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Film

Sifting the VIFF

A few picks from the wonderful (small) world of Vancouver's film fest.

Dorothy Woodend 2 Oct 2009TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend is the culture editor for The Tyee.

She has worked in many different cultural disciplines, including producing contemporary dance and new music concerts, running a small press, programming film festivals, and writing for newspapers and magazines across Canada and the U.S. She holds degrees in English from Simon Fraser University and film animation from Emily Carr University.

In 2020, she was awarded the Max Wyman Award for Critical Writing. She won the Silver Medal for Best Column at the Digital Publishing Awards in 2019 and 2020; and her work was nominated for a National Magazine Award for Best Column in 2020 and 2021.

Woodend is a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Vancouver Film Critics Circle. She was raised on the East Shore of Kootenay Lake and lives in Vancouver. Find her on Twitter @DorothyWoodend.

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Scene from 'Boy Interrupted'

I have come to deeply mistrust big. Be it big box stores, big business or big money.

I thought about this a great deal when the Toronto International Film Festival was happening, and the entire world seemed deluged in images of gleaming celebrities and their retinue of publicists, photographers and handlers. A fellow festival follower told me that many people she knew in Toronto had stopped going to TIFF simply because it had all become too much. The crowds, the parties, the hype. It didn't feel like it was for ordinary folk anymore, only for the armies of industry.

The VIFF is not the TIFF, thankfully. The Vancouver International Film Festival, for all its 300 plus films, is still a much more human affair. This is not to denigrate one and celebrate the other, although it may well sound that way, but if I had to choose between seeing a great film, and fighting for a glimpse of George Clooney, the choice wouldn't be difficult.

Family and farming

In among the larger themes of VIFF this year (oil, money, nature) many smaller themes emerged. Family was one such area, whether in documentary (This Way of Life, Boy Interrupted, Horse Boy, HomeGrown) or drama (Nora's Will, For a Son, Mammoth). Sometimes it is the smaller films that insinuate themselves into the delicate meat of your brain, and live there.

All of these aforementioned offerings are excellent, but This Way of Life from Canadian cinematographer and director Tom Burstyn is fascinating, not only for what it captures onscreen, but for what it reminds you of off screen. Namely, that not so long ago, many families lived quite differently from they way they do now. My son Louis often asks me about the olden days, when I was a kid and adults didn't endlessly monitor what children did. He is always thrilled by tales about breaking into our elementary school, or kids bringing knives to school (with which to hack down branches and build forts in the woods). That sense of freedom, rich and heady as wine, came flooding back to me during This Way of Life. I remembered what it felt like to fall off a horse and clamber back on, to live on the edge of what I thought I could do, just before I toppled over backwards and landed on my head.

The film follows the Karena family -- Peter, Colleen and their six wild children who live in New Zealand's rugged Ruahine Mountain range. The Karena's may be dirt-ass poor, but they also seem to be enjoying their life together immensely. They don't have a lot of stuff, but then they don't actually need a lot of stuff. Turns out that no one really does. As Peter hunts, trains horses and tries to find a home for his family, this freedom seems like it belongs to an earlier age. This is not to say that things are easy or simple for the Karena clan; they suffer their share of tragedy, poverty and plain old bad luck. But at the same time, their sense of independence and self-determination, for both parents and children, is thrilling.

HomeGrown is another take on a family working and living together, albeit in a quieter, more sedate fashion. The film follows the Dervaes family as they learn how to become entirely self-sufficient, growing more than 6,000 pounds of produce every year on a fifth of an acre. I can hear my mother snort that all this talk of micro-farming and urban agriculture is so much bullshit, that people have been farming since humans fell out of the trees. There is nothing new about growing food, it probably even predates prostitution as the world's oldest profession. But the point is that soon enough, we may have to learn these humble ordinary skills all over again.

The return to smallness is very much in the air at the moment. Witness the new issue of Sun Magazine that features an essay from everybody's favorite demagogue James Howard Kunstler. Kunstler has been writing, talking and carrying on about the need to return to smaller ways for a long while. And if ever there was a film that captured the remarkable beauty and dignity of a hand-made life it is The Way of Nature.

This is, perhaps, my favorite film in the entire festival. On a farm in Northern Sweden, director Nina Hedenius captures human drama and animal drama moving together in gentle cycles of birth, growth, death and then back to birth again. The deep, fundamental pleasure in witnessing things being made by hand, be it a fence, or a block of cheese, or even someone shoveling manure, is almost shocking in its immediacy. We are, after all, along with the cows, the chickens and the goats, physical creatures, subject to the same forces as every other type of animal. Watching this film felt like going home again, in the best sense of the word.

