Images Festival 2016: Preview

Images Festival

April 14-23, 2016

The Images festival is to cinema what noise (or drone, or free improvisation) is to music — unhindered by, and desirous of surpassing, traditional structures and throwing out traditional tired narratives to find new kinds of emotional connections. Like noise (or drone, or free improvisation) that means it's less user-friendly and not every experiment works — and it can even fall into its own narrow clichés. But for those that find satisfaction in the rough, the unfamiliar and in terrain where the dots aren't connected for you, there's ample rewards for taking a chance.

Billed as "the largest festival in North America for experimental and independent moving image culture", Images brings a full slate of screenings, installations, talks and more each time spring rolls around. Every year, the festival challenges itself to not be constrained by format or technology, spending ample time away from the movie screens to investigate parallel paths in other artistic disciplines.

The on-screen portion on the festival begins tomorrow with Factory Complex, an experimental documentary from Im Heung Soon tracing a dark side of Korea's economic miracle — the brutal conditions faced by the women employed in the country's factories. The film's strength comes from a series of intimate face-to-face interviews with workers, some of whom suffered from health problems from under-regulated industries, and some of whom fought back through the union movement and other protests. It's no triumphant David-versus-Goliath story as the investigation detours to Cambodia to see the same capitalist logic being imposed on the factories' new low-wage homes while Korea's transition to a service economy makes sees the same disregard for workers' rights being replicated in new workplaces. Around this narrative, historical footage and some meditative moments of calm subtly comment on and deconstruct the spoken narratives. [Screening at The Royal, Friday, April 15th at 7:00 p.m.]

Although there are standout features like Factory Complex (and a special retrospective screening of Chantal Akerman's News From Home) the best viewing at Images often comes from the shorts programs – for someone looking to dip a toe into these waters, this is definitely a great place to start. I had a chance to view the Toronto-centric Conundrum Clinique programme, and it's worth checking out, especially for Robin Collyer's excellent CLOSED, a montage of elegiac static shots of bins of merchandise and other nooks inside Honest Ed's, the beloved garish tackiness rendered sad and lonely in its depopulated emptiness. That landmark of a now-passing pre-condo Toronto can be nicely contrasted with Oliver Husain's Parade, which presents the new city of glass boxes as austere and unsullied sci-fi settings. [Conundrum Clinique screens at Jackman Hall on Saturday, April 16th at 9:00 p.m.]

There's a lot that looks compelling in the rest of the shorts programmes (including How Should A Person Be?, whose title was inspired by Sheila Heti's novel) but the most vital might be the Black Radical Imagination showcase, which feels perfectly timed with the social currents pumping through the city's cultural veins right now. [PWYC screening at Jackman Hall on Monday, April 18th at 9:00 p.m.]

There's way more going on in the talks and installations that you should look into, but I do want to highlight two excellent musical events. After the screening of Factory Complex tomorrow, the action shifts to The Garrison for the Opening Night Party, which includes performances from the excellent Petra Glynt and Cris Derksen and a special performance by HATAW.

Petra Glynt - Of This Land [live at Wavelength FOURTEEN, February 15, 2014]

Cris Derksen - War Cry, Movement I [live at Track Could Bend #13, January 5, 2016]

Grander in scale, the festival heads to the beautiful Aga Khan Museum for Earwitness, "a series of projects conceived by Eve Egoyan that explore the intersection of sound and visual elements as equal creative partners." Nicole Lizée, Michael Snow, John Oswald, and David Rokeby join Egoyan for a "live multimedia performance on a grand Yamaha Disklavier, an acoustic piano with a built-in digital interface." I'm not sure what sort of synesthetic concoctions the musicians are going to come up with, but this should be a most interesting experiment. [Thursday, April 21, 2016 at 8:00 p.m.]

TICKETS + MORE INFO

Tickets for most screenings is an affordable $12, and you can grab 'em online if you're planning ahead. Except for the opening and closing events, screenings take place in the lovely Jackman Hall at the AGO. You can make all your plans at the festival's calendar page.

Images 2015: Reviews #1

Reviews of screenings from The Images Festival, Toronto, Canada.

The Influence of Anxiety: Recent Works by Toronto Artists

This shorts collection is united more by point of origin than any broad theme, so there's a pleasing variety to experience here. Best of the bunch is All That Is Solid (Dir. Eva Kolcze, 2014, 16 min, Super 16mm on Digital Video, Canada), which examines the austere beauty of brutalist architecture. Surveying some landmarks at York and U of T (including an excursion to the Scarborough campus), Klocze's camera moves through the eerily-abandoned campuses as in a scifi dreamscape — it conveys what it must have felt like to wander through the interior of Rama, pondering what vanished civilization might have created these brooding hulks. And then, like decaying memory, a series of corrosive manipulations degrade the solidity of the images.

Also enjoyable was A Knight's Walk (and other speculative events) (Dir. Clint Enns, 2014, 12 min, PXL2000, VHS, Flipcam, Computer Animation, Canada) whose centrepiece sequence of a mildly-disruptive rebel's supermarket dérive is recontextualized by footage of a chesspiece's moves around a board and a video game being played out. Are autonomy and determinism just different sides of the möbius strip? Under the Ashes (Dir. Dona Arbabzadeh, 2015, 9 min, Digital Video, Canada) does a nice of of layering multiple fragmentary images to give its everyday Iranian scenes (a taxi ride, a trip to the market) the feeling of memories, imbued with a vague sense of loss.

The back half of the programme doesn't have quite the same impact (although I didn't have my 3-D glasses handy to get the full impact of Blake Williams' Red Capriccio). The Fortune Teller (Dir. Annie MacDonell, 2015, 16 min, 16mm and Digital Video, Canada) leads to a beautiful "dance" at its conclusion after tracking the efforts undertaken to restore a cast resin hand from a coin operated fortune teller machine but the languid detailing of the particulars of the restoration make it feel a little slow getting there.

