Take a sneak peak at the VIFF

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      24 City (China)
      In the far future, it seems likely that Jia Zhangke will be regarded as the most important chronicler of the massive social transformations that defined the People’s Republic at the dawn of the 21st century. In 24 City he is, for once, not interested in the towns and villages condemned to inundation by massive hydroelectric projects but, rather, in the fate of the employees of an aeronautics plant that is being relocated in the interests of real-estate development. All the testimony given is true, but much of it is enunciated by famous actors (including Joan Chen). The line between fiction and documentary has seldom been so thin. At Granville 7, September 30 (6:45 p.m.) and October 1 (12:30 p.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      Adhen (France/Algeria)
      Even when treated sympathetically, the Muslim is virtually always depicted as “other” in French cinema. Not in this movie, however. Virtually everyone who works in Mao’s pallet-repair complex believes in the words of the Prophet, from the boss (director Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche) on down. Unfortunately, it soon becomes clear that religious and economic solidarity are not always the same thing when a partial shutdown looms. This is an interesting social study of a world that is not just changing but changed. Granville 7, October 5 (9 p.m.); Pacific Cinémathí¨que, October 8 (10:45 a.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      Algeria, Unspoken Stories (France/Algeria)
      For years, the Algerian War of Independence has been endlessly refought in the French press as well as on motion-picture screens. Jean-Pierre Lledo’s relentless investigation into the major myths that still obscure this horrendous conflict is both insightful and refreshingly honest. A more than worthy addition to a seemingly endless debate. Granville 7, October 4 (12 p.m.) and 6 (8:15 p.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      Be like others (Canada/Iran/U.K./U.S.A.) Here’s a subject that will surprise most westerners. Repressive Iran not only allows sex-change operations but encourages them. At first, the clinic that director Tanaz Eshaghian focuses on seems almost progressive. But this smart doc slowly reveals that in a place where homosexuality is punishable by death and effeminate men are routinely arrested and sexually assaulted, the matter is infinitely more complex. Unimaginable access allows a rare inside look at a marginalized subculture within a closed regime. Granville 7, September 25 (9:45 p.m.); Pacific Cinémathí¨que, September 29 (1:30 p.m.); Granville 7, October 4 (4 p.m.).
      > Janet Smith

      Birdsong (Spain)
      Albert Serra is a filmmaker who seems to specialize in the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern moments of the Hamlets of world culture. Thus, in Honor de Cavelleria, we saw Don Quixote and Sancho Panza taking some well-deserved time out between windmill jousts. In Birdsong, conversely, the protagonists are the Three Wise Men, Joseph, Mary, and Baby Jesus. Everything is lensed in black and white, often in long shot, and dialogue (in Catalan and Hebrew) is minimal and largely improvised. Nevertheless, Birdsong is at peace with the natural world—and for Serra, his native Catalonia is obviously as “sacred” as Italy was for Pier Paolo Pasolini (The Gospel According to St. Matthew being an obvious influence on this production.) Stark minimalism has rarely looked so good. Granville 7, October 5 (6:40 p.m.); Vancity Theatre, October 7 (1:15 p.m.).
      > Mark Harris

      Captain Abu Raed (Jordan/USA)
      Everyday life in modern Jordan, with its pronounced social strata, is what matters here, although actor Nadim Sawalha (father of Ab Fab’s Julia Sawalha) turns in a stellar performance as an airport janitor who pretends to be a pilot to inspire the neighbourhood kids. Unfortunately, director Amin Matalqa compensates for weak writing chops with bombastic Disney-type music and aggressively edited feel-good montages. Granville 7, September 25 (4 p.m.) and 29 (6:30 p.m.); Ridge Theatre, September 28 (1 p.m.)
      > Ken Eisner

