Heading up the Hill

Attending the Whistler Film Festival is always an interesting experience. First of all because the festival is in Whistler, which, whatever its allure if you are a skier, is a strange place for a film festival. Whistler Village, an alpine fantasia or a commercialized snow fort, or however you'd like to describe it, is a little like Pleasure Island for the wintery set, filled with roaming gangs of party dudes, of both genders, braying and carrying on something fierce.

Even if you have nothing to do with the world of strapping bits of wood on your feet and sliding down hills, it may strike you as a terrifically odd place. Why are so many Australians drawn there, for example? Whistler is crawling with young men and women from Australia, a great many of them are serving coffee and bagels, or working in an Internet café.

Over the years that I've been to the festival, I've had my fair share of curious, enlivening experiences, almost all of them film related, so drag your filthy mind from the gutter. Listening to Robert Lantos, Atom Egoyan or Norman Jewison talk about their work was not only interesting, but often downright fascinating. Jewison's story about Dolly Parton and Ronald Reagan lingers especially -- OK, you can let your mind get extra filthy now, if you'd like. Speaking of dirty Whistler experiences, one of the dirtiest was being treated to clips of Cynthia Dale in the Lantos-produced aerobics film Heavenly Bodies, which boasted the tagline of "Working out... Reaching high... Dreaming big!" (Which I plan to adopt as my personal motto one day.)

Nothing can quite compare in terms of sheer weirdness, however, to the incident in which I wandered in, quite by accident, to a skiing film. It had all the trapping of porn, a lot of orgiastic groaning coming from the audience and plenty of white stuff. But all the film consisted of was scene after scene of people on skis jumping off cliffs, kicking off plumes and sprays of white powder, falling on their heads. I watched the proceedings for about 20 minutes or so, waiting for something else to happen, or for the real narrative to begin, but it never did. After a while, I tiptoed away, leaving the dreadlocked men and women in toques and boots to their revels.

Bumbling humans on Mount St. Elias

This year I had a similar experience watching adventure film Mount St. Elias, which chronicles the efforts of a band of Austrian skiers and mountain climbers to scale the heights of one of Alaska's most remote and inhospitable mountains. Not only climb the damn thing, but ski down it. The film has more bombast than a Celine Dion show, but it is oddly funny, even touching in places, perhaps without meaning to be. As the men, Austrians Axel Naglich and Peter Ressman, along with American free-ski dude Jon Johnston, make their first attempt to ski the bottom half of the mountain, their exchanges reveal a cultural divide between the maniacally purposeful Austrians and their less than thrilled Yankee colleague. The most impressive thing in the entire film is the mountain itself, prone to weather that kills human beings in an instant, and already boasting a couple of dead skiers on its heights. Even as the humans bumbling about its sides, downing as much Red Bull as they manage, claim to have conquered its might and majesty, Mount St. Elias retains its lofty and remote character. All the Red Bull-fueled hubris in the world cannot touch it.

For me, the parties and schmoozing and wandering through the snow, in boots that really had no business being outside of a mall, is only a small part of the festival. Although it must be said, I don't think I've ever experienced colder feet than I have at Whistler. A few festivals back, I even forgot to pack socks and had to take off my ridiculous boots whenever the theatre lights went down and basically fold my feet into my armpits to get them to unthaw. But enough of your personal meanderings, what of the films, you ask?

A festival of surprises

Whistler's programming has always been pretty idiosyncratic. In years past, choices like Takashi Miikes phastasamgorical kid's film Yôkai daisensô (or the Great Goblin War) or Stéphane Lafleur's Continental, a Film Without Guns (Continental, un Film sans Fusil), which picked up the Borsos prize two years ago, were emblematic of the eclectic and good-natured spirit of the festival. There have been plenty of other memorable offerings, including films like Air Guitar Nation, Tristram Shandy. I could go on. Bill Evans, the festival's previous programmer could never be accused of dullness, nor a lack of humour. Anyone who programs a retrospective of Uwe Boll films is in my good books forever. Even if I hate the man's films, it's an interesting choice. This is the first festival for the festival's new artistic director Stacey Donen, and while there's no BloodRayne this year, there is Best Worst Movie.

There is a number of other equally intriguing films on offer including Tom Ford's directorial debut A Single Man, which has generated a fair amount of buzzing, Sook Yin Lee's Year of Carnivore, and documentaries such as Mighty Uke, Pax Americana, and Last Train Home all look worth lining up in the snow for.

The intelligent and the muscular

The festival's opening film sets the pace in terms of odd choices. The Trotsky from director Jacob Tierney is a really weird film. I don't mean that in a negative sense, it simply starts off weird and keeps going. The story concerns one Leon Bronstein, a Montreal teenager, who believes he is the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky and sets out the relive the famous Bolshevik's life, all over again. The film owes a lot to Wes Anderson's Rushmore, with its depiction of a precocious high school genius in love with a much older woman. But it's purely Canadian, Montreal specifically -- the city never looked so good, warm and burnished, and lushly romantic. The film also benefits from an all-star roster of Canadian actors, Saul Rubinek, Colm Feore and the exquisite Geneviève Bujold.

Another equally curious offering is Brian Nash's Out of the Woods, which, despite its title, heads back into the local forests with some larger than life characters including Bus Griffiths. Born in 1913, Bus bounced from adventure to odd job and back again until he became a logger in the 1930s. Felling trees by hand wasn't the safest job in the world, but men getting beheaded in the bush didn't seem to faze Bus, nor having his shoulder nearly sheared off in a felling accident. He captured his adventures in a graphic novel called Now You're Logging that details a time, place and manner of working long since departed. Although Bus's drawings of tough men engaged in hard work recall Tom-of-Finland style occasionally, there is immense charm in these stories of men passing on their knowledge, or feats of daring and prowess that still boggle the mind. Tales of fallers throwing their hats in the air and then leaping downwards to beat their own hats to the ground were, according to Bus Griffiths, actually true. Other equally large characters interviewed in the film include eco-forester Merve Wilkinson, chainsaw artist George Sawchuk, and hellraiser Betty Krawczyk. Out of the Woods has some problems; it would benefit from less sappy music and few intertitles with way fewer exclamation points, but the material is strong, literally. One man tells a story about catching his 65-year-old father dead lift 300 pounds at a machine shop, when a forklift wasn't available. Old timers had muscles, forged from years in the bush, that were so hyper developed they looked almost like a deformities. It's these little details that stick out in the film.

I think they must have built people tougher back then, or at least with a greater capacity for suffering and endurance. The opportunity to hear their stories is deeply valuable.

The experience of being at Whistler proper is impossible to separate from the festival itself, but the thing that I like most about it isn't the boozy parties, or the swag bags, or even the free brie and strawberries, it's discovering curious films, from near and far.