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VIFF 2000 wraps up
Vancouver's 2000 film festival will be remembered in many
ways. Angst of the bleakest kind, gangster flicks with high body counts,
Canadiana, Asian cinema, and gritty documentary-making are themes that
spring first to mind.
With 200 features and 102 shorts screening in cinemas across the city
over the two weeks, at times it seemed like there was more than one film
festival on the go.
Of course, there were those films that everybody talked about. Czech wartime
drama, Divided They
Fall was an early front-runner and deserved winner of the Most
Popular Film Award. It was difficult to meet someone who had a bad
word to say about it.
It is only natural that Canadian fare would be popular with Vancouver
cinema-goers. Gary Burns' waydowntown,
is distinctly Canadian in flavour. The action all takes place in a labyrinthine
mall in downtown Calgary, that booming city at the foot of the Canadian
Rockies. Ultimately, the film is empty, but it has style, and that always
goes down well with the home crowd. Whether the story will translate to
audiences further afield, unused to such a vast superstructure as a Calgary
mall remains to be seen.
In keeping with the darker mood found across the VIFF 2000 programme Scorn,
caused some controversy with its dramatisation
of a brutal Vancouver crime where a high-school boy paid two other boys
to kill his mother and grandmother so he would come early to his inheritance.
Protection, a rough-edged, but powerful debut by Vancouver filmmaker
and former social worker Bruce Spangler, also generated a lot of interest
with its intelligent, insider's depiction of child-abuse.
This far West, Francophone Canada could almost be a foreign country. There
was less of a buzz about the mixed array of Quebecois features from the
bland Café Olé, to Denis Villeneuve's entertaining, comic Quebecois
saga Maelström. Perhaps the most topical was Hochelaga,
a testosterone-charged, drug-fuelled feature based on Monteal's notoriously
violent biker wars. A Montreal Gazette reporter is still recovering from
multiple gunshot wounds in his back after writing about the gang warfare.
An interesting side note is that the debut feature from Cree filmmaker
Shirley Cheechoo, Backroads, was apparently up there with some
of the most popular films, according to festival organisers, after being
severely criticised by local influential newspaper, The Georgia Straight.
A thriller set in Northern Ontario, it is the first time a First Nations
woman has written, produced, directed and acted in a fiction thriller.
Vanouver's legendry rain - comedian Bob Hope famously likened being in
the city to living in a car wash - barely fell throughout the festival
period. But there were heavy depressions inside the cinema. I'm not just
talking about the constant rain of the rain-sloshed Shanghai in the diverting,
but light-weight Chinese film noir Suzhou
River.
Both the Korean feature Peppermint Candy, which depicts the slide
of a man into ruin and self-loathing, and Helene Angel's unrelenting Skin
Of Man, Heart of Beast, about extremely dysfunctional relationships
in rural France, plummet the depths of the human psyche with powerful
results. The latter will have you coming out of the cinema gasping for
air. Still we queued outside the cinema for up to two hours in advance
for screenings.
As well as a steady supply of despair there was a continuous shower of
bullets. Sergei Bodrov, excellent in the gritty Russian gangster flick
Brother, shown at the VIFF two years ago, returned as a more callous
hoodlum in the sequel, Brother 2. He goes to America and gets involved
in various cartoon-style gun 'em down situations.
It is not to be confused with Tikano Takeshi's perhaps more violent gangster
feature Brother, in which Takeshi himself plays a laconic Japanese
gangster in black suit and sunglasses who goes to LA and sets off a local
turf war with the requisite high body count.
Not everyone wants to go to America to play with shooters. Director Miike
Takashi stays firmly in Japan with warring yakuza and triads in his Dead
Or Alive. Violent? This is explosive, extreme stuff. Some of it is
right off the dial. Don't miss the beginning.
Shoot 'em ups are often characterised by cruel humour. As an antidote,
Sachs Disease provided a drole and artful look at the life of a
keen young doctor in rural France, and the psychological impact his patients
have on him.
Barking Dogs Never Bite proved to be an entertaining but overlong
Korean domestic comedy, while crowd-pleasers like The Foul King,
Iron Ladies and dog show parody, Best
In Show (by Spinal Tap director Christopher Guest) had audiences
laughing at most of the right points, but still fell short of expectations.
Even if you had come for fiction it was still difficult not to ignore
the documentary strand. There were many good documentaries, although,
as you would expect, most were on tape.
No Maps For These Territories, interviews with the popular futurist
William Gibson, himself a Vancouverate, provided a stimulating ninety
minutes of viewing on matters techno, electro and cyber. One
Day In September helped put the doom and gloom about Canada's
poor showing at the Sydney Olympics into perspective. And Uncle Saddam,
about the world's most enduring meglomaniac-dictator, left you strangely
horrified and amused at once.
John Pilger's Paying the Price: The Killing of the Children of Iraq
and Kevin McKiernan's Good Kurds, Bad Kurds: No Friends But the Mountains
were probably the most talked about documentaries.
I missed these, but for me The
Diplomat about the struggle to liberate East Timor from Indonesian
oppression was the most poignant and powerful I saw. In it Australian
documentary maker, Tom Zubrycki, follows Jose Ramoz Horta, who for two
decades was the nation's ambassador in exile, but eventually helped lead
his country into freedom.
This touches on a few of the films that were being talked about. There
were others - just click here to read on.
Rebort
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