the indigenous perspective, and the ending she crafts for Cradlesong will leave you hopeful, even as it breaks your heart.
Bellissima
Artur Urbanski
Poland
2001
70 minutes
BetaSP
Producer: Telewizja Polska S.A.
Writer: Artur Urbanski
Canadian Premiere
There is nothing more tragic than a mother foisting her unfulfilled dreams on her daughter. This is the heart of Bellissima, a tragic and sophisticated feature foray into a mother's obsession and a daughter's search for individuality.
Artur Urbanski directs the film in his feature debut and also wrote the screenplay. He says of the mother, "she's been poisoned by the consumptive world, and the film tells the story of her passing the poison on to her daughter." Urbanski set out to explore the process by which children deal with the expectations forced on them by parents. He asks, "how much can we compromise in the transition to the grown-up, responsible world?"
Fifteen-year-old Marysia (Maria Goralczyk) is disqualified from a beauty pageant because her mother (Ewa Kasprzyk), eager to get her daughter's modelling career on track, has falsified her age. This is the first of many episodes in Marysia's accelerated maturation, due in part to her physical beauty and precocity, but also to the ruthless ambition of her overbearing mother, who is fanatical about her daughter becoming a supermodel.
It's obvious that the girl's career is meant to make up for her mother's own shortcomings. While her mother tries to make her daughter older than her real age, the mother herself dresses like a young harlot and even dates a young man her daughter's age. However, Marysia rebels against her mother's misguided love and maniacal career management. She leaves their small flat in an effort to extricate herself from the grasp of a woman obsessed with the material happiness that fame might bring.
The film illustrates what the mother is willing to do to shape her daughter's future. And yet, for her willingness to sacrifice her principles, she pays the ultimate price. In the end, it will be the daughter who will assume the maternal role in their relationship, in an unexpected conclusion which delivers an affecting moral message.
The strength of Bellissima is that it never forgets that, no matter how troubled, the bond between mother and daughter may be stronger than it appears.
Bellissima has been lauded for its "razor-sharp editing, dazzling spectrum of colour and a kinetic hand-held camera [that] replicate the glamour of fashion photography." Ewa Kasprzyk won Best Female Supporting Role for her portrayal of the mother at the Venice TV Film Festival 2002. The jury were impressed by "the range of emotions displayed to suggest the pain, rage, and desire for a life her character never enjoyed." The film also won Best Director's Debut, and Best Actress (Ewa Kasprzyk) at the Polish Film Festival 2001.
Director Artur Urbanski had a big international hit on the festival circuit with his last film, Stink, which received awards at film festivals in New York, Munich, and Mexico City. He has also directed short films and documentaries.
Sinners
Aisling Walsh
Ireland
2002
77 minutes
Producer: Alan Moloney
Writer: Lizzie Mickery
Canadian Premiere
Print Courtesy of BBC Canada
Sinners, the BBC One drama, swept this year's Magnolia Awards at the Shanghai TV Festival 2002, beating off competition from 13 other international films to win Best TV Drama. Writer Lizzie Mickery received the award for Best Screenplay, Aisling Walsh picked up the award for Best Director, and Anne Marie Duff won the Magnolia for Best Actress. Sinners also picked up the Magnolia for Best Technology.
It's no wonder. Sinners shows drama at its most powerful. Shocking yet never melodramatic, told with a narrative expediency, yet never dogmatic, Sinners brings vividly to life a shameful piece of Irish history.
The film begins in 1963. Anne Marie, a 17-year-old from rural Ireland, is committed to the local "Magdalen laundry" by her family. She is pregnant-and unmarried. Inside the gates of the convent laundry, which is not much different from a prison, she must work alongside other female sinners, cleaning filthy clothes and adhering to a daily grind of prayer, lecture, and penance. As the wretched women scrub soiled clothes, the Catholic sisters, and especially the formidable and cruel Sister Bernadette, attempt to clean their unholy charges of their sins.
As if the emotional punishment of becoming social pariahs weren't enough-the women must wear uniforms and renounce their given names-the women also suffer corporal punishment for unruly behaviour. Their babies, once born, are adopted out to "good Catholic couples" or given away to the local orphanage.
Anne Marie starts out indignant and rebellious, but gradually her hope for release diminishes and her spirit is almost crushed. She takes solace in her friendship with another inmate named Kitty. But a pivotal event involving Kitty awakens Anne Marie to the immense power her Catholic "captors" have over her, and she plans an escape.
Sinners is emotionally harrowing at times, but its conclusion, although not storybook redemption, is a small poetic justice that viewers will recognize as the complex truth we all have to embrace.
Although the film is fictional, the Magdalen Laundries really existed in Ireland between the middle of the 19th century and till as recently as the 1970s. When it aired, Sinners was hailed by Irish critics as "intelligent and beautifully produced...the best of 21st century TV." The acting is first-rate and includes Anne Marie Duff as Anne Marie, Bronagh Gallagher as Anne Marie's defiant friend Kitty, Gary Lydon as Patrick, the guard who works within the convent, and John Kavanagh, in the very touching role of Frank.
A World of Love (Un Mondo d'Amore)
Aurelio Grimaldi
Italy
2002 86 minutes 35 mm
Producers: Caterina Nardi, Leonardo Giuliano
Writers: Aurelio Grimaldi, Anna Maria Coglitore
Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of Italy's greatest postwar artists. He was best known as a filmmaker, but was also an author, novelist, poet and critic. Stridently communist in his politics and homosexual in his orientation, he was murdered in 1975 under questionable circumstances. Writer-director Aurelio Grimaldi creates a finely imagined, fictional reconstruction of Pasolini's life as A World of Love visits the artist at the beginning of his career.
The year is 1949 and Pasolini is in his late twenties, a teacher in the village of Ramuscello in Friuli. When the film begins, the local police have charged him with committing sexual acts with three male minors. Pasolini's war hero father is mortified, the locals are in an uproar, the authorities want Pasolini run out of town and the horrified parents of the three boys ignore the fact that none of them were forced against their will.
When the story hits the papers, the Communist Party expels Pasolini who, suddenly alone, guarded and vigilant, wonders what his next step should be. Friends advise him to go to Rome, so his mother leaves her husband to accompany her son and they catch the train for the capital. Thus begins the future filmmaker's journey into a strange, new world: the unemployed Pasolini goes to Rome's huge Cinecittà movie studio to find work as an extra and comes face to face with the medium that will make his reputation.
Grimaldi is not interested in linear, narrative biography. Although A World of Love is centred around real events, it is primarily a magnificent poetic recreation of a state of mind. Arturo Paglia is stunning as Pasolini, bringing great depth and resonance to the film, while Grimaldi invests every shot with a profound sense of wonder at his subject. Absolute control infuses every moment of this enterprising, striking work.
Respiro
Emanuele Crialese
Italy
2002 90 minutes 35mm
Producers: Domenico Procacci, Anne-Dominique Toussaint
Writer: Emanuele Crialese
Western Canadian Premiere
Respiro is a visually stunning and magical film shot on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa.
The film opens with a sequence showing young Italian boys, led by 13-year-old Pasquale, engaged in boyish turf warfare. At once, we have a sense of social structures where a set of rules are to be obeyed. In fact, the boys' groups are a microcosm of the small fishing village where they live. Pasquale's mother, Grazia, an impulsive, moody woman, seems to upset the social order in town, and the townsfolk are becoming intolerant of her free-spirited ways. Although she loves her children, Grazia is as unpredictable as the sea, slightly off-balance-the chaos factor. There's talk of sending her away to Milan for "treatment."
But her oldest son Pasquale, who seems to have adjusted to his mother's erratic behaviour, comes up with a solution which turns the town and his own family upside down, pushing the story into mythic proportions, exactly the intentions of director/screenwriter Emanuele Crialese.
The scenery is more than a pretty backdrop. Set against the ether-blue sky and turquoise waters are derelict buildings and rubbish piles. There are vicious stray dogs and boys who play at gang warfare in the arid hills. There is a sense of chaos and even brutality amidst the beauty. Even the sea itself plays a visual role in the film, and Zamarion's underwater sequences are liqueous lyricism at its best.
It's not easy to capture a sense of magic realism when acting, but Valeria Golino fully embodies the child-like recklessness of Grazia without overdoing it. Francesco Casisa plays Pasquale with the right combination of doting-verging-on-eroticism and has the ideal punchy counterpart in Filippo Pucillo, who portrays his younger brother with considerable kiddy swagger.
Respiro won the Critics Week Grand Prize and the Young Critics Award for Best Feature at the Cannes Film Festival 2002.