      C’est pas moi, je le jure! (Canada)
      How likely is it that one film festival would be blessed with two first-rate coming-of-age stories set in 1960s Quebec where the plot pivots on mothers who leave their families in search of a better life in Europe? Well, likely or not, that’s exactly what we’ve got and, if Léa Pool’s Maman est chez le coiffeur is the more elegant of the two, C’est pas moi, je le jure! is by far and away the more poignant. Indeed, Philippe Falardeau’s latest feature, billed as a comedy, might well be the saddest, rawest portrait of child abandonment that I’ve ever seen. It’s as real as an exposed nerve. Granville 7, September 27 (9 p.m.) and 29 (2 p.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      Celia the Queen (USA)
      An exercise in how not to make a documentary, this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink bio of salsa great Celia Cruz has too many inconsequential talking heads prattling alongside black-and-white re-creations that distract from the tale of a fantastically driven singer who found fame only in exile from Cuba. The movie still has plenty of great performance footage, especially from the key 1970s era, so is worthwhile for diehard Celiantes. Granville 7, September 26 (1:30 p.m.), October 3 (7:15 p.m.), and 7 (8:15 p.m.)
      > Ken Eisner

      Chris and Don: A Love story (Ireland/U.S.A.)
      Deceased Brit expat and Hollywood writer Christopher Isherwood (Cabaret) once may have run in some pretty glam circles (Paul Bowles, W.H. Auden, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams were personal pals), but this artful, engrossing documentary is memorable for much more than name-dropping. Instead, told mostly through his diaries and the eyes of his much younger partner, painter Don Bachardy, it becomes a more universal story of love’s ebbs and flows. Granville 7, September 26 (3 p.m.) and 29 (9:30 p.m.); Pacific Cinémathí¨que, October 7 (10:45 a.m.)
      > Janet Smith

      Charly (France)
      A rather bleak, Belgian-style slice of youth in mild trouble, Charly follows an ungainly 14-year-old, living with his dour grandparents in the French countryside, through a runaway adventure. While hitchhiking, he meets the bossy title girl, a demi-prostitute living in a dingy trailer. It’s not clear what this semi-literate creature teaches him about life, but the film’s gentle picaresque nature stays with you. Granville 7, September 26 (7 p.m.) and 27 (4:30 p.m.); Vancity Theatre, October 5 (11 a.m.)
      > Ken Eisner

      The desert within (Mexico)
      Religion, blood, death, family: they’re the motifs of so many Mexican stories, but here they’re cranked up to hyperartistic extremes. Gifted director Rodrigo Plá tells the story of a poor farmer obsessively drive to redeem himself with God after the deaths of his wife and son. He struggles to save his remaining eight children from the family curse by building a church in the desert. He even locks away one boy to supposedly protect him from the outside world. Throw in Mexico’s violent early-20th-century history, supernatural visions, and haunting paintings that literally come to life, all shot in burnished, desert hues. Dark and over-the-top in a truly biblical way, Desert is the leader in this year’s strong pack of films from our closest Latin American neighbour. Granville 7, September 27 (6:40 p.m.) and 29 (11:30 a.m.), October 6 (11 a.m.).
      > Janet Smith

      Eat, for This Is My Body (Haiti/France)
      If Maya Deren had remade I Walked With a Zombie from a script by Marguerite Duras, it would doubtless have looked a lot like this. A young Frenchwoman (Sylvie Testud) lives in a Caribbean mansion with an elderly mother who eerily resembles her. Both “colonialists” are tended (in more ways than one) by a handsome Haitian manservant. The inside of the house looks like it comes from the 1930s, but everything else is contemporary. Mysterious rituals abound, most of them having to do with milk, baths, and (possibly) eternal life. The style is thoroughly avant-garde and the dialogue frequently illogical. Michelange Quay has made something for the inner surrealist in all of us. Granville 7, October 5 (6:40 p.m.); Vancity Theatre, October 7 (1:15 p.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      Eden (Ireland)
      The problem with God’s Garden is this: there’s always a snake trying to kick us out, and nine times out of 10 that snake is us. That, at least, is what the Farrells (Eileen Walsh and Aidan Kelly) discover when they try to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary only to have a decade’s worth of unmet needs, unsatisfied desires, and unexpressed feelings explode in their anguished faces. Emotionally harrowing and 100-percent convincing. Granville 7, September 25 (10 p.m.) and 26 (2 p.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      En plein coeur (Canada)
      Technically, 32-year-old Benoit (Pierre Rivard) and 14-year-old Jimi (Kevin Noí«l) are car thieves, but the former is primarily interested in chasing women while the latter is in desperate need of a father figure. In his joual-heavy first feature, Stéphane Géhami demonstrates the narrative energy that animated Robert Morin’s Requiem pour un beau sans-coeur (indeed, at times Géhami shows the promise of a young Denys Arcand). Clearly, this is a newcomer we’re going to hear from again in the very near future. Pacific Cinémathí¨que, September 29 (7 p.m.) and 30 (10:45 a.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      The Eternity Man (Australia)
      The early life of Arthur Stace (a former teenaged alcoholic and bordello scout who eventually chalked the word Eternity onto Sydney sidewalks an estimated 500,000 times) is quite accurately depicted by punk-rock specialist and director Julien Temple in this adaptation of a short opera. However, once his religious conversion is complete, librettist Dorothy Porter lets her imagination run wild as a real-life local phenomenon gets transformed into an urban myth of almost Wagnerian proportions. The lyrics are bellowed rather than sung, the images woozily surreal, and the music an amphetamine-hyped tribute to Benjamin Britten. Totally whacked and delightfully deranged. Granville 7, September 26 (6 p.m.) and 29 (10 a.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      General idea: Art, aids, and the fin de siecle (Canada)
      Don’t miss Annette Mangaard’s provocative look back at a unique Canadian threesome that wittily challenged precepts of modern art and communications culture. Only one survived the 1990s, but the film inspires more than it elegizes. It’s preceded by “The U.S. and Us”, a sobering look at how American corporations are annexing Canadian resources, and Jeff Chiba Stearns’s truly wonderful “Yellow Sticky Notes”, a short diary shot on Post-its. Granville 7, September 29 (9:45 p.m.) and October 1 (3 p.m.)
      > Ken Eisner

