Les Invasions Barbares

Denys Arcand is Quebec’s top director…he’s made some of my favourite films, including Jésus de Montréal, as well as Le Déclin de L’Empire Américain and this year Les Invasions Barbares is the closing gala at the Atlantic Film Festival. It kicked off a festival run at Cannes where Marie-Josée Croze won best actress.

I loved the film…I enjoyed it more than the original Déclin as the new film happens within a different context in a different world. While the characters are similar, the introduction of the children of the characters provides new opportunities to explore contemporary Québecois culture and social issues. It’s very intellectual, but I found it surprisingly moving. The film moved along smoothly and then it was over… it didn’t feel as long as it should and I’ll definitely see it again. It’s playing Friday night as the closing gala at the Atlantic Film Festival.

September 18, 2003 , , , , , ,

AKA

A few nights ago I saw Duncan Roy‘s AKA which is a no-budget 35mm feature that tells the story of Dean Page, who manages to jump above his station. Through a series of coincidences and good luck he gradually becomes someone else. The innovative part of the film is that it is presented in three screens, each of which featuring a slightly different perspective. It’s a compelling portrayal with the different screens featuring sometimes different takes, and other times the same images. While it may seem to be technique for technique’s sake, it works very well, and I’m not sure if it would work that well on video, since the level of detail wouldn’t be the same.

At times it reminded me of Midnight Cowboy, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Abel Gance’s Napoleon, which split the screen into a triptych. AKA is not what I expected and I enjoyed it.

September 17, 2003 , , , , ,

Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself

Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself stillEvery now and then you see a film that you don’t know anything about and experience everything about it in a fresh way. I didn’t know much about Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself except that it was set in Glasgow and it was a Scottish / Danish coproduction. It’s one of my favourite films of the festival. It hit me just the right way. It was directed by the Danish director Lone Sherfig. It’s a post dogme film that explores similar themes, without the arbitrary rules. It tells the story of a pair of brothers, one suicidal (Jamie Sives)and one selfless (Adrian Rawlins). Then it brings in a single mother (Shirley Henderson) and her daughter (Lisa McKinlay) and the threads of the story begin to weave together. I found out later that it was shot on HD, but it’s not the way that it is shot that caught me, but the characters and situations.

It reminded me a bit of Diane Keaton’s 1995 film Unstrung Heroes which I also loved. Part of the please of Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself is in the exploration of the complex relationships that we have with those around us and the much greyer world of decisions, choices and morality. It screens tonight at the Atlantic Film Festival at the Park Lane cinemas.

September 17, 2003 , ,

The Magical Workshop of Ann Marie Fleming

On Monday I attended a great workshop with Ann Marie Fleming, the creative force behind The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam. The workshop was a combination of the personal and the work, which is what she does in her films. Of particular interest to me is her approach to documentary and the use of humour. It disarms you and makes it easier to deal with sometimes difficult issues. I had a great time and there were gifts as well! She showed lots of work and contextualized, analyzed, and philosophized about it. It hit me right in the heart and reinforced my belief that things will work out well and important stories will be told because they have to be told. Some quotes from my notes from Ann Marie’s workshop: filmmaking: “so much heart and so much fussiness”, “we all have stories”, “the very specific is most compelling”, “all film is documentary film”, “standup is like experimental film”, and “you just have to want to do it.” She confirms my theory that filmmaking can be characterized as a recessive gene… you don’t really have a choice, you just have to tell these stories. I’m glad that Ann Marie is out there sharing her stories.

September 17, 2003 , , , ,

International Shorts I

The International Shorts I program at the Atlantic Film Festival was great. It’s one of the reasons that I love going to festivals as shorter work is hard to see outside of the festival context. The program started off with the quirky mocumentary “Walking with Walken” about an obsessed British Christopher Walken fan who doesn’t do an impression of Walken so much as channel him. “Der Er En Ybdig Mand” (This Charming Man) is a Danish film about a man who is unemployed and has a somewhat farcical experience of being mistaken for an immigrant. At times I was a bit uneasy with directions that the film was going in, but it turned out to be a clever look at prejudices that are hidden and not so hidden. “Gravel” is about a single mom who takes her teenage daughter and a friend to meet an ex-convict she may be interested in. Beautifully shot on HD, it suggests rather than tells and leaves things ambiguous in a good way. “10 Again” is a nice series of 3 stories packaged up into one where adults in voice-over tell stories of their childhood while we see young actors portray what we are hearing. My favourite though was “El Elegante” which is a very quirky 16mm short about a man and woman in a decaying (but interesting) old hotel. Very strange characters, great art direction, music and some dancing – I loved it!

September 16, 2003 , , , , , , ,

John Greyson Master Class

I’m so glad that I saw Proteus and then was able to take John Greyson‘s Directing Master Class. It was a lot of fun and was packed with clips and great stories from the soft-spoken and genuinely nice guy that he is. I don’t know what I expected, but it was an engaging way to spend my Sunday afternoon. His background is in video art and while many try to categorize him, I think that he embodies the spirit of the independent filmmaker. All of his work is challenging and crams a dizzying range of ideas into beautiful structures. Seeing clips from his body of work along with his commentary revealed patterns, concerns and a wealth of information about telling a story through the media of film and video. A highlight for me was a short produced by Greyson as part of the 25th Anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival that encapsulated the love that we have for film and festivals.

There were fascinating glimpses into the process that he has followed and the challenges that he has overcome. He is one of the many filmmakers who grew out of the coop scene which is the backbone of media arts production in Canada. His diverse experience was shared as he talked about his video art, feature filmmaking and episodic tv (“Made in Canada”, and “Queer as Folk”). I took pages of notes and here are some gems that I took from the session: “three is so nice”, Movies of the Week – “interesting ways to talk about our lives”, “lunches are good”, documentary – “an immersion in ideas and not emotions”, and directing is “finding what feels right.”

September 16, 2003 , , ,

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