Beauty Queen Olivia
(Biuti Quin Olivia)
Federica Martino
Italy
2002 93 minutes 35mm
Writer: Federica Martino
Canadian Premiere
Print courtesy of Promfest / Bruno Bossia (303) 440-6304
Olivia has a tough-girl exterior. She seethes with hate. She wants to be a rock star. She hates school. But most of all, she is unloved and neglected.
Her mother, Franca, a low-wage maid, insists on staying with Olivia's non-biological father Salvatore, a bitter man who beats both of them. Olivia's home life is an emotional junkyard. When Olivia meets a girl named Lilli at her new school, they become friends. While Lilli indulges in her fairy-tale fantasies of Olivia Newton John and becoming a ballerina, Olivia's life-thanks to her self-indulgent parents-goes down the tubes. Ever rebellious, Olivia decides to cut out and seek her real father, and Lilli decides to come along for the adventure.
Like a grittier version of Truffaut's classic coming-of-age story, 400 Blows, the dramatic strength of Beauty Queen Olivia is its avoidance of sentimentality. Carolina Felline's focussed portrayal of the hardened Olivia earned her a well-deserved nomination for the 2002 "Nastro d'Árgento."
Writer-director Federica Martino gained experience working in wardrobe, photography, as production secretary, assistant set designer, cutter, assistant director, and even actress with several famous Italian directors including Sergio Martino, Georgio Capitani, Giuseppe Bertolucci, and Giampaolo Tescari. She received a degree in film and TV production at New York University, with a major in directing. Beauty Queen Olivia won Best New Director at Brooklyn International Film Festival. Martino is set designer, writer, and director for Beauty Queen Olivia, her first full-length film.
Neapolitan Heart
Paolo Santoni
Italy
2002 94 minutes 35 mm
Producers: Paolo Santoni, Daniele De Sanctis
Writer: Paolo Santoni
Question: Do the feelings that gave birth to traditional Neapolitan music still exist? Answer: Si, certo!
Get on board for a tour through the heart of Neapolitan music. Director Paolo Santoni takes his Italian heart and his camera on a search for the best interpreters of that most romantic of music, Neapolitan song.
Naturally, the tour swings through Naples, where Neapolitan songs were born and are still sung with the necessary combination of heart, brain, voice, and "i palle"-balls. But although its roots are in Italy, the offshoots of Neapolitan song reach as far as the US, brought there by Italian immigrants who settled in New York City and just about everywhere else. You can still hear those gloriously romantic songs about love and heartache serenaded at Italian weddings, crooned in the casinos of Atlantic City, or belted out in the streets of New York's Italian neighbourhood.
Neapolitan Heart visits some of the foremost interpreters of this music, including Jerry Vale (AKA Gennaro Valentano), Maria Nazionale, Peppe Barra, and Mirna Doris. There's also vintage footage of hilarious 1930's era music-video style films built around these often sentimental love songs. The film feels jaunty and joyous, kind of unavoidable, since Neapolitan music has a built-in theatricality you can't resist.
Adam Nayman, of Eye Weekly, enthused that, "As far as documentaries on Neapolitan crooning go, this one is just about perfect." He likened Santoni's film to a heartfelt love letter.
Paoli Santoni was born in Rome. After completing a literary degree, he studied film at the Universite de Saint-Denis in Paris. He made two early videos which explored the visual arts, Mono-ha and L'Atelier dell'artista and has also directed numerous television documentaries addressing social issues. In 1993, he made a short fiction film, Il Sogno di Samuel. Neapolitan Heart is his first feature-length film.
Stormy Weather: The Music of Harold Arlen
Larry Weinstein
Ontario
2002
78 minutes
Producers: Daniel Iron, Niv Fichman,
Larry Weinstein
Writers: Larry Weinstein, David Morton
World Premiere
Stormy Weather: The Music of Harold Arlen blows across the screen like a Technicolour tempest. The film is directed by Larry Weinstein, one of Canada's pre-eminent directors of films on musical subjects, incuding the composers Ravel, de Falla, Schoenberg, Rodrigo, and Shostakovich. This time around, he tackles the great American songwriter, Harold Arlen.
Rather than employing the usual show-and-tell narration of a biographic documentary, the film uses a multi-layered approach combining dramatization, film clips, song performance, and choreographed "hallucinations" to tell the history of Arlen's career.
Paul Soles plays the elderly Arlen, sitting in his living room, watching a (real) TV retrospective on his own career. As he watches, and as he wanders throughout his home distractedly, he hallucinates musical numbers featuring his own songs. The hallucination sequences are a clever conceit that works fabulously, thanks to excellent writing and an artistic team that creates inspired, even devious, new renditions of Arlen's hits (hats off to choreographer Donna Feore). The songs are performed and revitalized by contemporary performers of varied styles, from Debbie Harry to Rufus Wainwright.
Sometimes Arlen merely witnesses these intruding hallucinations, other times he participates in them, acting out scenes from his life, remembering triumphs, trials, and especially his abiding love for his wife, Anya.
He opens a door to a red-infused opium den where David Johansen is performing Kickin' the Gong Around amidst squirming bodies and hookah pipes. In another hallucination, Eric Mingus delivers a hep-cat gospel-revival-meets-Follies version of Get Happy, and Rufus Wainwright appears as a pouty cabaret singer in a vaudeville-ish take on It's Only a Paper Moon, all the more clever because it connects information about Anya to the choreography.
The most inspired realization is the brilliantly-staged I've Got the World on a String. Coming off a description of Arlen's life in the dirty 30s, the piece features Depression-era workers as marionettes tweaked about by performer Hawksley Workman as he sings an almost a-tonal version of the song and beats on a garbage can lid! The account of Arlen's marriage to Anya and move to Hollywood introduces a lush sequence where Shannon McNally sings As Long as I Live, and the screen dazzles with Busby Berkeley-inspired kaleidoscopic choreography. A storm outside ushers in a "cyclone" of memories, leading to a performance of Over the Rainbow by Jimmy Scott. The film then moves on to an account of wife Anya's mental breakdown. Here, Sandra Bernhard's rendition of Come Rain or Come Shine is surprisingly lovely.
What follows is a psychotic take on Blues in the Night delivered by Mary Margaret O'Hara in her trademark tremulous voice. Perhaps most touching, given the narrative journey the film has taken us on, is Jimmy Scott performing I Had a Love Once, which he so lovingly distills, bringing to a heartbreaking conclusion an exhilarating film journey through the life of Harold Arlen.
Astounding. It will leave you sittin' on a rainbow.
Rosy Fingered Dawn
Luciano Barcaroli, Carlo Hintermann, Gerardo Panichi, Daniele Villa
Italy
2002
90 minutes
Producers: Alessandro Verdecchi, Samantha Gaetani
Canadian Premiere
Terrence Malick's reputation as one of the most influential directors in American cinema rests on just three remarkable films: Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), and The Thin Red Line (1998). Despite this modest portfolio, he is respected for his unique poetic and philosophical vision and ranked among some of the best filmmakers, including Arthur Penn, Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino, and David Lynch.
The epithet, "rosy fingered dawn" marks the beginning of Odysseus's journey in The Odyssey. And so, Rosy Fingered Dawn is an apt title for a documentary about an influential filmmaker who not only allies himself with the philosophers and poets of antiquity, but who has been on a filmic odyssey that has fascinated filmgoers the world over.
With the cooperative effort of four young Italian filmmakers, who themselves journeyed throughout the US, from California to Virginia, Rosy Fingered Dawn documents the far-reaching cinematic career of Malick.
The film discusses the making of Malick's three films and the particular attention to imagery, myth-making, and philosophy that Malick employs in his films. Over 22 film industry people participate in the documentary, including actors Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek (who starred in his first film, Badlands), Sam Shepard, Sean Penn and Ben Chaplin, composer Ennio Morricone, cinematographer Haskell Wexler, art director Jack Fisk, and acting coach Penny Allen, among many others. Each person imparts his or her experience of Malick as a director and cinematic visionary, sometimes accompanied by clips from his films. Malick himself, a very private man, does not appear in the film, yet gave his blessing to the project.
"With an investigating but non-judgmental eye he's portrayed the fundamental episodes from the history of the United States: from the beginning of the 20th century in the conflict between rural and city culture in Days of Heaven to the loss of innocence during the Second World War in The Thin Red Line," say the filmmakers.
What emerges from the film is Malick's ability to make visually stirring cinema that evokes yet never directly comments on the issues it depicts. Film critic Hwanhee Lee explains that Malick's films are "intensely visual, abound in beautiful nature imagery and they elude explanation, in the sense of the reduction of a given phenomenon (say, a character's behaviors) to various (psychological, sociological) causes, usually favouring expression of moods instead". The documentary deftly mirrors this notion of moods with iconic shots of the American rural and urban landscape.