      Heaven's heart (Sweden)
      It’s hard to say what irony the beyond-generic title is meant to invoke, because there’s little romance, or heart, found in this intensely Bergman-esque study of two couples disintegrating, in intense close-up, before our very eyes. The conflict isn’t always profound, but the acting is phenomenal and should be seen by drama students everywhere. Granville 7, September 25 (1:30 p.m.) and October 2 (7:15 p.m.); Ridge Theatre, September 29 (7 p.m.)
      > Ken Eisner

      Helen (Ireland/U.K.)
      This meticulously composed character study is mounted in the dispassionate style of the police-televised crime reconstruction at its centre, in which the young title person, bereft of parents and home life, comes to a crossroads when asked to help English cops stage the events surrounding another girl’s disappearance. The approach of filmmakers Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy may be too dry for some viewers, but the film rewards patience. Granville 7, September 27 (11 a.m.), 29 (9:15 p.m.), and October 1 (11:30 a.m.)
      > Ken Eisner

      Magnus (Estonia/U.K.)
      Well, you don’t see that many pro-suicide films, and you can be sure that first-time director Kadri Kíµusaar thinks this is a compassionate take on the willful obliteration of a troubled teen (Estonian pop star Kristjan Kasearu) raised wrong. But the film’s bad acting and endlessly self-congratulating style are hard to ignore, or forgive. Granville 7, September 27 (9:30 p.m.) and 29 (11 a.m.); Vancity Theatre, October 3 (1:15 p.m.)
      > Ken Eisner

      Maman est chez le coiffeur (Canada)
      This Swiss-born filmmaker is a master of the “fake” autobiography (she didn’t move here until she was 28). For some strange reason, her best films are all coming-of-age stories set in 1960s Quebec; her protagonists are invariably adolescent girls trying to make sense of the complications and mendacity of the adult world. Elise (Marianne Fortier), the hero of Léa Pool’s latest and arguably finest feature, believes that she is personally responsible for ruining her parents’ marriage. It’s summertime, hormones are hopping, and things are both beautiful and peaceful down by the riverside (even if they’re otherwise in far-off Vietnam and in Elise’s young, tormented mind). Sad, subtle, moving, nostalgic, and compelling. Granville 7, September 28 (9:30 p.m.) and October 1 (1 p.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      Marina of the Zabbaleen (U.S.A.)
      Cairo’s garbage-picking community—the ostracized, Coptic Christian Zabbaleen—finds dreamy expression through documentary director Engi Wassef’s lens. We enter a fascinating, highly organized world where entire families specialize in recycling newspapers, plastic, and even rotten food. Its aching, vérité beauty lies in the way it’s told through Marina, a quiet six-year-old girl whose wide eyes take in the wonder amid the squalor: religious elders tattooing babies with crosses; masses flowing into a cave church carved out of a rock face; children skittering over mountains of trash. Her ultimate escape: riding on a giant, plastic elephant swing. Pacific Cinémathí¨que, September 25 (10:45 a.m.); Vancity Theatre, September 29 (11 a.m.) and October 4 (9:30 p.m.).
      > Janet Smith

