Time for the first batch of capsule reviews. I will prioritize the films that I saw on the days in question, and then, time permitting, I might comment on films that I caught earlier. If any of these films still have any screenings left, I will include that info here.
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Renaissance (dir. Christian Volckman; France/Luxembourg/UK, 103 min.)
Sort of a cross between Sin City (2005; my review) and Minority Report (2002; my review), this is a highly stylized animated film noir, set in Paris in 2054, about a cop who investigates the disappearance of a scientist in a city that is dominated by a giant cosmetics company. More style than substance, perhaps, and the plot’s a bit hard to follow at times, but the film certainly looks great — among other things, there’s a fantastic car chase that takes place beneath transparent sidewalks — and it sounds great, too. First-time composer Nicholas Dodd used to work with David Arnold, who scored all the Pierce Brosnan James Bond films but one, and Dodd’s score for this film is very much in that vein. I wouldn’t mind seeing it again, if only to figure it out better.
Sat Oct 7 @ 9:30pm @ GR7 | Mon Oct 9 @ 4pm @ GR7
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Our Daily Bread (dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter; Austria, 92 min.)
Do you want to know where your food comes from? Do you really want to know? This documentary looks at how food is mass produced in our modern, mechanized, industralized society — animal, vegetable, even mineral, it’s all here. The images of baby chicks being spat out of machines like tennis balls, or pigs and chickens dangling from motorized racks like laundry at the drycleaner’s, probably make the biggest impression; I swear I heard someone sobbing in the theatre when the cows were stunned and skinned. But this film is concerned with something much bigger than so-called animal rights; even the plants we grow and the salts we mine require a level of mechanization that was unthinkable until the past century or so. And since the film encourages us to ask where our food comes from, it might not be long before you begin to ask where the machines come from, and where the fuels that power those machines come from, etc.
The film left me pondering a few things. It is difficult to argue that vacuuming fish out of the sea is any less moral, from the fish’s point of view, than catching them in wide nets; but from the human point of view, it does seem less natural, even less romantic. Then again, as one who cringed through the porcine snuff scene in Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of the Wooden Clogs (1978), I’m not that sure that those who are personally attached to the animals they kill are in a better position, morally, than those who aren’t.
What makes the film work is that Geyrhalter presents all these processes without any commentary whatsoever; for an hour and a half, he just shows us what people in the food industry do — including how they socialize, or don’t, during their lunch breaks. Geyrhalter doesn’t tell us what we should make of all these images; instead, he provides us with, as they say, food for thought.
Fri Oct 6 @ 7pm @ PCP | Tue Oct 10 @ 4:30pm @ PCP
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Flesh (dir. Tami Wilson; Canada, 44 min.)
On a related note, one of my favorite films at this year’s festival, so far, is this strange Vancouver-based documentary which “explores the disturbing parallels between the treatment of animals and women, i.e. both are seen as meat and/or flesh.” The interviewees include women who work in meatpacking and organic cattle raising, a woman who hunts deer with bow and arrow, animal rights activists, feminists, and a Hooters girl; and the film gets into fascinating questions regarding sexuality, cultural chauvinism, and the place of women — and, more specifically, femininity — in male-dominated subcultures. It’s especially interesting to see PETA co-founder Ingrid Newkirk defend her organization’s “naked truth” campaigns against another feminist’s charge that PETA has given in to sexism, effectively sacrificing women for animals. To put this another way: When considering the differences and similarities between PETA activist Pam Anderson and a Hooters girl, what is more important — the similarities, or the differences? Is it more important that both of them trade on their physiques, or that one of them caters to omnivores and the other doesn’t?
Sun Oct 1 @ 6pm @ GR5 | Tue Oct 3 @ 1:30pm @ GR5
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Encounter Point (dir. Ronit Avni, Julia Bacha; Israel/USA, 89 min.)
Avi Lewis, AKA “Mr Naomi Klein”, was on hand to introduce this documentary about efforts to promote non-violence among Palestinians (including Christians and Muslims alike) and Israeli Jews (no reference is made to Israeli Arabs). Many of those involved in this dialogue are the bereaved relatives of people who were killed by Israeli soldiers or Palestinian militants. Central among these dialogue participants is an Israeli woman who opposed apartheid when she lived in South Africa, and now sees many of her fellow Israelis making the same mistakes that the Afrikaners made; she is involved in the dialogue now because she lost her son to a sniper, and her integrity is tested when an opportunity arises to contact the sniper’s family. Also central to the film is a Palestinian who was jailed at 16 for his involvement in the first intifada; in one scene, he meets a religious Jew who opposes the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories but has never met a Palestinian before, and the awkwardness at this meeting is nicely defused by humour. But the most interesting scenes are probably those in which certain Palestinians and Israelis speak to their kin, and try to persuade their countrymen that there is a point to pursuing peace the way that Gandhi, King and Mandela did. More concerned with the process of getting people to talk than with the content of their conversations, per se, this film has a limited scope, but works well enough within it.
Tue Oct 10 @ 12:30pm @ GR2
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Paraguayan Hammock (dir. Paz Encina; Argentina/France/Netherlands/Paraguay/Spain, 78 min.)
My mother grew up in the Chaco in Paraguay during the 1950s, so when I heard that this film, set at the end of the Chaco War in 1935, was the first film to come out of Paraguay in 30 years, I figured I had to see it. The story concerns a rural couple who miss their son, who is at war, and who spend their time sitting and talking and sitting and talking — sometimes by themselves, but more often together, on the titular hammock. I had heard in advance that the film uses slow, long takes, so just for fun, I counted them — and by my count, there are 11 wide shots of the hammock and its environs, 8 shots of the sky seen from the couple’s point of view (all of which are inserts in the hammock sequences), and 13 shots of other things. I like the way the film keeps the couple distant, even remote, from us; their dialogue plays like a voice-over track and can’t be matched to any discernible lip movements, and on the rare occasion that we do get close-ups of their heads, they are either turned away from us or in simple profile. In some ways, this is more like theatre than film; but if this were performed on a stage, we wouldn’t get the grounded, rooted, atmospheric quality that this film has.
Mon Oct 2 @ 1:15pm @ VCT
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