Festive Spirit
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| Vancouver International Film Festival director Alan Franey at launch of 2003 programme | |
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VIFF continues to champion alternative cinema in Canada
Toronto may hog the international limelight, but the Vancouver International Film Festival, which starts on the 25th, is what film festivals should be about. While big budget features clunk relentlessly off the production line with the accompanying marketing blitz, the fest in the Canadian West takes risks, injects new ideas, and uncovers fresh talent with its two and half week flurry of diverse films.
As VIFF director Alan Franey draws closer to completing his labour of love to open a state-of-the-art cinema in Vancouver devoted to alternative and world film (it's due to open after VIFF 2004) he feels the "pioneering spirit" is truly with him and his team. His remit, he says, is clear.
"The more opposing - in the complementary sense of the word - our agenda is from what the big business people do, the better. Because they are controlling what’s on our screens for the rest of the year, the film festival offers the chance for there to be other values to play on rather than just the dollar," he says.
Although VIFF champions smaller films, it still seems big. While Toronto crams everything into ten days, Vancouver’s 17-day event (25 September to 10 October) can be a marathon viewing experience, with 500 screenings of more than 300 films from over 50 countries. The Dragons and Tigers strand of East Asian films in the first week remains a major component, and there is a "bigger than ever" Canadian Images section. Around a fifth of films are documentaries, "the biggest non-fiction programme of any international festival," points out Franey.
So what to see? "I find it even hard to recommend films to my kith and kin, because it’s a largely a matter of taste," says Franey, who finalises the programme at midnight tonight.
If you are lucky enough to get invited you can begin at the beginning with the first of the three galas (all Canadian, incidentally), Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions continues its depiction of the decline of the American empire. The festival opener was awarded Best Screenplay and Best Actress (Marie-Josee Croze) at this year's Cannes Film Festival.
Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World, starring Isabella Rossellini, is the Anniversary Gala on 4 October, a dream-like comedy set in depression-era Winnipeg. The festival closes on 10 October with Charles Martin Smith's The Snow Walker, made by a largely Vancouver-based production company, which tells the story of a bush pilot and an Inuit woman struggling to survive in the 1953 Arctic.
Carma Hinton’s Morning Sun, a documentary on China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76), also stands out. "This is more or less a definitive film on the cultural revolution," says Franey, "an amazing piece of scholarship."
Among directors returning to VIFF this year is Germany’s Christian Petzold bringing Wolfsburg. "I don’t want to give away too much," says Franey. "It’s a hit-and-run story. But it’s the way it’s told, it’s got such strong, formal control. It’s just masterful filmmaking."
Australian director Sue Brooks (Road to Hhill) is back with Japanese Story starring Toni Colette. "It took everyone in Cannes by surprise," says Franey. "It’s kind of a two-hander between a Japanese man and this woman who set off to the outback and surprising things happen."
Czech director Jan Hrebejk, who made VIFF audience award-winner Divided We Fall, returns with Pupendo, a drama set behind the Iron Curtain.
Another Franey expects to be popular is Adolfo Aristarain’s Common Ground, a contemporary drama about a professor in Buenos Aires who after being forced into early retirement finds his place in life in the country. "It’s such a mature, intelligent, soulful sort of film," says Franey.
Fans of maverick John Sayles (Limbo, Sunshine State), can catch his latest Casa de Los Babys, about American mothers who adopt children in Mexico. Patrice Chéreau (La Reine Margot, Intimacy) brings Son Frere, "an unsparing account of two brothers, one of whom is on his death bed and the other who is taking care of him."
The War in Iraq is too recent to be covered, but VIFF addresses American global agendas. Return of the Khan looks at Afghanistan through the eyes of a returning Afghani intellectual. Baghdad On-off, which, unusually is made by Iraqis, furtively documents the deplorable conditions in Saddam’s capital before the war. Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs -The Iraqi Connection, is a Swiss documentary looking at the cultural dislocation of Iraqi Jews who immigrated to Israel after the founding of the Jewish state ("quite amazing", says Franey).
Politics is also to the fore in The Corporation in which documentarians Mark Achbar (Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media) and Jennifer Abbott dissect this pervasive power model through interviews with CEOs and social commentators like Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Naomi Klein.
There's also Sam Green and Bill Siegel's documentary The Weather Underground about the radical American terrorist group of the Sixties and Seventies that tried to bring down the US government. First Nations issues are addressed in Gil Cardinal's Totem, about repatriation of native artefacts and Our Nationhood which looks at the burning issue of self-government for Aboriginal peoples.
Los Angeles, the most photographed city in the world, is looked at through fresh eyes in Cal Arts film professor Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself. The doc has inspired a series of 12 films in the programme that offer alternative views of LA.
The big-budget El Alamein in the Line of Fire dramatises the Italian experience of being caught in the middle of the pivotal WW2 battle in North Africa. "It’s more psychologically interesting then most war films," says Franey. "Not heroic in its depiction."
As well as a slew of music docs, particularly Latin-flavoured, there is comedy with Day of Wacko from Poland ("a mordant, quotidian humour, I think people will respond to"), Jagoda in the Supermarket which was a big hit in its home Serbia and a curious piece called Peter Sellers Story - As He Filmed It compiled from his 16mm home movies.
Plenty of reasons for hitting Vancouver's cinemas.
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