Small world, big money

A world away, but still the same old world, from these humble stories of family and farming is the curious arena of big money. Actually, make that insanely huge obscene money. There are a number of films that tackle the subject of global finances. It is very much in the zeitgeist at the moment (witness Michael Moore's latest, plus The End of Poverty?). Of the films especially chosen for the VIFF's new Follow the Money section, Erwin Wagenhofer's Let's Make Money is exceptional. It is global in nature, exhaustive in approach and ferocious in attack. Like his previous film, We Feed the World, that criss-crossed the globe, following the path of industrialized agriculture, this new documentary also walks the earth, following the route money takes, from the gold mines in South Africa, where gold is clawed out of the ground to its final resting place inside the gleaming vault of a Swiss bank. Wagenhofer intercuts economic theory with often startling images -- women and small children hammering rocks by hand in a huge open pit, or an enormous billboard for Deutsche Bank erected in the middle of an Indian slum.

But the most curious information is often imparted in the soothing tones of British bankers or Austrian financiers. One such example is the four streams of neo-liberalism laid out by an ex-financial worker John Christensen in the back seat of a London taxi. Christensen helpfully explains that the current economic reality began in the mid-70s with something called The Washington Consensus. According to Christensen, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund identified four key strands to help cement the future of what was to become neo-liberalism. "The first strand was to deregulate financial markets around the world, in other words to allow capital to move freely from one country to another. The second part was to liberalize trade flows... To break down the trade barriers. The third strand was to break, completely break, the hold of the states, to reduce the ability of the states to intervene to protect their citizens. The fourth strand was to require the states to privatize their industries."

All of this effectively moved power from the state to private interests.

The film does not stint on explaining exactly what happens to ordinary people through this process. As gold, cotton, water, oil and other resources are moved from one part of the world and hoarded in another, life expectancy, literacy levels and endemic poverty in poorer countries combine to produce spectacular levels of human misery. In Burkina Faso, for example, the entire country is dependent on the cotton crop, which must compete on the world market with heavily subsidized American producers. As one government official explains, this never-ending downward spiral will end with economic migration on a massive scale. "We will invade you, sure enough" he says.

Which is why, perhaps, that people with a lot of money are willing to pay highly for its protection, whether it be from private security forces or the American government.

John Perkins (familiar to VIFF audiences from last year's Confessions of an Economic Hitman) explains how people, or even countries, that don't play the financial game by the rules are quickly brought to heel through a combination of economic hit men, assassins (called jackals), and the entire U.S. army. Such was the case with Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who planned to sell oil for something other than U.S. dollars, and thus threatened the stability of the entire economic system. Hussein, according to Mr. Perkins, couldn't be corrupted or cajoled or even easily killed, so the military was sent in to bring him down. If Hussein had backed down, "He'd still be in running the country, and we'd be selling him jets and tanks, or whatever he wanted."

But overt military displays, shock and awe-type tactics are often the last resort. It is usually a much quieter and more insidious process, using money as leverage. Putting countries into huge states of debt and then demanding favours, is "Not illegal," says Perkins. "It should be, it isn't."

The process is similar to that employed by the mafia, only "more professional." Economic hit men identify a country that has resources that American corporations covet, be it oil or gold. The U.S. arranges a huge loan to that country through the World Bank, supposedly for some huge infrastructure-type mega-development. Once the project is complete, and the loan is due, what happens is that the ordinary citizens are left holding a huge debt that they can't possibly repay. According to Perkins, the economic hit men then go back to the impoverished country and say, "Listen, you owe us a lot of money, and you can't pay your debts, so give us a pound of flesh, sell your oil real cheap to us or vote with us on the next critical United Nations vote, or send troops to some place like Iraq."

The numbers do not lie. As the film's final indictment states, if all the money that was held in offshore untaxable accounts, some $11.5 trillion dollars, was taxed at a reasonable rate of return, governments around the world, would have an excess $250 billion dollars every year that they could spend on alleviating poverty, paying for education programs, healthcare, housing, and so on. Or here in B.C., maybe they could even reinstitute funding for the arts.

Watching a collection of films en masse is helpful, as it provides multiple viewpoints, like looking out of fractured lens of the eye of a fly. Thousands of smaller pictures add up to some bigger perspective. That's the idea, anyway. But after watching all these films, I feel the limitations of my own brain. I wish I was smarter, I wish I could grasp the bigger picture, somehow get a better hold on history even as it happens right in front of my eyes. That damn greater understanding eludes me, it dances just out of reach, taunting, "You want to understand, but you... just... don't... quite... get it."

But even if you only get a small piece at a time, isn't that enough?  [Tyee]

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