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Film

Woodend's VIFF Survival Guide

With hundreds of films, how to possibly find gold? Our reviewer sharpens her pick.

Dorothy Woodend 20 Sep 2014TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about film every other week for The Tyee. Find her previous articles here.

Vancouver is currently blanketed in approximately six million giant eyeballs. They leap out at you from every billboard, follow you around the Internet, and coat the entire sides of moving buses. It's as if the giant lidless eye of Sauron is watching you from every street corner. Suddenly, I have a whole new appreciation for the fortitude of one Bilbo Baggins.

They signify, of course, that the Vancouver International Film Festival has come to town. VIFF is a big festival -- that much is explicitly clear. But how to make sense of it all? Do you spend hours reading film reviews and festival reports, and then choose a few select titles? Or do you go full throttle, take your holidays, pack a pillow and a brown-bag lunch and disappear into the dark of the theatres for two weeks? There are hardcore folks who are willing to do just that, and bless their cantankerous little heads.

But in all frankness, I don't know if Blitzkrieging it is the best way to go. First off, it's a little on the masochistic side. Also, there's a price to be paid. If you watch a lot of films, especially those that deal with difficult matters, you need to pay attention. Suffering and sadness should not be sloughed off like so much dead skin so that you can get to your next six screenings. Be reasonable. Pick a human amount of films to watch and give your old self some time to wander outside occasionally. Eat real food, talk to your friends and family, or even the person standing behind you in the bathroom queue.

If you only have time and resources to see a half dozen or so films, you must choose wisely. Three hundred or so odd films is a lot of films. At first glance it can seem a bit overwhelming, even for those of us who work in the festival world and are familiar with the titles on offer, having seen, or read, or heard tell of them for a while. Many have been on the march from festival to festival, accruing reviews and awards.

A bit of research can provide you with some safe bets. For starters, you can't go too wrong with anything from the Cannes Film Festival, the Dardenne Brothers, or Godard. Don't worry about films that are bound to get a commercial release in a couple of weeks. The bragging rights of seeing a film before anyone else aren't what they used to be in this era of VOD and Edward Teach levels of piracy. Reese Witherspoon's new film Wild will no doubt be released in commercial theatres, so don't feel badly if you miss it at VIFF.

Eric Kohn recently wrote a piece for Indiewire talking about the fact that he skipped the opening film of the Toronto International Film Festival (The Judge starring Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall), and felt nary a qualm about it. His essential point is summed up in the final paragraph of his article: “Although TIFF showcases all kinds of movies, the innumerable distributors in town have different agendas. They want movies that will find commercial footing beyond the festival grounds. Together with the media, they're drawn to familiar faces and themes. The fixation on the tentpoles means that even a potentially brilliant movie at TIFF may end up getting buried.”

The big films have all the power and resources, and can often get eyeballs through sheer onslaught alone. All that the little guy, or little film, has is the power of its story, originality, and for want of a better word, authenticity. You know it when you see it: the sting in the tip of your nose and the glissando slide up your vertebra.

I've been obsessing over big versus little for weeks now, and after a while it starts to seem like it's the only story there is. The ridiculously brilliant Andrew Nikiforuk, writing one of the best pieces I've read about the Ebola outbreak right here in the Tyee, summed up the current state of the world in one perfect paragraph. “Large global institutions, from banks to corporations, tend to cultivate misery and inequality. Bigness doesn't care about local ecologies, let alone serving local needs. In many cases bigness just obliterates those realities and supports more bigness.”

Big Oil, big government and big money are ranged against us poor wee humans, grinding down little kids, school teachers, raggedy hippies and old folks. It is not much of fair fight.

Little done right

In Vancouver, the struggle between big and little is taking place on almost every street corner, with small houses and neighbourhoods disappearing under massive developments that loom like aircraft carriers, bristling with glass and buttressed with marketing blather. And still they keep coming, endless Borg-like buildings, squashing pipsqueak mom and pop establishments in their wake.

You see it most clearly in a VIFF film like Julia Kwan's Everything Will Be, which examines the rapid destruction of Vancouver's Chinatown. As elderly shopkeepers watch from their windows, buildings are torn down in quick succession, replaced by new condominiums or art galleries for the extremely wealthy, men who can afford to hold onto a piece of the past like it is a possession.

It is a deeply elegiac film, especially for those of us who grew up in Vancouver and have watched it change, piece by piece. But there's also a weird feeling of passivity that suffuses the film; no one seems very angry, nor apt to fight back. Maybe this is a consequence of age. As one woman in the film notes, "I don't want to come back as a human being again in my next life."