Screens: Friday, April 10, 9:00 p.m. @ Jackman Hall

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Razzle Dazzle

This programme offers tacos and tunnels as metaphors for the feminine mystique. The title comes from one of a pair of excellent animations (Dir. Jodie Mack, 2014/2013, 5 min/5 min, 16mm, USA) that bring fabric to life in vibrant style. Razzle Dazzle's rapid-cut flurry of close-ups flips past 'til the silver threads in one swatch seem to become connected to the next, while Blanket Statement #2: All or Nothing employs knit rows as the softest/trippiest test pattern you may ever see. Wayfinding by Feel in the Spacetime Weaving Continuum (Wednesday Lupypciw, 2013, 4 min, Digital Video, Canada) also riffs on the associations between fabric and weaving, femininity and feminism by lovingly recreating a feminist talk show circa 1975. It feels a bit like a highbrow take on Portlandia's Feminist Book Store, but still evokes some sly humour: "was it macramé or was it destiny?"

Her Silent Seaming (Dir. Nazli Dincel, 2014, 11 min, 16mm, USA) is a standout here, its rhythmic pulses making it feel like the energetic bursts of a riot grrl song, with rushes of words inverting the rock'n'roll loverman cliché with the narrator reeling off the insecurities of a string of male romantic partners. Thunderbolt (Dir. Heidi Phillips, (2014, 4 min, 16mm on Digital Video, Canada) also registers as a musical experience, with its ominous synth soundtrack lingering as the rumble following an initial lightning-bolt flurry of fragmented images.

The aformentioned taco imagery is supplied by Waxing and Milking (Dir. Alee Peoples, 2014, 9 min, Super 8, USA) whose hip LA is rendered with grainy 8mm footage, and asks "what happens when you want a taco so badly you let everything else fall by the wayside?" (Also: some cool 80's popsongs, including an incredible manipulation of an INXS tune.) Fall of Communism (Dir. Hannah Black, 2014, 5 min, Digital Video, UK) asks how deep can you go as it falls through a sinkhole and takes a spelunking journey towards the centre of the earth. Sometimes a tunnel is just a tunnel.

The screening is bookended by a couple amusing shorts, including Accent Grave on Ananas (Dir. Tamara Henderson, 2013, 3 min, 16mm, Canada) providing some energetic mirror trickery and XXX-mas Barftacular (Dawn Frasch, 2014, 6 min, Digital Video, USA) couching its rape politics rage in stop-motion animation and also, um, the Ratbaby Jesus.

Screens: Saturday, April 11, 9:30 p.m. @ Jackman Hall)

Planet in Focus 2013: Preview + Advance Reviews

Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival

November 21–24 , 2013

Planet in Focus is Canada's largest environmentally-themed film festival, presenting movies and advocacy since 1999. The ongoing ecological crises we are living trough can be emotionally draining to consider, but in the face of a constant corporate onslaught telling us everything is fine, it's essential for concerned planetary citizens to educate themselves. And beyond the inherent heaviness of the issues, there are always stirring stories to be told of people who are standing up and trying to do something about it.

There room for a lot of variety in looking at these topics, from the austere examination of nuclear fallout in Metamorphosen (an "attempt is to find a cinematic translation for a danger that is not perceptible nor visual") to Kiss the Water's more close-up, personal look at fly fishing. There's a chance to learn about issues ranging from advocacy on GMO's to invasive Asian Carp to European songbird poaching. It's also an awesome chance to see the world on the screen, from the impacts of far-flung tourism to life in cities, where most of us are, including Ekumenopolis' tour of Istanbul to Tokyo Waka's urban crows.

Screenings are at the TIFF Lightbox and Jackman Hall, and tickets are generally $15 per screening ($10 for seniors/students), with some money-saving pass options available if you want to really explore. The festival gets started on Thursday, but I've had a chance to check out a couple films already, so here's a couple advance reviews:

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Arctic Defenders (Dir: John Walker, 90 mins., Canada, 2012)

Passionately interested in the people of the Arctic as a youth, John Walker got a job on a cargo ship at age sixteen and went to Resolute Bay, snapping pictures of the people he met there. Now, forty years on, he's making the trip again. The fact that he gets to re-encounter some of the same people is the "hook" here, and a scene where a couple of the locals go through the pictures, their faces lighting up with the memories of those living and dead is a highlight. But the film is really about what the people of Resolute Bay have had to go through, before and since.

These were not their original lands. The Inuit were involuntarily relocated here (as well as to Grise Fiord) from Northern Québec in the 1950's as "human flagpoles", part of the Canadian government's efforts to establish its sovereignty in the Arctic during the Cold War. These geopolitical pawns were treated with shocking racism — virtual prisoners "dumped on the beach", left with no homes and no food, and even their sled dogs were systematically killed by the RCMP so they wouldn't get to wandering off too far. Unsurprisingly, this sense of dislocation led to widespread suicide and other social ills.

It would also lead to the birth of a political movement by the younger cohort in the 60's — a bridge generation who knew the languages of both cultures. The Inuit Tapirisat of Canada was founded as a united voice for the Inuit peoples, and their long struggle (and monumental land claim) would lead to the foundation of a new territory called Nunavut. We get to meet with some of those activists, including living Father of Confederation Tagak Curley and John Amagoalik and see how they fought for their rights in the "Inuit way", speaking with tenacious gentle insistency, presenting their movement with nonviolence and humility and always playing the long game.

