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.