Chacabuco: Memories of Silence
Gaston Ancellovici
Canada/Chile
2002
85 minutes
Producer: Gaston Ancellovici
In 2001 a group of Chilean men and some of their families visit the remains of the Chacabuco concentration camp in the Atacama Desert. These men are survivors of Chacabuco, and this documentary is a powerful examination of their courage in returning to that site. In the process of remembering their individual and collective struggle we learn how coming to terms with the past is an important journey. For most of the men, their struggle with degradation through torture, malnutrition, and loss of freedom began because of their support of socialist, pro-democracy President Salvador Allende. The year was 1973, month September, day the 11th. The Military Junta supported by the USA and headed by General Augusto Pinochet swept through Chile with its terror tactics and proceeded to traumatize its citizens. The archival footage is in itself excellent documentation of a difficult passage in Chile's history.
The cinematography in this documentary works exceptionally well in capturing the immediacy of their response to site and memory. We witness intimately what they see and how they feel and in turn we get to understand how survival for them required a powerful determination not to give in to the everyday presence of despair and the constant threat of terror.
Today, after 9/11, we are collectively living with the experience of a state of terror and many of us are wrestling with the question of the right moral approach to these difficult times. Through the stories of these survivors of Chacabuco we are made aware of how a group of people collectively supported each other and made it possible to endure the despair and hopelessness. As Roberto Zaldevar, survivor and gatekeeper of Chacabuco says as he welcomes the next group of visitors to the site, "they come here not to weep but to seek strength." This documentary is a moving testament to the strength of the survivors of Chacabuco.
Cinemania
Steve Kijak
USA
2002
80 minutes
Producers: Wellspring Media
Writers: Stephen Kijak
Canadian Premiere
If you're the type of person who goes to see movies at VIFVF, you know you love movies. But do you really loooooove movies? Do you call curators and projectionists to find out what's coming even before the programs come out? Do you plan your movie watching schedules for months in advance, just to make certain there's not one single movie you can't see? Are you willing to change your diet to one that increases the chance for constipation (bowel movements can annoyingly interrupt film viewing), give up on sexual contact because it will "never live up to its cinematic models," dump your friends and sacrifice all personal and social ambitions just so you'll never miss a valuable second of movie watching time-ever again?
Well, maybe you're not a true cinemaniac, but after watching Cinemania, there can be little doubt that Jack Angstreich, Eric Chadbourne, Bill Heidbreder, Roberta Hill or Harvey Schwartz are the real deal. Jack has committed himself to a "technically deviant lifestyle" in order to see up to five movies every single day without exception. Eric's given up socializing altogether. Bill has accepted "film as a substitute for life" and washes himself before every film he sees in order to ensure that he has a perfect experience every single time. Harvey times every movie he sees and can tell you the exact running time of them with Rain Man-like accuracy. And finally, Roberta has done almost nothing but watch movies since 1950 and has kept every single ticket stub for every movie she's seen since then.
But Cinemania is much more than just a documentary about people who love movies. It's a sometimes scary but mostly humourous look at five different faces of one singular obsession and the unique city of New York which makes their lifestyles possible.
The True Meaning of Pictures - Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia
Jennifer Baichwal
Canada
2002
75 minutes
Producers: Nick de Pencer, Jennifer Baichwal
A toothless man holding a pig's head. A gnarled old woman smoking a pipe. A long-bearded man sitting on his rickety bed, holding a banjo. Evangelical snake handlers. Poverty. They're images that haunt. But is it art or exploitation?
Described as one of the hottest documentary filmmakers in Canada, director Jennifer Baichwal probes the prickly question which makes all artists hot under the collar: at what point is art exploitation? In The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia, she introduces us to the black and white photography of Shelby Lee Adams, whose gritty, controversial portraits of poor Appalachian families elicit both praise and criticism.
No-one argues about Adams' skill as a photographer. He is, an artist with a sophisticated eye for composition. But to what degree should his "art" intrude on the "truth" of his subjects? Critics point out the striking theatricality of Adams' work, but some take issue with the way he manipulates lighting and his subjects' poses. Do his photos unwittingly mock the very "friends" he purports to represent? Is he perpetuating the age-old hillbilly stereotypes that Kentucky folk would like to erase?
In addition to showing us stills of the photos themselves, Baichwal takes us behind the scenes, deep into Appalachian Kentucky, to flesh out the portraits for which Adams is so famous, and in the process, steers us straight into the heart of the issue for all those who document life on film. At what point is the presence of a photographer intrusive? What is a true representation? The families which Adams photographs, who are documented here, like and trust Adams and enjoy his photos. Yet critics say that the photos are visually sophisticated and require a sophisticated reading. They are not sure that the people depicted in them understand how others "read" these photographs. Baichwal is smart enough to let the viewers decide for themselves.
The film shows us that the people in these photos are what Adams shows them to be, and yet--thanks to moving photography--they are also much more. We come to understand that the very heart of the artistic experience is emotion. If a picture provokes, it succeeds. Does it matter that the emotion felt by the Appalachian subjects is different from that of the more "citified" art viewers? We all bring our own values to art. What Adams wants is for us to "stop making judgements and experience life."
Jennifer Baichwal's other documentaries include The Holier It Gets (VIFVF 2001) and Let it Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles.
Jimmy Scott: If Only You Knew
Matthew Buzzell
USA
2002
77 minutes
Producers: Brian Gerber, Matthew Buzzell, Sylvio Sharif Tabet
He's an elfin man with the voice of a woman, yet he's a living legend. He's Jimmy Scott. Director Matthew Buzzell gets inside the stop-and-start career of jazz singer Jimmy Scott from his earliest days as a backstage boy, to his recent international acclaim in this intimate documentary portrait.
Scott's unique voice actually comes from a rare hormonal disorder called Kallmann's Syndrome. Those afflicted do not go through puberty, so Scott's voice never changed from his boyhood one.
The documentary traces Scott's life from his boyhood in 1920s Cleveland, through his failed marriages, and mismanaged career. Despite singing with some of the biggest names in jazz music-Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lionel Hampton, Ray Charles-Scott's career nose-dived for a long period. Scott was exploited by a particularly tenacious and malicious agent, was not credited for songs he recorded, recorded brilliant albums which were withdrawn, then languished in obscurity for 20 years, till he was "rediscovered" in the 80s. And yet, the man remains buoyant.
The film visits longtime friends and colleagues, biographer David Ritz, current band members, and siblings to give us insights on the man and his approach to both life and music.
It's also a story about the power of a mother's love. Scott was very attached to his mother (who had nine other children and an absentee husband). As the tape rolls, Scott tells how she died when he was 13 years old, trying to protect one of his sisters from a moving car. Her influence never left him. The film cuts to Scott singing Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child. It's gut-wrenchingly beautiful, especially with the prior biographical details, and the kind of authentic performance for which Scott is admired.
Scott looks so lonely and small in front of the microphone, yet he is in complete control of his vocal delivery. It is this combination of vulnerability and verve that endears him to millions of fans worldwide and which Buzzell captures beautifully in this film. The documentary is framed by clips of Scott performing on a Japanese tour, and the songs chosen reflect on biographical material in the documentary itself. Given Scott's rollercoaster career and early childhood (he worked to give money to his mother), the song Pennies from Heaven is especially touching.
He may be in his late 70s now, but as his backup pianist says, "Jimmy totally kicks ass on the road." Serendipity stepped in a little late, but despite being in his 60s, Scott was ready to take to the stage again and deliver songs in his unique staccato style moving people the world over to tears. Good things come to those who wait.
The Sweatbox
John-Paul Davidson &
Trudie Styler
UK
2002
86 minutes
Producers: John-Paul Davidson and Trudie Styler
Western Canadian Premiere
"...in the best tradition of fly-on-the-wall documentaries, the film allows the audience to experience what five years in the Mouse House is really like." Producers/directors John-Paul Davidson and Trudie Styler
Putting together all the elements of an animated feature film is a bit like alchemy: lots of experimentation with the end result, hopefully, being a singular hit.
But sometimes, the formula doesn't come together as planned.
The Sweatbox sticks its cameras into the warrens of Disney Studios to reveal the convoluted creative process-sometimes rewarding, sometimes exasperating-involved in getting The Emperor's New Groove to the big screen on time.
Actually, the animated film began life as Kingdom of the Sun, but when studio executives found the plot was not coming together, it mutated into a different project with different characters, different voice actors, a different director, and even a different composer. But always along for the bumpy ride was popstar Sting, who was asked to compose songs for the film.
This documentary marks the first time in their history that Disney allowed an outside film crew into their studios to interview creative staff and chronicle the development process of an animated film, from story pitch, to storyboarding, character creation, drawing, studio recording, and test screening. It's an exhaustive process. And this project in particular exhausted many of its participants.