Their work has led to new possibilities as well as new struggles. With global warming opening up the North-West passage to more shipping (and the possibilities of new oil and gas exploitation), there is, once again, a quest for the government to "declare sovereignty" with splashy military pageants. But when the big annual war games are done, it's the Canadian Rangers, composed of the locals and their deep knowledge of the landscape, that are Canada's eyes and ears in the high Arctic. We spend some time on patrol with the Rangers, whose pride is mixed with more ambiguous feelings at their place in promoting a concept of land-grab sovereignty that was never their own to begin with.

And we also spend time with Oo Aqpik, who is returning to her childhood haunts in Lake Harbour (now known as Kimmirut), as well as the pragmatic Aaju Pater, who is equally adept as a wildlife-spotting guide and cultural philosopher. We're reminded that not all of the promises made during the creation of Nunavut have been kept, and as a new lawsuit to hold the Crown to account looms, we once more meet some figures from a rising young generation who are working to preserve their culture.

As all of that might indicate, this film is a bit like its protagonists — patient and not in a rush to assert a point. It drifts a bit topically, but remains engaging throughout. (And as we travel, there's no shortage of beautifully shot footage of the Arctic's rugged beauty to linger over.) As we trace the larger history of Canada's Inuit through individual personal stories, many viewers will feel sadness and shame at what has been done in their name by the Canadian government, but this isn't a sad story. You couldn't survive in the Arctic without a sense of perpetual optimism, and even as we witness a quiet moral forcefulness ("the Canadian people need to cleanse themselves of what's happened in the last hundred years," Amagoalik reminds us) it's the joy and beauty in these lives and this land that give hope.

Screens: Thursday, November 21, 2013, 5:30 p.m. @ TIFF Lightbox Cinema 1

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Gold Fever (Dir: JT Haines/Tommy Haines/Andrew Sherburne, 84 mins., Guatemala/USA/Canada, 2013)

A giant machine eats a mountain, grinding it to dirt to find tiny particles of precious gold, leaving poison in its wake. Eventually, someone will amass enough of it to make a shiny new gold bar that they can secure in a buried vault.

What happens when this gold is found in your back yard? Would you fight for your land, for your way of life? With gold prices going through the roof, giant open-pit mines processing low-grade deposits are suddenly profitable, leading to extraction operations all over the world. In 1998, vast deposits of gold were discovered in the Guatemalan Highlands, where the Marlin mine has been operating since 2005. This film follows the struggles of the indigenous locals as they struggle to stop the destruction of their environment and their way of life.

This is, sadly, not a new story, and I'm inclined to think that most people who will seek it out at a festival like Planet in Focus will already be familiar with these tropes. In one sense, this has been done enough that there's something of a template to be followed, with a standard cast: an evil corporation, resilient locals, a valiant NGO worker. (And, of course, an all-star team of truth-to-power talking heads, here including Noam Chomsky, David Korten and John Perkins.) And though I have no doubt that the whirlwind history lessons given here for background here (the links between the CIA and United Fruit in engineering generations of coups in Central America; large-scale development imposed by IMF and World bank with no consultation or sense in how it will benefit Guatemalans instead of corporate shareholders; the festering wounds of the civil war, where hundreds of thousands of Mayans were killed) will blow someone's mind as they learn for the first time that "corporations are people too", this feels a little rote and is not the film's strength.

Instead, it's seeing the specifics of this struggle in this place that register. In San Miguel, we meet Gregoria, Diodora, and Crisanta, strong women fighting in defence of land and water in San Miguel. There's local discord as those with mining jobs have bought into the company's worldview, pitting them against local activists who take a longer view and wonder what will be left when the mine is depleted and only toxic tailing ponds are left behind.

It's also important to name names of those who perpetuate this destruction, and we also watch the gleeful expansion of Canadian corporation Goldcorp, always maintaining plausible deniability that any misfortunes to those against their mines has anything to do with them. Meanwhile, sweetheart royalty deals are negotiated and any "setbacks" to profiteering (such as an injunction to close) lead only to business as usual, the mine chugging away while the process drags through the legal system. If you believe that this is a bad scenario, then it's worth knowing that all Canadians have an indirect stake in these profits (and the environmental destruction they entail) being maintained, as the Canada Pension Plan is invested in Gold Corp.

On the whole, this is a slick and well-made film. It takes a position and makes a well-argued stand for it. These are important things, and its role as an advocacy tool should not be diminished. As a documentary, its impact is undermined for some viewers by the "standard issue" template indicated above. Your enjoyment will vary, depending on how many times you've seen this story before, and by whether seeing another iteration of it feeds righteous indignation and a desire to try and stop this or merely a doomed sense of the inevitability of it all.

Screens: Saturday, November 23, 2013, 9:00 p.m. @ TIFF Lightbox Cinema 1

Rendezvous With Madness 2013: Festival Preview + Advance Reviews

Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival

November 11–16, 2013

The Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival has been investigating the facts and mythologies surrounding mental illness in the media of moving pictures since 1993. Presenting films cutting across genre lines, the festival creates spaces for dialogue and the exchange of ideas. Many of the films are presented with panel discussions to further the conversations that the screenings provoke. And it helps that there's a strong selection of films that are worth seeing on their own merits.

This year's movies move from present-day India to Iran to 19th century Bavaria and range stylistically from shorts to documentaries to dramas.

Some of the films feel ripped from the headlines (such as Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse, about "a shy and gentle artist's struggle with schizophrenia... [which] examines the actions of the police officers responsible for his death" — a topic which resonates all too strongly in this city) while others explore nearly unimaginable ideas (like Sole Survivor's look at four of the people who lived through the commercial plane crashes in which only one person survived). There's also a couple classic films of note, including Warrendale by the late Canadian documentary master Allan King (presented as part of a Youth Mental Health Symposium) and a free screening of Chester Withey's 1916 silent film The Devil's Needle, presented with a live piano score performed by Justin Haynes.