A festival gem

The best thing about a big festival is finding a film that you can feel is your own personal discovery, a humble, human masterpiece. And I have one for you. Signe Baumane's deeply personal film Rocks in My Pockets uses daffy and often beautiful animation to tell the long twisting tale of mental illness and depression in her family, beginning with the story of her grandmother Anna.

One day in 1949, a poacher setting traps in the woods discovers Anna trying to drown herself in the river. Unfortunately, she had forgotten to stuff rocks in her pocket and had bobbed to the surface. Cut forward many years later to her granddaughter (Baumane herself) thinking through her own plan for self-annihilation, from coating the surface of a noose with soap to cut down on friction, to wearing an adult diaper in order to spare whomever discovers her dead body the work of cleaning up poo and pee. The combination of absurdity and pain sets the unique tone of the film.

Baumane describes Rocks in My Pockets as "a funny film about depression." In her director's statement she explains more fully: "The thing that interests me as an artist, one of the things, is the interaction of the inwardly personal with the outwardly social. We all have deeply personal experiences that we don't discuss, but we feel them, and when we externalize them, they become stories and most likely they become really removed from the original inner experience. I want to bridge the gap between the internal and external. I want to communicate what it really feels like to be alive and go to a dentist, or have sex, or be depressed."

The slippery protean nature of animation is the perfect medium for her story, as it winds and twists and suddenly blooms with images both cute and disturbing. The effect is disarming, and insinuates itself into your heart and your mind, rendering normal defences useless.

I wasn't familiar with Baumane's work until I saw Rocks a few months back. I then set about watching the many short films she's made, most of which are so honest and raw you may spit milk out of your nose while watching them. As long as you avoid milk, you'll be fine. They mostly have to do with sex at its most ridiculous, painful and hilarious moments. If you're not a prude, and who is these days (good old-fashioned prudery is hard to find), go and watch them.

The damaged truth

But back to the film at hand. As much a cultural history of Latvia as a familial one, Baumane's film kicks off with her beautiful and ambitious grandmother Anna, dreaming of being the first person in her family to go to school. When Anna gets a job with an entrepreneur/inventor named Indoless, the inevitable occurs. The couple falls in love, he leaves his first wife and Anna gets pregnant. So begins the long and winding road towards failed hopes, remaindered dreams and the failure of love. Abandoned by their families, Anna and Indoless move deep into the forest where they produce eight children. Successive waves of occupying soldiers, Russians and Germans cause endless amounts of suffering, but through it all Anna hauls water (40 buckets per day), raises rabbits for food, feeds and clothes her hungry kids, and has sex with her husband every night. The poor woman.

After a time, the yearning for the sweet release of death takes on physical form, becoming a large-eared grinning succubus that lives in the river and beckons every time she hauls water for cows and kids. Of Anna's surviving children, most go on to success and solid careers, kept afloat by their mother's iron will. But the second generation is not so lucky. Many of Baumane's cousins wind up committing suicide or being medicated into oblivion. Baumane herself finds the means to combat this ticking time bomb of genetic heritage in her own inimitable way. Even as her parents and family tell her that artists are whores and degenerates, she declares: "I am a working artist." But even this is not a means to combat the capering creature that lives inside her brain.

Standing in line at the grocery store, buying brown rice, chicken thighs and a pineapple, she feels the gentle prick inside that signals the beginning of a period of mental illness. For the next six weeks, she is hollowed out by a razor-edged balloon of pain so intense that the only thing that promises relief is the idea of hanging herself. This may sound grim, but Baumane's filmmaking is so blunt and forthright that it dispels fear and shame and leaves only understanding and acceptance. It takes courage to look at the most damaged and difficult parts of yourself and tell the truth about them, but that is exactly what this film does.

A few more picks

In addition to Rocks in My Pockets, there are a great many fine films at VIFF. Off the top of my head, I recommend Advanced Style. It's a lot of fun, and any fan of crazy old ladies and orange eyelashes will be utterly charmed. Large-scale, 3D presentations like Cathedrals of Culture or Goodbye to Language 3D also deserve to be seen on the big screen.

While it's true that some films need to be writ large, humble, fallible, fucked-up people in all their flabby, shabby particularity will always fascinate, no matter what.

I will have a few more VIFF picks next week.  [Tyee]

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