In its infancy, the animated film was to have been directed by Roger Allers (fresh off his success with The Lion King). But when the original storyline falls apart, Allers withdraws diplomatically, feeling that the story is no longer his. Sting also begins to have doubts about the homogenizing of foreign cultures in the new version. Six of his songs end up on the scrap pile.
Sting agreed to write songs for the film on the condition that his wife, filmmaker Trudie Styler, could document Disney's production process. Of course, no one knew at the time that the film would become a bit of an albatross. The documentary never glosses over this fact and with honesty captures the daunting artistic challenges involved in the onerous five-year schedule. Sting, Allers, and Disney staff express their anxieties, doubts, and disappointment throughout the revision process. The end result is a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the world's most successful commercial animation studio.
Trudie Styler has worked in the film industry as both an actress and producer. She is a devoted environmentalist who, along with her husband, Sting, is co-founder of The Rainforest Foundation. The Sweatbox, her third film with John-Paul Davidson, marks her debut as co-director. John-Paul Davidson is a filmmaker who worked previously with Styler, directing Boys from Brazil, and The Grotesque.
Spellbound
Jeff Blitz
USA
2002
97 minutes
35mm
Producers: Jeff Blitz, Sean Welch
Print Courtesy of THINKFilm
"Thoroughly engrossing...Mr. Blitz's film is likable and suspenseful, managing to evoke the intellectual's iron-man competition, youth division, with wit and sympathy." Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times
Whether or not you adore obscure, polysyllabic words, you are bound to fall under the spell of the charming documentary, Spellbound.
Spellbound began with a simple idea. Director/DOP Jeffrey Blitz and co-producer Sean Welch thought it would be fun to traipse around after a bunch of kids preparing for the US National Spelling Bee. Eight otherwise perfectly ordinary kids but super-spellers were chosen for the project, and the result is causing a documentary buzz in the film world.
The first part of the film introduces the kids and their families - and the rigorous training required to qualify for the Be-all of Bees. There are different approaches to the acquisition of a prodigious vocabulary, from daily study of the dictionary to spelling coaches, and strategic research into previous contests. Parental guidance varies from the gentle to the more dictatorial. But these junior brainiacs are not all cut from the same cloth. Some are shy and tentative, others bombastic and confident. They all
hail from different ethnic and economic backgrounds. The spell-binding cast includes Harry, a spirited Jewish kid from New Jersey; Ashley, an inner-city black girl; gun-totin' Ted from Texas; April, the daughter of blue-collar tavern-owners; and Neil, a first-generation Indian immigrant who's got 1,000 supporters in his native India praying for his success.
Besides being highly entertaining, the National Spelling Bee also provides the ultimate forum for exhibiting the American melting pot at work. But director Jeff Blitz does not trumpet this aspect of the film. And although, as he points out, the film also shows how children internalize their parents' struggles, the film addresses this largely through presentation of its young subjects, not any overt theorizing.
The word on Spellbound is that it's one of the most engrossing 95 minutes in documentary film. It's fast-paced and light of heart. Audience goers are on the edge of their seats, rooting for their favourite kids to correctly spell obscure words like "banns" and "Darjeeling," and slouching in sadness when the kids are eliminated from competition. Blitz commented that one of the great rewards of making the film has been the feedback from families profiled who felt that they had been shown in a "truthful light."
Spellbound is Blitz's first feature-length documentary. It won Best Documentary Feature at SXSW, the Los Angeles Film Fest prize, the Best Documentary Award at the Woodstock Film Festival, and the Audience Award at San Francisco Docfest, and it continues to entertain audiences across North America.
Can you spell "success"?
Tom
Mike Hoolboom
British Columbia
2002
70 minutes
Producer: Mike Hoolboom
Mike Hoolboom, one of Canada's most playful and prolific art filmmakers, returns to VIFVF in feature form with an utterly fascinating look at the notorious and dazzling filmmaker Tom Chomont. VIFVF filmgoers may remember Hoolboom from In The City (VIFVF 02), but his career has spanned over 20 years and 40 different films. Hoolboom creates a different look and style of documentary here but definitely one in which the friendship and respect these two men share is palpable throughout.
Tom is a look at the controversial New York based video artist Tom Chomont, but those wanting to get to know his art in an introductory way will need to get their primer elsewhere. The movie is much more about his life and the forces that have come to shape him than his art in particular, although his works are highlighted throughout the movie.
Born the accidental byproduct of a naive mother, Tom's life has been damaged many times. First by his own isolated childhood and then by film, love, death, AIDS and even incest to make him the man he is today. And this is why Hoolboom can make Tom so much more than just another A&E biography-his subject has experienced the extremes of life as few have.
Hoolboom has separated the film into two interweaving elements. The first is an eclectic mix of found and stolen footage and Tom's own often shocking works. The second element is a look at Tom Chomont as he is today. With great style and verve he relates stories of infanticide, a mobster's love, incest, S&M, fetishism and a rare white light which he imagines as both the beginning and end of all life. As these two elements come together, Tom takes on a magical almost eerily unnatural air-an air which is augmented by ambient trance music made deliciously visual.
s
E V O
Oliver Hockenhull
British Columbia
2002
78 minutes
DVCam
Producer: Flyswatter Productions
Writer: Oliver Hockenhull
Are we always changing? Or are we always kinda the same except for short periods where things get so shook up that a mere collection of DNA, such as ourselves, could never really understand it? And what do BC's Burgess Shale, a Cyber-Geisha, a gorilla in a London zoo, Charles Darwin, UVA, UVB, the SUV and the Royal Ontario Museum have to do with it all, anyway?
Witness the evolution of evolutionary theory that is E V O.
In his newest work, VIFVF favourite Oliver Hockenhull has created yet another amazing, beautiful and hyper-intelligent documentary-like work. As with his previous works, Aldous Huxley: The Gravity of Light (VIFVF '98) and Building Heaven, Remembering Earth (VIFVF '00), E V O can only be called "documentary-like" because Hockenhull has used a delightful mix of reality and artifice to get at bigger and deeper questions than documentary itself is normally capable of. He layers in fantastic imagery, CGI collages, ticker taped texts, and punctuating audio rhythms to take documentary and essay filmmaking to a whole new level of commentary and observation. Hockenhull is clearly not just a person with an idea to document, he is an artist with a keen visual sense that allows him to paint as his subjects pontificate. It's a style that must be seen to be truly understood.
And where he once turned his ever-thoughtful eye to social and architectural theory, he has now focused in on the very history of all life on earth and perhaps its very future too. He leaps through time, places and scales from prehistoric to geologic and microscopic to the massively biologic. And it's all to examine famed naturalist Stephen J. Gould's theory of CONTINGENCY, the idea that maybe evolution isn't the constant revolution we once thought it was.
Question: What is evolution if it isn't what we thought it was?
Come and find out and prepare to be delighted.
But I Can Almost Touch You
Judy's Song
Rick Raxlen
Victoria
2 minutes
Music and drawings merge in a lament about lost love in the latest animation from a filmmaker whose work has been screened world-wide.
Mange Mange
Chris Barry
Ontario
3 minutes
A young boy shows his mother how much he loves her by playing her fascist game.
intima | te / intim | ate
Steve Daniels
Ontario
4 minutes
A search to understand lost intimacy in the information age.
L'Arbre Lait
Dominic Etienne Simard,
Marie-Claude Journault
Quebec
5.5 minutes
L'Arbre Lait integrates colour and b/w stop motion live action film with hand-drawn animated effects graphics. Together these elements let the story unfold in poetic movement, enhanced by the audio track of emotive acoustic picking and tasteful sound effects. L' Arbre Lait, The Milk Tree, is about love and reality; about the organic connection of milk and blood used as metaphors for the simplest of human instincts.
Crying
Brian MacDonald
Victoria
3 minutes
A man recalls the three most influential characters in his life: his father, his first girlfriend and -Spock!
Orchid Games
Passia Pandora
Victoria
7 minutes
An intense and erotic drama about two role-playing gay lovers who risk their relationship.
Through Your Eyes
Guillermina Buzlo, Eva Urrutia
British Columbia
9 minutes
The story of a young woman whose parents were detained and disappeared in Latin America when she was a young child.
Talk Salo
Shawn Postoff
Ontario
10 minutes
Demons from a long-suppressed past are pulled to the surface as two longtime friends discuss Pasolini's controversial film Salo. For those who know Pasolini's work, the various visual references to his films will make this a delight.
Green Rose
JC Hung
Taiwan
12 minutes
This is the story of a political murder that goes unsolved in Taiwan, revealed without a line of dialogue, only four beautiful songs.