Screenings take place at Workman Arts and the TIFF Lightbox. Regular screenings are $12 (galas and symposia vary), and you can get all the box office you need here. And don't forget, I also have some free passes I'm giving away to Valeria Golino's Honey (Miele). Oh, and I've also manages to catch a couple films from the festival already, so here's the early reviews...

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Running From Crazy (Dir: Barbara Kopple, 100 minutes, USA, 2013)

What does it mean to come from a family with a history of mental illness? How do family members accept and comprehend the burden of their parents' strife, and how do they overcome damage done to them while raising the next generation? This film examines all these issues, but it wraps it up in the "hook" of investigating them in the context of a family of celebrities.

Mariel Hemingway (the main subject here) rose to fame in the 70's and 80's alongside her older sister Margaux, but there were always dark clouds looming. Including their grandfather (famed novelist Ernest Hemingway), there were numerous suicides in their family and a history of mental illness. The film gives us the outlines of the burdens passed down the generations — Ernest lost his own father to suicide and had a distant mother, and his eldest son Jack (father to Margaux and Mariel) was an alcoholic, struggling with the corrosive effects of being the son of a legend.

"There's a bunch of funky shit in my family," Mariel tells us, as we learn about the environment she grew up in, with domestic discord, allegations of sexual abuse and her mother's illnesses being her "normal" before she droped out of school to pursue her Hollywood career. Now, she's in a reflective mood, looking back at her conflicts with Margaux (who would take her own life at age 42) and the institutionalization of her eldest sister Joan.

We watch Mariel in the celeb milieu, shilling lifestyle advice, but also but also in support groups and working as a suicide prevention activist. She's pretty open here, raw and self-critical — trying to look back and see the lessons learned and trying to apply them in the lives of her own daughters.

Produced for Oprah Winfrey's television network, there's a couple draggy spots in the endgame with (including a too-forced climb-that-mountain metaphor on a rock-climbing expedition) but on the whole, this is engaging stuff. It helps that the project is helmed by veteran director Barbara Kopple (who made one of the all-time great documentary films). Here she's working closer to the celeb profile template, but it never settles for infomercial glibness. There's also strikingly seamless use of archival material, including footage from a documentary on Ernest Hemingway that Margaux began in 1983. (In fact, the 80's material is some of the most compelling stuff here.) This will be of interest to those interested in the Hemingways as well as fans of Kopple's work, but ultimately it's a compelling story about how a family's struggles are passed along with their name. [Warning: contains some footage of the ritualized animal abuse that is bull-fighting.]

Screens: Thursday, November 14th, 6:45 p.m @ TIFF Lightbox.

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Ludwig II (Dir: Marie Noëlle & Peter Sehr, 140 minutes, Germany, 2012)

A rare regent who cared more for kunst than krieg, King Ludwig II of Bavaria is remembered for his love of opera, his architectural legacy... and for going mad. His oft-told story gets a re-examination here from Noëlle and Sehr, who treat this as more-or-less a straight-up biopic.

We meet young Ludwig in his student days, happier to sneak off to listen to the latest opera than to deal with his militaristic royal duties. Despite his father's efforts to teach him the ways of realpolitik his sudden death leaves Ludwig a most reluctant king, thrust too quickly to the throne. Swanning around with his beloved cousin Elisabeth, he employs his political capital to prove that opera could be more powerful than guns — never a popular opinion with the established order, who approve even less of his almost filial devotion to the composer Richard Wagner, who quickly comes to realize he can manipulate the young king.

Defeat in the Seven Weeks' War and Wagner's forced expulsion were psychological blows to the king, and soon he is hiding on his private island. The cancellation of his wedding, his brothers' struggle with mental illness and further political setbacks led to his increased isolation, and soon he preferred to remain far from the capital, building a series of more elaborate castles and existing at a far remove from the masses (and though the locations are sumptuous, sometimes the screen feels weirdly underpopulated). Eventually, he would be deposed and reduced to a "poor madman" before his mysterious death.

The film's main concern seems to be to get us through this huge amount of plot, and big questions like "what is madness?" and whether art can be as powerful as politics aren't tackled head on. Nor does the film really get to the heart of the man and the king — although that's admittedly no easy task for someone who pronounced, "I wish to remain an eternal enigma to myself and to others."

In covering three decades of Ludwig's life, the film chooses to represent him with two actors, which is handled fairly seamlessly. Sabin Tambrea excels, giving us the young king as a twitchy dandy with shades of Crispin Glover filled with airy romanticism and confused sexuality. Sebastian Schipper fares less well, although perhaps there's less to be done with the withdrawn older Ludwig, a sullen mystic holding imaginary dinner parties with Wagner and Louis XIV.

This story has had several big screen treatments — cineastes may be most familiar with Visconti's Ludwig from 1972, and it's probably hard for any actor to match Helmut Berger's intensity there. But this version moves at a quick enough clip that the lengthy running time never feels like a strain, and though there are some underdeveloped elements, it never feels too slight. That makes this film worth seeing for those who are interested in the legend and the man — but it probably shouldn't be the only one they see.

Screens: Tuesday, November 12, 8:30p.m. @ TIFF Lightbox

Reel Asian 2013: Reviews #2

Reviews of screenings from the Reel Asian International Film Festival, Toronto, Canada.

Confession of Murder (Dir: Jeong Byeong-gil, 119 mins., South Korea, 2012)

Fifteen years after a string of murders, a photogenic serial killer publishes a book confessing his crimes. The detective who had just missed out on catching him during his spree is incensed, but there's nothing he can do as the statute of limitations has expired. The killer is free to become a media darling.

