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War In The Middle East
VANCOUVER, October 2001
Vancouver was not hit as badly as the Toronto film festival, where the September
11 attacks struck as it was going into its second week. There the organisers even
considered shutting the event down before it was due to end on 15th September
out of respect for the victims. In the end, they chose to soldier on.
VIFF opened in both reflective and apprehensive mood, the terrorist attacks and
retaliation very much in peoples' minds. The group of films relating to the Middle
East attracted much of the media attention from the start.
Promises, which follows a group of Israeli and Palenstinian children growing up in and around Jerusalem, is a powerful depiction of lost opportunities.
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The films
touch on some of the issues that have been concentrating minds
this last month, although understandably for a program that was
made before the attacks took place, there was a sense that there
is a lot more to come on this subject.
Nevertheless, this year's awards
reflect the preoccupation with the Middle East, with two documentaries
about the region taking top awards.
Promises,
which looks at the Arab-Palestinian conflict through the eyes
of seven children filmed by an American-Israeli journalist over
the course of four years, won the Audience Award for most popular
film as well as the Diversity in Spirit Award.
The Italian/Afghani documentary Jung (War): In the Land of
the Mujaheddin, which looks at how two decades of the Taliban
regime has ravaged the country of Afghanistan, its institutions
and its people, won the Best Documentary Award.
A special mention was also made for The Inner Tour, except the impact of the conflict is seen
here through a busload of Palestinians revisiting lost homelands.
Vancouver
audiences got behind filmmakers addressing the Middle East, but
John Gianvito, director of The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
was clearly still apprehensive an hour before his first screening.
Remember the bombing of Afghanistan had not yet started and this
was the first public screening since the terrorist attacks of
his deeply political, pacificist critique of American jingoism
during the Gulf War. The film depicts the racist backlash and
tragic impact on the lives of three individuals in the US.
Gianvito, curator of film at the Harvard
Film Archive, who credits Ken Loach as one of his influences,
said the film "found him, rather he finding it". The film appeared
to be well-received, with no signs of hostillity in the post screening
Q&As, although Gianvito was apprehensive about how the film
would be received in Chicago when it screens this weekend.
The War was never out of sight or mind. Each evening, on the steps
of Vancouver Art Gallery, just below the suite window where festival
guests imbibed martinis and dipped into the buffet suppers, a
small but growing crowd of placard-waving anti-war demonstators
gathered.
Perhaps there should have been more of us like the film critic,
from the World Socialist Web Site,
who having travelled from Detroit for VIFF, could be found on
the street on day three of the bombing of Afghanistan, distributing
an anti-war statement by his publication?
As the bombs rained down on Afghanistan God is My Co-Pilot, part of a series of documentaries from
Holland on the ten commandments, stood out as having a particular
relevance. The film explores the moral dilemmas facing US pilots,
in Kosovo and Serbia, struggling to reconcile war with religion.
Other related films included:
Kandahar
This follows an Canadian journalist of Afghan origin as she goes
back to her devastated homeland to save her sister, described
by our reviewer as a film of "deceptive simplicity and sheer
poetry".
L' Ange de Goudron (Canada, 100 min.)
Quebec-set exploration of exile and immigration though the tribulations
of an Algerian family on the verge of becoming officially allowed
into Canada.
Before the Storm (Sweden, 102 min.)
A middle eastern cab driver's guerilla past comes back to haunt
him.
Do It (Switzerland, 97 min.)
Documentary that looks at the motivations of Seventies revolutionaries
and their terrorist activities.
A Huey P. Newton Story (USA, 90 min.)
Spike Lee's biopic about the "gangster with a conscience"
who was killed in 1989 and earlier disgraced in the media as a
violent drug addict in self-imposed exile.
The Making of the Revolution (Netherlands, 52 minutes)
Media commentator John Berger turns to the powerful photographs
of Sebastião Salgado and a critique of globalization in investigation
into the power of the image in left wing polemic.
T-Shirt Travels (USA/Zambia, 57 min.)
Documentary showing how Western business practices wiped out the
once booming Zambian textiles industry and dried up economic development.
Vancouver International Film Festival
awards 2000
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