Why Can't We Be a Family Again?
Roger Weisberg, Murray Nossel
USA
27 minutes
A cinema verite portrait of the bond that develops between two brothers who long to be reunited with their mother. The film chronicles their mother's agonizing battle with crack addiction and their grandmother's extraordinary determination to keep the family together.
The most indelible impression gleaned from Why Can't We Be a Family Again? is the resilience of the lives of the working classes. The decency and common sense of the boys and their grandmother shines through the gloom.
A Beat Too Fast
Cow
Pierre-Hughes Dallaire
British Columbia
2.5 minutes
The sole crew member of an alien space exploration mission awakens with a start.....
Dr. Voodoo
Aaron Lane
British Columbia
4.5 minutes
A fine country gent makes a drastic stab at self improvement.
Pion
J.F. Denis
Quebec
7 minutes
A couple.
A chessboard.
Henry's Garden
Moon Seun
USA
8 minutes
Life is idyllic for Henry. There is his garden and there are flowers. But Henry's a monster who loves flowers and is about to experience a harsh transformation to his environment.
Paranoia in the Launderette
Henry Kestler
Ontario
16 minutes
Jack is a paranoid screenwriter (is there another kind?). He believes that serial killers are out to get him and if that's not enough, he has no clean clothes for his big pitch meeting.
Night Magic
Bernardo Rviz
USA
16 minutes
Jose has one dream left-to become a magician. Despite the daily humiliations of his supervisor, the teasing from his domino partners and even the cruelty of a reality TV magician, Jose endures blow after blow in pursuit of his dream. Oh yes, and there's also strippers, sword-swallowers, fire-eaters and glass chewing freaks.
The Man in Pyjamas
Rafi Spivak
British Columbia
16 minutes
Absurd account of one night in the life of a hopeless romantic whose sleep is disrupted by a costume party.
The Hit
Martha Elcan
USA
8 minutes
A woman takes a call to do a job she does not want to do. The caller won't take no for an answer.
The Propeller Guy
Daniel Hogg
Victoria
9 minutes
A short interview with the stuntman who hit the propellor in the 1997 film Titanic.
Who the Hell Am I Anymore
The Human Mule
Thorsten Nesch
Victoria
60 minutes
Our character the Human Mule is in solitary confinement subjected to electronic music by the mind police. He tries to tell his story-just what made him do 'it'-through a mind recorder. During the course of the film the Human Mule discovers how to relay his thoughts to the viewer, bypassing the police recorder.
Heartbeat
Jennifer Yu
British Columbia
4.5 minutes
A woman remembers growing up at the height of the cultural revolution in China. She witnessed atrocities performed by the Red Guards and turned from a gung-ho Maoist to a disillusioned youth.
WaterRainFlickerFire
Stacy Elliot
U.S.A.
3 minutes
The hardest questions rarely come with warnings. They spiral through dappled light and run out the back door, leaving you breathless.
Alien Hand
Susan Turner
Saskatchewan
11 minutes
Poetry, voice and mysterious atmospheric sound take you through an intense and intimate struggle with memory loss.
Airports for Beginners
Tara Veneruso
USA
4.5 minutes
Listening to her thoughts, meeting her boyfriend, observing their time together and the spaces they visit . . . These are happy times introduced by painful thoughts and ethereal images.
Who the Hell Am I Anymore
Ewan McGregor, Jude Law,
Dexter Fletcher, Denise Van Outen,
Gaby Dellal, Stephen Hopkins,
Bob Hoskins, Menhaj Huda
Daniela Nardini and Armando Iannucci
UK
88 minutes
Print Courtesy of Sky TV
Tube Tales is both a tribute to 1990s Cool Britannia and an opportunity for many of Britain's best actors to step behind the camera. Set in the London's underground (AKA the Tube), the film's nine shorts depict England's most hallowed form of public transportation in wildly divergent manners, from gritty to surreal. Jude Law's A Bird in the Hand is a quietly affecting tale about an ailing old man, while Horny, by Stephen Hopkins is an extended sexual fantasy imagined by a sweaty commuter enduring both the dog days of summer and his obvious arousal. Ewan MacGregor's Bone is a fanciful tale about a trombonist and his imagined lover on their way home from a concert, while Bob Hoskins' My Father the Liar is an emotionally powerful tale about a child who witnesses a suicide. But perhaps the standout segment from this film is Armando Iannucci's uproarious Mouth, featuring a beautiful, poised woman vomiting on her fellow commuters set to Bruckner's 9th Symphony. Frank Harper appears in a number of these short works as an overly officious subway staffer. The film-makers make the most of their unlimited access to the Tube system, in a vivid, creepy and amusing panorama of life down under.
Uncharted Territory
Area [code]
Bridget Farr
Ontario
14 minutes
Director Bridget Farr created this introspective examination of urban and rural spaces while on a coast to coast bicycle ride across Canada. The film merges moving and still imagery to reconstruct the diverse Canadian communities we know today. In addition to her strong use of landscape imagery, she uses sound to maximize the impact of her observances.
Unearthed
Christina Spangler
USA
8 minutes
A potato dodges death only to find itself fighting for survival. Upon gaining the ability to see the world around it, the potato must come to terms with the many sad realities that arise with expanded awareness.
"This 16mm stop motion of puppets, props and a live figure is dramatic, with sharp lighting that strengthens its suspenseful overtones. Its rich colours demonstrate the depth inherent in film stock. The stage, composition and camera team obviously worked together to create an outstanding overall production."
Keeping Balance
Scott Clark
British Columbia
5 minutes
This captivating hybrid film takes an observer's perspective in viewing the Hopi, an indigenous American culture of beauty, harmony and tradition.
"This mixture of colourful hand-painted cells and direct contact printing results in a delightful blend of illustration and live action."
Hide and Seek
Michel Toledano
Ontario
17 minutes
A loving and imaginative relationship between a young boy and his grandmother continues despite a sad and confusing discovery during a playful game. This sepia soaked film is tender, funny and heartbreaking. Young actor Casey Dubois delivers a charming performance as this perplexed grandson struggles to understand the situation he is in.
Devouring Buddha
Korbett Matthews
Quebec 17 minutes
Part genocidal essay, part disembodied trance, Devouring Buddha follows the ghost of a young girl, killed decades earlier during the Khmer Rouge Revolution, as she fleetingly returns to Tuol Sleng Prison, the place of her and her family's forgotten deaths.
An experimental documentary reflection on what remains and what is remembered in modern Cambodia.
Le Red Balloon
Erik Anderson
British Columbia
4 minutes
A goofy moment in Beacon Hill Park involving an egotistical baby, his lovely mother and a sneaky thief eyeing up a cherished red balloon.
Shudder
Helen Pau
USA
28 minutes
An experimental narrative short, Shudder explores the implacable world of longing, where a young boy plots a majestic vengeance against the fatalistic memory of his father's suicide.
Brain Drippings
The Brainwashers
(Les Ramoneurs Cerebraux)
Patrick Bouchard
Quebec
12 minutes
We're first introduced to our protagonist as he goes into a doctor's office for a procedure. The goal: tidy up his brain by cleaning out all of its memories. This brain is exceptionally fascinating as each turn through its labyrinth further develops a captivating world.
Stiltwalkers (Les Echassiers)
Sjaak Meilink
Quebec
13 minutes
Creativity breeds, life as the drawings and carvings of an isolated fisherman suddenly construct their own two-dimensional existence.
"Extreme textures make this film visually diverse as main character and boat are like molded clay -solid. The world around him is made of translucent water with the dramatic ink line world of the stiltwalkers. The cadence of the audio track enhances the visual drama; their worlds reverse, change occurs forever, great storytelling!"
The Letter from Cairo
Marc Oberon
France
19 minutes
A wealthy man is found dead in his home under rather unusual, and oddly humorous circumstances. The lieutenant assigned to solve the murder has a difficult mystery to unravel, yet it seems that he may be the only one without a clue as to what happened.
The Provider
Matt Smith
USA
20 minutes
Billed as "a short course in agricultural economy," this provocative short is sure to shock you, perhaps disgust you, but leave you with many significant and often overlooked issues to ponder about putting food 'on the table'.
Une eclaircie sur le fleuve
Rosa Zacharie
Quebec
27 minutes
"Everything about the creation has been considered and I found myself surprised that so little 'real' time had elapsed while I watched it. Stories about tentative, and only partially successful, family reunions abound, yet this time the sentimentality (and it is sentimental) does not seem excessive. The distant sound of the Canadian geese echo the haunted and stilted conversations; when all you can give are reports of current weather conditions, it's hard to find a way to say anything more."