I found the first act of Jeong Byeong-gil's Confession of Murder hard to get into, because that premise seemed like the ludicrous contrivance of a scriptwriter's pen. In fact, it turns out that until less than a decade ago, the statute of limitations on murder was indeed fifteen years in South Korea. I think knowing this going in would help with the "buy in" to this action thriller.

After an opening sequence that shows that missed apprehension, we flash forward to find that mean-tempered, foul-mouthed detective Choi Hyung-gu (Jeong Jae-yeong) is still carrying a lot of baggage from the case. The confessional book by Lee Du-seok (Park Si-hoo) is just salt in the wound, especially when he starts making public displays of contrition that play as much like PR ploys as acts of genuine regret. Things get even more complicated when family members of his victims band together to hatch a plan to kidnap him and exact their revenge, turning Detective Choi into a reluctant rescuer. A ratings-hungry TV producer puts them face-to-face on a live news show, when Choi threatens Lee's fame with an unexpected taunt: what if he's not the real killer? The emergence of the secretive J., who knows some unpublished details about the killer's final victim only muddies the water further.

Although the set-up left me dubious, soon enough I was being pulled along with it. The some-scars-never-heal symbolism might be heavy-handed, but the contrivances ultimately aren't any worse than in your typical Hollywood thriller and most of the plot holes are resolved with a consistent inner logic. (One key relationship that is withheld until a flashback about three-quarters through feels like a bit too much of a manipulation, though.)

Oh, there's also some pretty good action sequences here, with not one but two show-stopping car chases. Plus, by the end the film builds up some rather frenzied momentum that leaves little time for doubts. Once you can get over the hump and buy into the premise, this is a satisfying action flick. Clearly director Jeong, in his first narrative feature, has made big strides since the lacklustre doc Action Boys.

Bonus! Director Jeong Byeong-gil will be in attendance at the festival screening.

Screens: Saturday, November 9th, 9:45 p.m. @ The Royal

American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs (Dir: Grace Lee, 82 mins., USA, 2013)

When I wrote up a preview of all the docs that I wanted to see at the festival, I managed to skip right over this one, which is a bit of an orphan at the end of the schedule, playing off in a venue on the other side of town from most of the other screenings. But this may very well be the best thing I'll see at the festival.

Grace Lee's well-constructed doc is both a documentary of its subject as well as a deeper meditation that will resonate with anyone with strong political convictions: What does it mean to be an activist for the very long haul? What is the source of the revolutionary urge, and, ultimately, what is revolution supposed to do?

We explore all of this in the life of Grace Lee Boggs, who we meet at ninety-five years of age, pushing along in her walker through the ruins of Detroit (a sure sign that some big changes need to be made, she says with a slight smile). A Chinese-American woman born in 1915, college educated before being radicalized by the Great Depression, she's lived through the wars and cold wars, through McCarthyism and through the turbulence of the '60's. A Marxist theoretician turned Black Power activist with a thick FBI dossier to her name, Boggs has spent decades pondering the details of revolution and evolution. She's crossed paths with luminaries along the way: her early work was alongside C.L.R. James before moving to then-bustling Detroit to be where the workers were. After marrying James Boggs she moved into the orbit of the nascent Black Power movement, organizing marches for Martin Luther King and conferences for Malcolm X. (He delivered his famous Message to the Grass Roots at one of those.)

A devoted dialectician, Boggs has constantly tested and modified her own theories throughout her life, stressing that ideas become dead when they become fixed. The riots of '67 (or "the rebellion", as she'd label it) gave her much cause for reflection upon her younger ideas of direct action and the use of violence. Concluding that the anger released in that cataclysm didn't push forward the revolutionary cause, she's moved increasingly towards celebrating non-violence (and learning to appreciate MLK in a way she could not during her lifetime).

As her consciousness developed to consider her own role as a woman, as a Chinese American, and as older person, some of the most resonant ideas of her later years arise from her belief in the radical possibilities of conversation (the dialectic in action!) as she comments, "the radical movement has overemphasized the role of activism and underestimated the role of reflection."

As all of this recapping might indicate, I was utterly swept up in this film's story, amazed by Boggs' resilience and highly impressed by the film that Lee has fashioned here. Encountering her on an earlier project where she was looking for other women who shared her name, Grace Lee struck up a friendship with Boggs and has returned to visit her regularly ever since. That (plus a wealth of archive material) gives us a decades-long glimpse at her ideas and her character. In her later years, Boggs has gravitas and is firmly rooted in the strength of her ideas, but never comes across as someone who thinks she has all the answers. At ninety-five, her revolution includes gardens and conversations and a strong conviction that the leadership we need to transform the world is already there inside of us.

This is a powerful portrait and gets a highest recommendation.

Bonus! Not only will director Grace Lee will be in attendance at the festival screening, but it's also free to attend, with tickets available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Screens: Tuesday, November 12th, 7:00 p.m. @ Ryerson University, School of Image Arts (122 Bond St.)

Reel Asian 2013: Preview & Advance Reviews

The Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

November 5 – 16, 2013

Given the plethora of local film festivals, it's not surprising that some of them focus very tightly on one thing, whether a genre or topic. But with a geographical mandate as big as the largest of the continents, Reel Asian (now celebrating its seventeenth year), cuts across all of those narrow limits. The fact that you can see popcorn exuberance rubbing up against arthouse austerity and the dizzying imagination-leaps of animé cheek-by-jowl with sobering documentaries makes this one of the more enjoyable of the local film fests. A week of screenings downtown (with most features at The Royal) is followed by a closing weekend in Richmond Hill. Definitely a great opportunity to see some films on the big screen that you might not come by otherwise — and everything in subtitled in English, of course, for those who don't speak the diverse group of languages on the screen.