      Mock Up on Mu (USA)
      It’s hard to figure out who this extremely eccentric mockumentary is actually aimed at. With its found footage, appropriated—and appropriately cheesy—science-fiction film stock, rewritten historical destinies, and whacked-out narrative, it presupposes a great deal of prior knowledge on the part of the viewer. Everyone from L. Ron Hubbard to Wernher Von Braun gets drawn into a deliberately absurd conspiracy theory with no resolution in sight. Strange but, as they used to say about Newfoundland, “the odd devil might like it.” At Granville 7, September 28 (9 p.m.) and 29 (3 p.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      Momma's man (USA)
      More sad than funny, although there’s plenty of both in this piquantly told story that finds Baghead’s Matt Boren taking the place of writer-director Azazel Jacobs in the memorably overstuffed Manhattan home of the latter’s bohemian parents. They play themselves: artists who can’t quite let go of—yet don’t quite engage—their almost-middle-aged son when he deserts his West Coast wife and child to move back into his teenage bedroom. Granville 7, September 25 (10 p.m.) and 26 (11 a.m.)
      > Ken Eisner

      My Marlon and Brando (Turkey)
      The smartly shot, sometimes breathtaking background of this near-documentary tale is far more interesting than are the main characters, two actors (hence the silly title, sort of) divided by borders, language, and ethnicity at the start of the Iraq war. Screenwriter Ayí§a Damgaci plays her somewhat-annoying self, an Istanbul theatre person in love with an Iraqi Kurd who sends her funny videotapes. Granville 7, September 25 (11 a.m.) and 28 (6:40 p.m.)
      > Ken Eisner

      The Necessities of Life (Canada)
      When Inuit hunter Tivii (Natar Ungalaaq) is sent south to Quebec City in 1952 to recover from tuberculosis, he soon decides he might as well die. This is not because the doctors, nurses, nuns, and patients who surround him are residential school–style monsters; it is, rather, that because this new world is so alien to everything he has ever known, belief in the future becomes impossible. How hope is eventually restored provides the crux of Benoit Pilon’s plot. A surprisingly optimistic film on a usually downbeat subject. Granville 7, October 2 (6:25 p.m.) and 4 (10:30 a.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      Night and Day (South Korea)
      Kim Sung-nam (Kim Yeong-ho) is a sexual monster, even though he comes across as a shambling nebbish. Hiding out in Paris lest he be arrested in Seoul for a minor drug offence, this artist who reads the Bible and seeks solace in clouds wreaks havoc on virtually every woman he meets. Not an obvious Don Juan—he frequently breaks into tears—this tongue-tied émigré somehow manages to worm his way under female skin. Director Hong Sang-soo is known for his unusual psychological portraiture. This is a worthy addition to his gallery of obsessive oddballs. Pacific Cinémathí¨que, October 9 (8:45 p.m.) and 10 (4:30 p.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      Possibility of an Island (France)
      Michel Houellebecq distills his popular novels from dystopian philosophy, archaic science fiction, sleazy sex, and a complicated love-hate relationship with the legacy of the 1960s. In Possibility of an Island, his own adaptation of his most recent novel, tropes three and four are mostly suppressed (except for a cult largely modelled on the Raellians). The protagonist is a neohuman who, in the far future, remembers the time immediately before a rather deathly form of immortality was bestowed upon a privileged few. Hint to Houellebecq: don’t quit your day job. Granville 7, September 26 (11:30 a.m.) and 30 (9:15 p.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      Revanche (Austria)
      A petty crook and a Ukrainian hooker conspire to escape Vienna’s underworld, with unfortunate results, as the crook gets enmeshed in the life of a rural cop. What starts as a gritty crime thriller gradually evolves into a subtle character study, with class, gender, and national identity examined smartly along the way. Long, but the ending is particularly strong. Granville 7, September 25 (2:30 p.m.) and 28 (9:15 p.m.)
      > Ken Eisner