The Stone of Folly
Jesse Rosensweet
Ontario
8 minutes
Doctor is making his way through the corridors of the vast medieval hospital. He enters the X-ray room, where we catch a glimpse of the process as performed five hundred years ago. Doctor continues into the operating theatre, where the patient is anesthetized and operated upon. The procedure works, but there is something wrong with the methodology.
"The character development is original and skilled, the camera angles and layout were well thought out for all of the intricate changes. The music score accompanies the pace and gives effect to the bizarre story of a [medieval] underground operating room. Inspired by a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, The Cure for Folly, the sinister humour unfolds. This one verges on theatre masterpiece, the lighting and props feeding off each other, like being driven over the edge in shear delight." Winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival
Erotic Shorts
On Top Down Under
Fridrik Thor Fridriksson
Iceland
27 minutes
Without words, this film expresses a tragic sense of memory haunting two lovers as they reminisce on distant continents. Alone in a lighthouse in a wintery Icelandic landscape, a woman recalls time spent with her lover in hot springs. At the other end of the globe the man travels through the intense heat of Australia, transporting slabs of melting ice across the haze-blurred desert. Each lover articulates their sense of longing in silence that is infused with the passion and loss they share.
The Summer of My Deflowering
Susan Streitfeld
USA
25 minutes
Definitely a Type A personality, Megan David has been shooting a video diary of her life since she was a child. Years have passed and now she is eagerly choreographing the film's conclusion-the loss of her virginity. She's scouted the location and cast the co-star through meetings on the Internet. All that remains is the shooting of the scene itself-a deflowering set in a thematic hotel suite called the Garden of Eden.
PORN.com
Directed by Bob Rafelson
USA
28 minutes
A humourous look at the mishaps of a legendary director who's abandoned his own film festival retrospective to help his hospital-bound producer. What's the favour? Finish up a porn film that has an explicit, and perhaps bodily harm inducing, deadline. From then on it's a series of sexy, silly laughs as this highly regarded director enters the frolicking world of porn.
Bombed But Breathing
Civilian Casualties
Frances Anderson
USA 2002 60 minutes
Canadian Premiere
The personal story of several incidents of Afghan civilian casualties during Operation Enduring Freedom, as seen through the eyes of four Americans who lost loved ones in the September 11th terrorist attacks. The film follows the four Americans on a delegation to Afghanistan in January of 2002 to share their grief and offer their condolences to Afghan families who lost loved ones in the U.S. bombing.
Civilian Casualties provides great contrasts between cultures particularly due to how immediate the documentation of the terrorist attack and the war are to North Americans. You can feel the pain, the fear, and the questions - why my child? - why war? - why terror?
From Baghdad to Peace Country
Sherry Lepage
Victoria 2002 30 minutes
World Premiere
"When I do art, I am trying to reach your heart." - Deryk Houston
Canadian artist Deryk Houston travels to Baghdad on a peace mission in 1999. Shocked by what he experiences in the war-torn country, Houston's art, on his return, takes a dark turn. As Houston begins to understand the need to work his way through the emotional residue from the trip, he decides to create a positive work and embarks, with his son, on a massive landscape project featuring a mother and child theme.
Cutting back and forth between British Columbia and Iraq, filmmaker Sherry Lepage manages to capture the intensity of the project in her own work. With a sharp eye for composition Lepage keeps the subjects and art framed for an appreciation of the scale of the art as well as the scale of the social issues that are being wrestled with.
A clear and strong examination of an artist's concerns and his processes as he works to reflect the injustices of our time.
Committing the Act
Criminal Acts
Tony Snowsill
British Columbia 2002 52 minutes
World Premiere
Criminal Acts takes the viewer behind the barbed wire as director Tony Snowsill examines life for the inmates of William Head Prison as they produce their latest plays. The camera principally follows Paul, an inmate, who is up for parole at the same time that he is performing in The Cage by Mario Fratti (about a madman in a cage who still manages to commit a murder for love).
By focusing on Paul alone, Snowsill allows the viewer to empathize with the other inmates before finding out about their pasts. The crimes and violence in the play take on double meaning as the viewer wonders if these men are mirroring crimes they committed.
Say I Do
Arlene Ami
British Columbia 2002 56 minutes
The mail-order bride industry has exploded with the advent of the Internet. Websites, newspaper advertisements, and pen pal agencies sell contact information to link men from the West with women from developing countries. A website operator is interviewed: "One of the easiest things to sell to men are women... It's mostly all foreign women.. European, Philippines. Pilippines is huge."
In the Philippines we meet two young women who are registered on the Internet. Young Emma is soon to marry Stan, a logging weigh master living in Greenwood, BC. Another young woman reads a letter she received after her photo was posted on the "Intimate Submissives" website: "...I need to find myself a nice submissive young lady who wants and needs to have me control and direct her life. I am age 52, divorced after a long marriage. There is nothing so pleasurable to me as teaching a young woman to submit fully to my wishes... If my wife does not obey me, then I am perfectly willing to punish her in whatever way I think is right..."
What lies ahead for these women?
ViFPA Screenings
Cherry Kingsley. Recognizing the Person.
Abused child, sex trade worker, recipient of the Governor generals Award, Cherry Kingsley is an international spokesperson for the rights of children. Gumboot Production's Cherry
Kingsley-Recognizing the Person follows Cherry across Canada as she pieces together her childhood. Producer - Peter C. Campbell
Director- Penny Joy
Produced by Gumboot Productions Inc.
From New Age to New Edge.
Can we really change the world without changing ourselves? From New Age to New Edge explores this question, as it travels to the remote rainforests of western Canada, where a revolution is in the making. Here, the face of environmental activism is going through radical changes, as it dovetails with
the personal growth movement. So far, it's been a winning combination: it has kept chainsaws away from one of the largest remaining stands of old-growth forest on the planet.
Producer/Director - Bill Weaver
Produced by Across Borders Media
A Forgotten Legacy.
Spirit of Reclamation: presents a long-neglected perspective of Native history. The film negates a common fallacy that Native people responded to European settlement and industrial development by retreating to a reserve existence. This is a story exploring the overwhelming contribution made by Native workers, labourers, and entrepreneurs to a burgeoning British Columbia.
Producer/Director - Martin de Valk
Produced by Chiaro Productions Inc.
Silence of the Strings.
"A Community Movement for Music" is the story of teenage musicians who tuned up and took to the streets to save Victoria's historic string orchestra program for younger children -a movement that inspired adults around them to act. This music-filled documentary (The New VI, KNOW and Bravo) makes a passionate case for the value of music in children's education and in communities.
Director - Sher Morgan
Co-producers & writers-Sherry Lepage & Sher Morgan
Editor - Jack Morbin
From Baghdad to Peace Country.
In 1999, Victoria painter and father Deryk Houston joined a peace mission to Baghdad - and returned fired with determination to speak up for the Iraqi children suffering and dying from the effects of war and international sanctions. What he saw there has inspired a dramatic international landscape art project for children's rights - culminating in the creation of a peace sanctuary the size of Stonehenge in the northeastern BC wilderness.The film has its world premiere at this festival.
Director - Sherry Lepage.
Producer - Tracey Friesen.
National Film Board of Canada
To Free The Slaves.
Over 28 million men, women and children live in slavery around the world. To Free the Slaves is a documentary that looks at ordinary men and women in four different countries who are determined to bring an end to the
suffering of the weak caused by the economic concerns of the powerful.
Executive Producer & Director - Hilary
Jones-Farrow
Producers - Hilary Jones-Farrow & Arthur Holbrook
InVision
Getting a screening at a film festival is pretty cool all by itself. What could significantly increase the cool factor? How about the prospect of a $500 cash prize?
The VIFVF presents its first ever student film and video competition featuring 8 promising new filmmakers. Don't skip it unless you want to kick yourself down the road for missing an early work by the next Egoyan.
Jet
Colin Minihan
British Columbia 18 minutes
A shoplifting excursion spirals into a frenetic series of crimes.
Evelyn: The Cutest Evil Dead Girl
Brad Peyton
Ontario 9 minutes
How can anyone so dark and dreary, so dank and creepy, be so darned adorable? When shooting at crows becomes dull, Evelyn decides to pursue friendship with the living. Much to her dismay, her strategies drive them away, leaving her lonelier than before. With an air of Tim Burton or The Addams Family, this evil little film, and its evil little heroine's revenge, is sure to put a devilish little grin on your face.
Daypass
Deborah Chow
Ontario 12 minutes
A wildly delusional romantic returns from the dead to claim the love of his "life" on the night of her first daypass.
"The casting is great and the convenience store setting (with the emphasis on Slurpies) is the perfect mundane foil to the insanity. Best of all is the dialogue and the protagonist's ability to direct my attention." Wakeup Call
Javier Solsona
British Columbia 1.5 minutes
Count Dracula finds himself the victim of a daymare.