There's a strong-looking selection of documentaries here, including a troika of pop culture observations on Linsanity, Uyghur rap crews, and the Filipino YouTube star who aspires to be Journey's new lead singer. Also not to be overlooked are the four shorts programmes, which mix all that variety stated above into well-curated selections. All shorts screenings take place in the cozy Jackman Hall at the AGO, two of which as matinées for anyone looking for a good mid-week daytime excursion.

Tickets for most screenings are $12 and can be purchased in advance here.

Just to get things started, here's a couple advance reviews.

Tales from the Dark Part 1 (Dir: Simon Yam/Fruit Chan/Lee Chi-ngai, 114 minutes, Hong Kong)

Although Hallowe'en has passed, the festival's Centrepiece Presentation of this HK horror anthology film will attempt to raise some chills. A triptych of mid-length ghost stories, this will appeal more to genre fans than serve as the sort of film that transcends the standard horror tropes.

Stolen Body is the directorial début of Simon Yam. Yam (perhaps best known to casual fans for Election), also stars as a down-on-his-luck labourer who comes up with a novel scheme to extort funds from the relatives of the recently-departed. After all, he reasons, the greatest horrors he faces are economic — can the notion of ghosts compete with his very real fears of losing what little he has? Yam is engaging as a man that could be slipping into the ghost-realm (or simply losing his grip on sanity), though the piece is somewhat too-stylized and not scary enough.

A Word in the Palm (dir: Lee Chi Ngai) is broad enough to feel like an episode of Goosebumps, with hammy acting and comedically large eyeglasses attempting to distract from a fairly rote ghost story of a jilted high-school swim team member's efforts at revenge from beyond the grave. Everything here is telegraphed pretty unsubtly, so there's not much more to do than watch Tony Leung Ka-fai try and maintain a straight face as a fortune teller on his last day on the job.

Jing Zhe (dir. Fruit Chan) intrigues the most here, although its immersion into the realm of "villain hitting" is a bit confusing at the outset. This ancient form of witchcraft involves a punishment-by-proxy, with a variety of clients coming to a curbside stall by the old overpass to have a likeness of their foes beat by a shoe to rhyming curses in order to bring them low in the real world. That karma can come back even on those powerful enough to smite people's enemies is all that needs to be said here.

Screens: Friday, November 8, 2013, 8 p.m. @ The Royal

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Shorts programme: Counter Move

This screening collects the "Best of Canadian Shorts" at the festival. There's an interesting variety of non-narrative film here, so though this might not be the most populist collection, there's a lot to enjoy.

The best of the bunch — and likely the most crowd pleasing — comes right at the top with The Banquet of the Concubine (dir: Hefang Wei, 12 minutes, Canada, 2012), a gorgeously animated re-telling of an eighth century Chinese story. The Emperor's Number One concubine is having difficulty enjoying her banquet while he's off canoodling with the newest addition to his retinue, and we see that the sweetness of love (or fruit) doesn't always win out in the end. The elongated figures and watercolour washes are visually spectacular and give this the feel of an NFB classic.

A trio of shorts here could function as gallery installation pieces, including the nature choreography of Dafeena (dir: Marlene Millar/Philip Szporer, 5 mins., Canada, 2012) and the blend-in survival strategies of Treasure Hill Camouflage (dir: soJin Chun, 2 mins., Taiwan, 2012). The best of these is Portrait as a Random Act of Violence (dir: Randall Okita, 4 mins., Canada, 2012), which evokes a sense of the uncanny in documenting a creepily kinetic sculpture pulling shards of broken glass into a shattered human figure.

Item Number (dir: Oliver Husain, 16 mins., Canada, 2012) is perhaps the most commanding short in the programme, the screen filled with the magnetic presence of Kirtana Kumar. Two minutes before her performance begins, an actress' inner monologue comes to life — dancing doppelgangers and all! — as the fourth wall is broken in a meditation on the roles she has on stage and in life. The film veers towards winking meta-commentary at a few points, but the close focus on Kumar keeps this grounded.

The fourth wall is broken in a different — and unexpected — way in A Grand Canal (dir: Johnny Ma, 19 mins., Canada/China, 2013), though to say more about how would constitute what might be labelled an "emotional spoiler". In any case, this character study of the director's father, a stoic sailor with a love of pop songs, is a winning biographical sketch as well as a social portrait. What might happen when the "red envelope" money to the local Boss isn't enough seems telegraphed in the father's sad features (well conveyed by Mei Song Shun) with a sad inevitability. Even before Ma confounds our expectations in attempting to intervene in his own story, this is well worth seeing.

Some other personal reminiscences also take different paths to bridge past and present. The multimedia palimpsest collage of Shiro Yagi (dir: Cindy Mochizuki, 12 mins., Canada, 2012) gets across the fragmented sensibility that comes in reconstructing the past but is a bit too busy to connect emotionally. Conceived (dir: Eui Yong Zong, 5 mins., Canada, 2013) is more succinct, using audio interviews with his parents to face some hard truths about the choices they made before he was born — and revealing a bit of an emotional gutpunch that results from lingering on these things. There's more optimism in the straightforward personal documentary approach of My Father, Francis (dir: Casey Mecija, 12 mins., Canada, 2013), which also does a better job of unpacking the layers of meaning in unspoken gestures between a parent and child. A father's hard work as a factory hand is supplemented by his own sideline in crafting "useful" objects from scraps. Besides attempting to bond with him in the making of things, Mecija also shows him that his inventions transcend mere functionality by celebrating them as objets d'art. Local musician Mecija (formerly of Ohbijou, now performing solo and with Warm Myth) crafts a loving portrait here that also hints at the quiet bridges that can be built to overcome the differences between "suburbs" and "downtown", between generations, and between fathers and daughters.