      Tricks (Poland)
      One of the most delightful films offered at this year’s VIFF, and a G-rated item that doesn’t talk down to anyone, Tricks follows a spunky Polish boy as he latches on to a businessman passing through his small town, convinced that the guy is his absent father. The acting is terrific, nothing is overstated, and writer-director Andrzej Jakimowski’s visual style is exhilarating. Granville 7, September 27 (7:15 p.m.) and October 3 (11 a.m.); Ridge Theatre, September 29 (9:30 p.m.)
      > Ken Eisner

      This Dust of Words (USA)
      World literature is littered with the bones of writers who didn’t achieve their full potential (Flann O’Brien) as well as paranoid schizophrenics (including E. T. A. Hoffmann, who functioned quite well, considering), but rarely have the two come together so tragically as they did in the case of Elizabeth Wiltsee. Filmmaker Bill Rose shows us how a multilingual graduate student with a 200 IQ and seemingly limitless future was reduced by the wiring in her brain to a muttering homeless person. It is a testament to Wiltsee’s character that people continued to care for her deeply even after she became “demented”, which perhaps explains this film’s rather peculiar appeal. Even after our minds “die”, it would seem, something of our real personality remains (in this world, at least, if not in the next). Pacific Cinémathí¨que, October 6 (7 p.m.); Vancity Theatre, October 8 (11 a.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      United Red Army (Japan)
      Although this three-hour docudrama mentions this revolutionary group’s most notorious crime (the 1972 attack on Israel’s Lod Airport) only in passing, it does a bang-up job of showing how far-left sectarianism works in practice. As the Japanese underground parties RAF and RLF try to merge into one coherent unit in the wake of a massive police crackdown, they develop many of the characteristics of the most murderous sort of religious cult. As snake-eyed rebel leader Hiroko Nagata, Akie Namiki gives one of the scariest performances of all time. Granville 7, September 25 (2 p.m.) and 29 (9 p.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      Under the Bombs (France/Lebanon) Was there ever a war where one side had so little invested and bore so much of the pain? While Israel and Hezbollah slugged it out in 2006, it was the ordinary Lebanese who did most of the dying even though they were, at worst, incidental parties to the conflict. As Zeina (Nada Abu Farhat), freshly arrived from Dubai, engages a troubled but likable taxi driver (Georges Khabbaz) to help her find her missing and endangered son, the whole tragedy of the situation becomes clear. Director Philippe Aractingi makes his points subtly, without ever becoming too didactic. In the end, we are left with one inescapable question: why are human beings such total fuckheads? Granville 7, October 5 (9:15 p.m.) and 7 (2:30 p.m.)
      > Mark Harris

      Where are their stories? (Canada/Mexico)
      This no-frills fable puts light on a country in the throes of change. Simple Vicente sets his jaw and marches off to the big city to fight for his grandma’s property rights. There, he’s forced to hole up with his mother, who lives behind a curtain as a maid in a rich couple’s house. Low on dialogue, the minimalistic film is slow and full of endlessly long takes, yet it’s as driven as its main character—eventually treading into some deeply disturbing class issues. Granville 7, September 26 (9:30 p.m.); Vancity Theatre, October 4 (11 a.m.).
      > Janet Smith

      Who’s afraid of Kathy Acker? (Austria)
      Somewhere, the bad girl of ’80s fiction is nodding her platinum-spiked head in approval. This exhaustive documentary about the renegade feminist’s personal history and writing mixes countless interviews and archival readings with funky animation and stylized dramatizations. If you never appreciated the aggressively sexual writing of Kathy Acker, who died in 1997, this tribute to the original riot grrrl’s flaws and brilliance will at least help you understand her. Granville 7, September 26 (9:45 p.m.) and 30 (3 p.m.).
      > Janet Smith

      The Witch of the west is dead (Japan)
      As with Captain Abu Raed, this simple tale is best appreciated by children—mostly because they have not yet been overexposed to cloying manipulations that undermine humanistic intentions. Here, adults must overlook treacly TV music and smarmy plot devices (including the worst punchline of any VIFF film) to feel for a neglected girl who spends a life-altering season with her kindly witch of a grandmother (played by Shirley MacLaine’s daughter, Sachi Parker). Granville 7, September 28 (6:20 p.m.) and October 2 (2:30 p.m.)
      > Ken Eisner

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