The Fastlane
Directed by Rachel Moore
British Columbia 3 minutes
A swimmer is challenged to face her fear and rise to meet her coach's expectations.
"This is a unique film. The simple characters flow with an awkward grace combining paint and brush with quick morphs shot under an animation camera. The highlight of the film is the underwater scenes; the buoyancy and action were created with a great understanding of water."
Porcelain
Jorge Hernandez
British Columbia 3.5 minutes
A tall figure wearing rotting garments
chooses amongst a collection of porcelain masks, trying to find the appropriate expression to adorn his featureless face on an extraordinary night.
"The audio track builds suspense and lends a classical emotion to the changing expressions of tragedy. The production team and supervisors worked well together, crafting contoured forms and using light direction to create extreme depth."
Brain Juice
Micah Chambers-Goldberg
USA 10.5 minutes
Ignoramus, an evil brain collector, has swiped the brains of history's famous thinkers including Newton, Einstein and Caesar. The plan--mash them up, remove their intelligence and inject it into his own skull. His strategy hits a glitch when his final victim survives the brain theft and continues through a Seussian landscape to retrieve it.
"The graphics and style of the animation along with its layout and execution are well thought-out, effective and deserve commending."
Der Keffeherstellar
Jeff Bryant & Evan Roberts
British Columbia 10 minutes
A quirky mockumentary providing an introspective look at an eccentric director who is either a creative genius or a pompous freak, depending on how you look at it.
FilmCAN
FilmCAN is an opportunity for local high school students to create a short video from beginning to end and have it screened at the 2003 VIFVF. Guided by mentors Brian Paisley (Narrative), Sherry Lepage (Documentary) and Grace Salez (Experimental) the teams workshopped their ideas and then plotted them out in depth before plunging into production.
Welcome to their world premieres.
Community Arts Council Gallery
FREE SCREENINGS
Community Arts Council Gallery
6G - 1001 Douglas St. (in the Sussex Bldg. Courtyard)
Daily at noon from February 7 - 12 (Programs approximately 1 hour)
PURE COMIC GENIUS!<
br>
Friday, February 7
Monday, February 10
A Charlie Chaplin triple bill of one reelers!
Easy Street
The tramp at his best, wandering the
skidrows of town.
One A.M.
In the boarding house, our fearless tramp struggles to get some sleep.
Rink
A night out at the local skating rink leads to big laughs.
ANIMATIONS ALIVE!
Saturday, February 8
Tuesday, February 11
VIFVF has always loved good animations. Come see some "unknown" classics.
Adventures of a *
Early 1960's work that uses abstract expressionism to explain modern life.
"E"
See how one little letter of the alphabet can lead to government tyranny.
Evolution
A take on Charles Darwin that's heavy on the sight gags with its strange assortment of creatures.
George 'n' Rosemary
An NFB classic! A lonely widower named George pines silently for the woman of his dreams, just across the street.
Big Snit
About one little scrabble match that takes on global significance. Or does it? Another NFB film too good to miss!
Chairy Tale
Norman McLaren's ground breaking animation about a chair that refuses to be the butt of anyone else's comfort.
Knick Knack
One of two early Pixar animations that lead up to Disney's family favourite Toy Story.
A BRIGHT SHINY... PAST?
Sunday, February 9
Wednesday, February 12
Ahh... the remembrance of years gone by. But were "the good ol' days" always so good?
Nails
The making of nails, now and then, as seen by VIFVF celebrated director Philip Borsos.
Spartree
The quiet and stunning craft of the old-time logger also as seen by director Philip Borsos.
My Financial Career
A young man's frightful encounter with the banking system. From the story by famed Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock.
The Awful Fate of
Melponemus Jones
A delightful tale of social niceness gone dreadfully wrong. Also from a story by famed Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock.
Debts
Animated film reflecting on hard times in Canada's "dirty 30s."
One Million B.C.
Clip from the classic Hollywood "B" movie featuring rival cavemen and iguana-like dinosaurs.
Last Tango in Paris
Saturday, February 15 - 7:00 pm
Leanne Cadden Gallery, 562 Yates St.
Please note: See just the film $10.00
Bernardo Bertolucci
Italy
1972
129 minutes
Producer: Alberto Grimaldi
Writer: Bernardo Bertolucci
Once-controversial, still-steamy drama about an American widower who, tormented by his wife's suicide, drowns out his dark feeling by engaging in an erotic affair with a young woman he meets in a vacant Paris flat. Critics call this Marlon Brando vehicle a modern masterpiece.
Followed by an Italian reception with food by Zambri's
The King's Beard
Tony Collingwood
UK
2002
73 minutes
Producer: Christopher O'Hare
Writer: Tony Collingwood
Canadian Premiere
The Mirrored Kingdom: "Where all the men are bearded and the women have long hair!" It's such a catchy tune, I can't stop singing it!
Children and their escorts, whether bearded or not, will love this feature-length animated film fresh from Britain's leading animation studio, Collingwood O'Hare Entertainment. It's jam- packed with jaunty musical numbers, action, and fantasy, with an eclectic cast of characters sure to delight. There's the "babble," a bubbly green thingy who can only repeat what he's just heard (and yet the nuance he's capable of in his reiterations is highly amusing), a bumbling wizard, a pair of carping Jewish mice (one of which says he "hates musicals"), a fairy who's lost her wand, smart-ass ghoulish bats, and an evil twin seething with disdain and nastiness.
Rufus, a raffish-looking young man, arrives in the Mirrored Kingdom (with a couple of talking mice in his pocket) eager to begin his new career as a barber. It seems like a cheery place. The townsfolk lean out windows or wend their way through the streets singing happily about their king and his wonderful beard, which they seek to emulate by wearing a beard themselves (men) or growing long hair (women). Look closely, however, and you'll see that the king's blue beard is so long it's pouring out of the casements, strangling the doorways, twining like a frenzied vine around lamp poles, and coursing down the streets like a swollen river. It's worse than a bad hair day-it's a curse!
While all the townsfolk admire the king's voluminous facial hair, the thing is so cumbersome that poor King Cuthbert can barely move from his throne. With uncut facial hair in fashion throughout the kingdom, Rufus knows he's got to buck the trend to make a living! With the intention of snipping the trend in the bud, so to speak, he attempts to cut off the king's beard. But it's not that simple.
His action sets off a series of misadventures, launching him into a battle with King Cuthbert's evil twin brother, Jasper, whose sole desire is to turn the kingdom on its head--literally--and become ruler. With the help of a fairy named Sophie, her bumbling father, Wizzie, and an army of very enthusiastic mice, Rufus goes head to head with Jasper and his evil bat minions. Jasper's theme song is "Let yourself be selfish," a maxim all good children will immediately revel in, and yet know to be decidedly evil.
The King's Beard is clever, charming, action-packed, and accompanied by a score (Philip Appleby) that's expansive, evocative, and rollicking, all in the right places.
LOCK UP YOUR SONS & DAUGHTERS
Anti Queer Films from 1950- 1990
Presented by Out On Screen programmer, Bill Taylor
Okay boys and girls get ready for the sometimes scary, sometimes hateful but often hilarious 'educational films' from the 50's to the 90's.
Dating Do's and Don'ts
12 minutes
Just a little informative piece on how straight folk ought to act...
Red Light Green Light, Meeting Strangers
16 minutes
An excellent educational film teaching young kids about strangers. Atrociously acted and planned out, this film also boasts a notorious and nasty anti-gay slant, with all the 'dangerous strangers' being same sex with no explanation. A real audience favourite.
Boys Beware
12 minutes
Produced by Sid Davis productions, this nasty film presents the stay-away-from-strangers film updated to the 70's. Amazing styles, fashions, but a curious way-out-there approach to how to deal with homosexuals. Surprisingly stark.
Soapy The Germ Fighter
10 minutes
To totally lighten things up now! Billy's (the dirty kid) parents beg him to clean. No can do, says Billy. Why? He doesn't want to be a sissy. Then, one night, when Billy is asleep, Billy has a dream.. "At least, I think it was a dream!" Out of nowhere, Soapy appears, and sets Billy 'straight' on the merits of using soap (including, of course, how it doesn't cause homosexuality).
Perversion For Profit
12 minutes
George Putnam (who is introduced as an "Outstanding News Reporter") lays the stark truth out for us as simply as possible. Blaming everything from "Lesbianism, Sadism... and every kind of sexual pervesity..." on (that's right!) The Communist Masters Of Deceit. This
jaw-dropping film is both funny, scary, silly and amazingly outdated. Another crowd pleaser.