Screens: November 7, 2013, 6 p.m. @ Jackman Hall

Inside Out 2013: Reviews #3

Reviews of screenings from the Inside Out LGBT Film Festival, Toronto, Canada.

C.O.G. (Dir: Kyle Patrick Alvarez, 88 minutes, USA)

When handed a religious tract reading "Are you a C.O.G.?", David laughs it off and makes a joke, and yet it somehow resonates with him, and he keeps it like a talisman. This would figure into his subsequent deeper encounter with faith ("Are you a Child of God?" is what it's asking), but it's quite evident that David is also worried about becoming merely a cog in society's machine.

That would be one reason why that after finishing his M.A. at Yale he's hopped on a bus and headed west to Oregon to join in with the apple harvest. (There's shades here of know-it-all Leland Stamper making a similar trip west in Sometimes a Great Notion, not in the least in a pre-credit sequence detailing the waking nightmare of a cross-country Greyhound trip.) Sure, originally there was a romantic plan, hatched up by his girlfriend, to slum it with the proles — but once she stops by only long enough to introduce her new boyfriend and ride off into the sunset, David seems even more determined to stick it out. It becomes clear pretty quickly that he's not just out for an adventure — he's running away from himself.

Of course, there are parts of you that are going to be there if you want them or not. You can find a new town, a new life, and new ways to tamp your desires down but they're just not going anywhere. As we follow David's episodic adventures (from the apple grove to the packing plant to an artist's workshop) we see this struggle play out. Along the way, his vulnerabilities leave some chips in his smug and superior veneer.

Jonathan Groff does good work here in the lead role, never going too "big", and thus letting each small payoff register. The supporting actors — and this is largely a film of and about men — evoke some solid characterizations as well, from Dean Stockwell's taciturn farmer to Corey Stoll's rambunctious co-worker to Denis O'Hare's evangelical artist. Director Alvarez maintains a solid balance here as well, keeping the story moving along without things ever feeling rushed. Some of his counter-intuitive choices, such as a score filled with a lot of Steve Reich music, also work out rather nicely.

Adapted from a David Sedaris essay, this film shines as a quote-unquote modest story about the slow accretion of experiences that can sometimes lead to growing up. It's silly and affecting just like lives lived tend to be, and the biggest changes are internal — represented by seeing David's eyes looking on the world in a slightly different way. That welcome modesty can be a hard sell in the marketplace, but this film certainly deserves to find an audience.

Continental (Dir: Malcom Ingram, 96 minutes, UK)

Everybody knows that Bette Midler got her start in the gay bathhouses of New York City. That tidbit might be the hook for this story about The Continental Baths, where that breakthrough happened, but this film's ambitions keep it interested in something more than salacious nostalgia. Indeed, amongst a panoply of celebrities such as Frankie Knuckles, Holly Woodlawn and Labelle's Sarah Dash, Midler is one of the few who doesn't show up to offer a remembrance. But given the various strands contained in this film, her presence is hardly missed.

Tracking a "high point of hedonism" in that moment of sexual freedom between the discovery of The Pill and the advent of AIDS, The Continental was both a product of a period of increasing liberality ("the 60's") as well as a force to push the gay liberation agenda even further. By serving as a hub for community organizing, it managed to transform the context (beholden to the mob and dependent on graft to be left alone by the police) that bathhouses operated in.

All of which also makes this the story of Steve Ostrow, The Continental's owner, whose commitment extended well past dollars and cents and into the realm of social transformation. Copious interviews with him flesh out both his life story and the saga of The Continental (as well as plenty of outlandish-but-true tales along the way), and that gives this documentary its heart and soul. By the end, you'll feel honoured to have made his acquaintance.

And along the way, there's also a chance to re-live the joyful excess and opulence of The Continental. Located in the gorgeous Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side, the baths operated 24/7, with both the disco floor out front and the private rooms in the back serving thousands of patrons daily. Over time, growing bolder and more ambitious, it became a chic nightspot, a place-to-be-seen where straight couples on a night out would mingle with the towel-clad clientele to see the biggest cabaret stars of the day. In a monumental coup for the opera-loving Ostrow, Eleanor Steber, diva of The Met, would record a live album there during a "black towel" event. Over time, the baths would serve as a precursor to disco-era hotspots such as Studio 54.

The film gives us plenty of colourful stories to bring the Continental's heyday to life — and it doesn't stint on reminding us that this was a sexually-charged space for men to fuck (a point that Michael Musto gets across with great relish.) And yet, it's the attachment to the broader social context — and the people who made it possible — that make this memorable. (The screening was also elevated by a lively Q&A with gregariously argumentative director Ingram, who came across as the sort of person you'd want to hang out and have a beer with.)

The film screened with the short Death of a Bathhouse (Dir: Rolyn Chambers, 11 minutes, Canada), which put a local spin on some of the same issues. Tracking the last days of the St. Marc's Spa, the film includes some musings on the changes in bathhouse culture, as well as a look at the commitment to art (with "curated" rooms similar to those at the Gladstone) that made this spot unique. Slightly shaky source images ("I'd been up for about thirty hours straight at the time," Chambers commented of the Spa's hectic last weekend, when he'd shot the footage) is fleshed out with interviews from a who's-who of local queer artists, including Sky Gilbert, Keith Cole (interviewed in his bubble bath!), Drasko Bogdanovic and Shane MacKinnon. A nice remembrance of some local history.

Inside Out 2013: Reviews #2

Reviews of screenings from the Inside Out LGBT Film Festival, Toronto, Canada.

Mixed Shorts: Local Heroes [shorts programme]

Genre, mood, and orientation are all rubbing elbows together in this program that is unified by its local content. There's also a mix of fully-realized ideas, quick hits, and pieces that we might optimistically say show promise. But it's always rewarding to see familiar sights and sounds up on the big screen. In roughly descending order, here's how the programme shook out for me.