The Report: The Gay Agenda
10 minutes
A scary and ghastly video which shows that anti-gay propaganda is still out there (and in fact, can be easily ordered from the Internet right this minute). The film trots out many dubious experts from percent spewing "scientists" to ex-gay ministry spokespeople (who try sooo hard to act straight). This is one blackly humourous piece, but one that must be taken as a word of caution that this kind of hate is still out there.
The Heterosexual Agenda
12 minutes
Filmmaker Mark Kenneth Woods made a film in response to The Gay Agenda. The Heterosexual Agenda is a very funny, right-on-the-money film, and will leave the audience with a smile on their faces when exiting the theatre.
ANIMANIA
February 8 & 9, 9:00 AM till approximately 4:00 PM
Canadian College of Film & Acting
16 Bastion Square
$75.00 per person
Do you have a penchant for drawing? Do you think the Simpsons are the best thing since sliced bread? Have you ever wanted to learn how to do animation? Have you been bitten by ANIMANIA? Then this is your chance. An intense and lively session held over two days that takes you through all the steps to create your own animation. This is camera-less animation-that's right, you will be drawing right on the film-and at the end of the class on Sunday you'll pop over to the Capitol 6 to see your work on the big screen.
Instructor: Award-winning animator Scott Clark
For anyone of any age who loves to draw.
FAMILY DAY
Student Union Building
University of Victoria
Saturday, February 15
12:00 - 4:00PM
$5 per person
for families with children ages 7-14
The VIFVF presents a day of cinematic discovery for kids and their parents.
What's more fun than watching a movie you love?
Learning how to make one!
This is your chance to find out how to create your own sound effects, try your hand at animation, test out your acting skills or try on some special effects make-up. There will be lots of demonstrations, workshops and films going on all over the building. The only question is -- will your parents be able to keep up with you?!
Family Day includes 2 feature film screenings.
The King's Beard
Tony Collingwood
UK
2002
73 minutes
Producer: Christopher O'Hare
Writer: Tony Collingwood
Canadian Premiere
The Mirrored Kingdom: "Where all the men are bearded and the women have long hair!" It's such a catchy tune, I can't stop singing it!
Children and their escorts, whether bearded or not, will love this feature-length animated film fresh from Britain's leading animation studio, Collingwood O'Hare Entertainment. It's jam- packed with jaunty musical numbers, action, and fantasy, with an eclectic cast of characters sure to delight. There's the "babble," a bubbly green thingy who can only repeat what he's just heard (and yet the nuance he's capable of in his reiterations is highly amusing), a bumbling wizard, a pair of carping Jewish mice (one of which says he "hates musicals"), a fairy who's lost her wand, smart-ass ghoulish bats, and an evil twin seething with disdain and nastiness.
Rufus, a raffish-looking young man, arrives in the Mirrored Kingdom (with a couple of talking mice in his pocket) eager to begin his new career as a barber. It seems like a cheery place. The townsfolk lean out windows or wend their way through the streets singing happily about their king and his wonderful beard, which they seek to emulate by wearing a beard themselves (men) or growing long hair (women). Look closely, however, and you'll see that the king's blue beard is so long it's pouring out of the casements, strangling the doorways, twining like a frenzied vine around lamp poles, and coursing down the streets like a swollen river. It's worse than a bad hair day-it's a curse!
While all the townsfolk admire the king's voluminous facial hair, the thing is so cumbersome that poor King Cuthbert can barely move from his throne. With uncut facial hair in fashion throughout the kingdom, Rufus knows he's got to buck the trend to make a living! With the intention of snipping the trend in the bud, so to speak, he attempts to cut off the king's beard. But it's not that simple.
His action sets off a series of misadventures, launching him into a battle with King Cuthbert's evil twin brother, Jasper, whose sole desire is to turn the kingdom on its head--literally--and become ruler. With the help of a fairy named Sophie, her bumbling father, Wizzie, and an army of very enthusiastic mice, Rufus goes head to head with Jasper and his evil bat minions. Jasper's theme song is "Let yourself be selfish," a maxim all good children will immediately revel in, and yet know to be decidedly evil.
The King's Beard is clever, charming, action-packed, and accompanied by a score (Philip Appleby) that's expansive, evocative, and rollicking, all in the right places.
Touching Wild Horses
Eleanore Lindo
Canada/UK
2002
90 minutes
Producers: David M. Perlmutter, Lewis B. Chesler, Frank Huebner
Writer: Murray McRae
B.C. Premiere
From the tradition of animal classics like Rascal and Old Yeller, where animals are a catalyst to healing, comes a new heartwarming drama called Touching Wild Horses, starring Jane Seymour (of Dr. Quinn fame), Mark Rendall (Tales from the Neverending Story), and Charles Martin Smith (Farley Mowat in Never Cry Wolf).
Shot in Sandbanks, outside Toronto, the film concerns Fiona (played by Seymour), a reclusive researcher living on remote Sable Island who is suddenly required to care for her 11-year-old nephew, Mark, whose father and sister were killed in a car accident. His mother is in a coma. The cantankerous Fiona takes on the assignment grudgingly and lays out a strict regimen for the young boy, including homework and tests every day, cooking meals, and always leaving the toilet seat down. Her grim motto is, "Always go out and prepare for the worst."
At first, Mark's new situation hardly seems better than his previous family life, which was marked by "screaming or drinking or crying." He suffers nightmares and is unable to break through the crusty exterior of his humourless aunt. But over time, Mark takes an interest in the wild horses that Fiona studies and which populate the island. He gradually settles into life at the isolated outpost and begins to establish a relationship with Fiona. Problems arise, however, when he befriends an orphaned foal and breaks the cardinal rule about touching the wild horses, putting Fiona's scientific studies in jeopardy.
The movie shows how the two characters, each marooned by their own emotional suffering, learn to share their painful memories and heal in the process. Says Seymour, "the horses are absolutely integral to the relationship. It allowed them to open to and cope with the terrible loss and guilt and pain in their lives."
Jane Seymour's name has come to be associated with quality family entertainment, and this film is no exception. Touching Wild Horses won the Crystal Heart Award at the Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis, given to filmmakers whose work explores the human journey by artistically expressing hope and respect for the positive values of life. At the Marco Island Film Festival, it received Best Feature Drama and tied for Best Cinematography (cinematographer Steve Danyluk receives top marks for his evocative landscape shots and dream sequences). Jane Seymour also received the Crystal Palm Award at that festival for choosing scripts that reflect positive values and provide wholesome family entertainment.
Chrysler Million Dollar Film Festival - A Special Presentation
The Chrysler Million Dollar Film Festival is an annual competition that provides emerging filmmakers the opportunity to compete for a $1,000,000 feature film production and distribution deal courtesy of Chrysler, Hypnotic, and Universal Pictures. The 2002 program included events in Park City, Cannes, Los Angeles and Toronto, as select filmmakers advanced through a series of filmmaking competitions to determine the winner and launch a career in Hollywood.
Set against the French Riviera during the most prestigious film festival in the world, ten filmmakers traveled to Cannes, France to cast, shoot, edit and premiere a five-minute Chrysler branded short film featuring either the Chrysler PT Cruiser or Chrysler Crossfire. Five of these Extreme Films were selected as finalists and each filmmaker developed a Feature Film Package last summer at Universal Studios in Los Angeles.
In partnership with a competition mentor, each filmmaker drafted a feature film script, produced a scene that best represented their project, and developed a movie poster. In early September 2002 in Los Angeles, each finalist pitched their projects to a panel of industry professionals who judged and selected the winner. At a gala event in Toronto, filmmaker Jeff Wadlow was announced as the winner of the 2002 Chrysler Million Dollar Film Festival.
To celebrate his achievement, the Victoria Independent Film & Video Festival is proud to screen Jeff Wadlow's Chrysler Million Dollar Film Festival qualifying short film The Tower of Babble, his Extreme Film Manual Labor along with the other finalists, and his winning feature film project Living the Lie.
For information on the 2003 competition, visit chrysler.ca.
2002 Winner Jeff Wadlow - Qualifying Short Film
THE TOWER OF BABBLE - Jeff Wadlow, Director (Run Time: 21:30)
2002 Finalist's Extreme Films
MANUAL LABOR - Jeff Wadlow, Director (Run Time: 8:00)
BLUE - Seth Wiley, Director (Run Time: 6:30)
CANNES MAN - Matthew Ehlers, Director (Run Time: 6:00)
THE YOUNG AMERICAN - Patrick Daughters, Director (Run Time: 6:00)
FRACTURE - Geoff Haley, Director (Run Time: 6:00)
2002 Winner Jeff Wadlow - Feature Film Project
LIVING THE LIE - Jeff Wadlow, Director (Run Time: 5:14)