The gem of the bunch is definitely For Dorian (Dir: Rodrigo Barriuso, 16 minutes, Australia/Canada), the story of a bourgeois father who has good reason to be protective of his son Dorian. But as he's growing older and learning to conceal things, there are a few signs — a new "friend", a possibly non-meteorological interest in the TV weatherman — that Dorian needs space and independence. Sweet in tone and nicely-observed, Dylan Harman gives a nice turn in the title role with a shy smile and a glint in his eye.

Also quite excellent is Dependent (Dir: Stephanie Markowitz, 4 minutes, Canada), a new music video from Reg Vermue's Light Fires project. (Attendees will also have been grooving to some Light Fires in the festival's trailer.) I've heard this number in live performance for a little while now, but the studio version — performed as a duet with Owen Pallett — ups the ante considerably. Markowitz matches that with a stylish concept that puts us in the middle of the first-we-break-up/then-we-make-up-dynamic. After its première at Inside Out, expect to catch this on a small screen near you.

How would you fare if you had to look in a camera and give an honest account of your choices? I'm Yours (Dir: Chase Joynt, 5 minutes, Canada) puts us face-to-face with two individuals who have both experienced a transition, albeit in opposite directions. Shot against identical white backgrounds, the film cuts between multimedia artist Nina Arsenault and her unnamed counterpart as they have an open conversation about their identities and their changes. Their responses humanize them while giving us a hint of the variety within the trans experience. Brave, forthright, and admirably concise.

Also admirably concise is Shawn (Dir: Mark Zanin, 4 minutes, Canada), where a pair of guests at a funeral each make some surprising discoveries about their dead lover. This gets its laughs from its premise and ducks out without lingering too long.

Knowing how far to stretch out a concept is a bit of a problem for a couple films here. Happy 16th Birthday Kevin (Dir: Jen Markowitz, 11 minutes, Canada) dives head-first into the dark, dark world of its tormented goth protagonist with over-the-top glee, but the deadpan tone is hard to sustain without drying into dust. Still, while hanging out at a particularly awkward birthday celebration, it gives a nice portrait of loving/oblivious parents and the circles of social exclusion — and the chance that there might be someone out there to take us away from all of this.

Stormcloud (Dir: Kate Johnston, 14 minutes, Canada) feels a bit too much like two films jammed together. Its comedic centrepiece, with Vi, a heartbroken artist, inviting a pair of door-to-door bible-thumpers to come in off the porch and say their piece gets some laughs, especially from Mandy May Cheetham whose barely-repressed desires make it unclear who's going to convert whom. But the dramatic wraparound structure doesn't work as well and its metaphors of storm clouds and silver linings are rather too obvious.

It might be my general lack of interest in celebrity culture that kept me from feeling too engaged by Her With Me (Dir: Alyssa Pankiw, 13 minutes, Canada), where a local-girl-made good takes up with a townie while trying to conceal the nature of her tryst from the paparazzi. We have paparazzi in Toronto? Best element here is some well-deployed Army Girls tunes in the soundtrack.

Breaking and Entering (Dir: Andrew Hull, 6 minutes, Canada) feels more like an extended trailer for an impressionistic arthouse feature than a compelling story on its own merit, but might engage those satisfied with a more symbolic cinematic style.

Jason's Dad (Dir: Matthew Campea, 13 minutes, Canada) has died with a secret in this short that could be subtitled "Every Melodramatic Canadian Film Ever". The grim, repressed melancholy is so thick here that the film verges on self-parody, while the plot turns on a smartphone without a password and monumental surprise at someone having a queer bit on the side, both of which seem a little implausible in 2013. Meanwhile, bask in the muted, muddy palette and simmering, brooding expressions.

Screens: Thursday, May 30, 7:00 p.m. @ TIFF Lightbox 1

Hot Guys With Guns (Dir: Doug Spearman, 110 minutes, UK)

Pitching itself as "Boystown meets Chinatown", one might have guessed that this film would be some campy fun in the vein of Lethal Weapon-esque 80's action flicks. But don't expect a parody. The film takes itself much more seriously, and has ambitions of being a bona fide comedy-thriller. Sadly, however, it just doesn't pull it off.

Someone is on a crime spree, knocking out and robbing the participants at Hollywood's upscale gay sex parties. The discreet nature of these events is enough to keep anyone from calling the police, and it's not until rich, unlikable Pip (Brian McArdle) loses the watch he inherited from his father that anyone seems inclined to investigate. His former flame Danny Lohman (Marc Anthony Samuel) is taking a PI course to prepare for an acting role, and despite himself he gets pulled in to untangle the caper. Along the way, there's a romance angle as we find that the pair still-kinda-maybe have feelings for each other.

The plot elements hold together, but at nearly two hours things feel generally bloated, especially with all the hammy acting along the way. Samuel brings an easy, natural affability to Danny, but the rest of the cast generally bogs things down. That makes it hard to care too much as things unwind. The secondary characters generally fail to engage, except for Pip's shrill, presumably-meant-for-comic-relief lush of a mother who leaves a negative, we-couldn't-afford-Jessica-Walter impression.

Most of the other elements are unsatisfying as well. In the style of PG-13 action movies, don't expect any nudity besides a few bums and don't be surprised at the rather chaste bondage party. There are some undertones of racism and class conflict in the dynamic between Pip and Danny, but they don't really go anywhere interesting. In the end, this is neither good enough to be good nor bad enough to be entertaining, and the film's made-for-cable aesthetic will ultimately see it consigned to the status of bland product, gay twist or no. Not recommended.

Screens: Friday, May 31, 7:30 p.m. @ TIFF Lightbox 1