Vancouver International Film Festival: Woodend's Picks

One day a movie will get made about the process of putting together the Vancouver International Film Festival. It is deeply deserving of a film all its own (I can attest as an insider who helps write the guide). I've already done some casting for VIFF: The Movie in my head, and sketched out the initial narrative, but the problem is no one would believe it.

While you wait for VIFF: The Movie to get made, there are a lots of other large scale dramas this year at the festival -- more than any one human can see. The five-hour epic that is Olivier Assayas's Carlos, plus the Cannes-award winners, Of Gods and Men, Certified Copy and the more homely pleasures of Putty Hill. In looking at the lineup of films at the VIFF this year, the mind boggles under the sheer number of films on offer.

'Protektor'

The very first film out of the gate this year is director Marek Najbrt's Protektor, the Czech Republic's entry to the Academy Awards last year. Art directed to within an inch of its life, the film most often resembles a Bauhaus photograph come to frenzied life.

The story is set in Prague, during the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, and concerns the fate of one couple. He is a radio producer, she is an actress, and neither one is initially all that sympathetic. Self-interested, vain and ambitious, they barely seem to notice when the Germans come to town.

Before long, however, the streets of the city are riddled with signs forbidding Jewish citizens from entering stores, restaurants and movie theatres. The occupiers install a new power structure at the city's radio station, dispatch all dissidents and begin broadcasting propaganda, disguised as feel-good treacle, to lull the locals into a false sense of normality.

Emil Vrbata (Marek Daniel) uses the changes to his own advantage, becoming the voice of the nation, bedding women and growing a sleek fat ego in the process. Meanwhile, his wife Hana (Jana Plodkov), forbidden to work because she is Jewish, begins a curious relationship with a junkie film projectionist. Even as the Nazi threat looms thicker and darker with each passing day, the couple persists in thinking that they can somehow continue on. But history has a habit of squashing everything in its path, like a Panzer tank rolling over a tricycle. Personal collusions and betrayals on the domestic front mirror the larger scale events.

As Emil locks his wife in the bathroom, ostensibly to save her from herself, then later accidentally steals a bicycle that is implicated in the assassination of a high-ranking Nazi official, events begin to converge into one irrevocable course. Love, courage and sacrifice crumble and fail before the iron force of history on the move.

The film's final scene makes this process explicit, as all the film's whirling dervish of stylistic tricks dissolve into a slow and anonymous march. Individual suffering is washed away, disappearing into the anonymity of time and tragedy.

'Mamas and Papas'

Drama on a more homely scale forms the meat of Alice Nellis's film Mamas and Papas. The act of parenting, whether desired or not, is one of the central dramas of human life. The film follows four different couples, each engaged with getting and having, losing and loving children. Tragedy and joy intertwine so closely that it is nearly impossible to pick them apart. Iva, a 40-something physician who counsels couples that are trying to have children, has suffered the unbearable loss of her own young daughter.

Some of her patients include an older couple using every conceivable means (quite literally) to get pregnant including invitro-fertilization, hormone shots and even sex with other people, all to no avail. When they finally decide to try the adoption route, the bureaucratic complexity is almost as complicated as the physical process.

Meanwhile, two other couples are facing unwanted pregnancy with equal amounts of guilt, trepidation and uncertainty. Nellis employed an improvisational process during the making of the film, which gives the film a lovely touch of verité.

'When We Leave'

Sometimes when you know too much about a film before you actually see it, you approach it like you would an angry snake. If you are then required to write about it, the process feels like putting your arm down and waiting for the snake to bite. You know it is going to hurt, you just don't know when or how the pain is going to come. This is the feeling I had upon reading about When We Leave. I knew enough to expect tragedy, and I wasn't disappointed.

The film begins with a young woman named Umay (Sibel Kekilli from Fatih Akin's Head-On) sneaking away from her traditional Muslim family to undergo an abortion. When she returns home to her violent husband, the strictures under which she lives are made clear. She is little more than a sexual slave. Umay flees to her own family in Germany with her young son Cem, but there is no safe place for her there either. When she tells her father that her husband beat her, he says, "The hand that strikes is also the hand that soothes," and orders her to return home.

Feo Aladag's film is drawn directly from headlines where honour killings in traditional Muslim families have become more prevalent and more vicious in recent years. In this closeted and insular world, if a woman has sex outside of marriage, leaves her husband or seeks a divorce, she brings dishonour upon her family, and killing her is the only way to win back the family's respect within the community.

As Umay moves between women's shelters and shabby apartments, the one constant in her life is her love for her little boy. Making a better life for Cem fuels her as much as her own need for self-determination. The most painful aspect of Aladag's debut drama is that that love is Umay's undoing. She loves her family, and her repeated attempts to create some type of reconciliation are heartbreaking because they are desperate and genuine.

Beautifully made, but ferocious in its intent and underlying anger, When We Leave forces you to inhabit one woman's reality. As difficult as it is to feel, even vicariously, what is happening to Umay and her family, it is critical to understand how oppression and control masquerading in the guise of honour impact on men, women and children.

Ultimately, that's what art can do: inject empathy and compassion; which can be as painful as something sinking its teeth into you, and refusing to let go. It is not an experience that you can easily forget.

'Love and Other Demons'

Love of another stripe runs molten through Hilda Hidalgo's adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez's celebrated novel. Forbidden love is just so damn hot, even when it occurs between a teenage girl and a Catholic priest. Set against the rich and rotting tapestry that is 18th-century Cartagena, García Marquez's story begins with young Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles and her black nanny traveling through the jungle to partake in pagan rituals. Sierva's father, the Marquis, is listless and plagued by boils, while her mother never leaves the shelter of her darkened bedroom.

When Sierva is bitten by a rabid dog and consigned to the local nunnery, a young priest is sent to establish whether her condition is demonic in origin. Love, which can be easily mistaken for rabies, erupts between the pair, and all hell breaks loose.

Sex has a way of overthrowing all practicalities and responsibilities. Even God's divine will is not enough to keep it at bay. As the film's title so aptly states, it is akin to a demonic possession. The film steps lightly over the more queasy elements of love between a teenager and her much older lover.

It is best not to take things terribly literally when it comes to Márquez's magical realism. It is rich and heady stuff, and one could easily drown in its foaming waters. One can read the film as a clash between life in all its profligacy and religious strictures, jungle fecundity meets the stiff frocked vestments of the Catholic clergy. The libidinal energy versus the civilizing forces of culture and society represented symbolically.

As Jung once wrote: "It is the energy that manifests itself in the life process and is perceived subjectively as striving and desire."

Dylan Thomas put it more beautifully:

"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer."

That's probably tattooed on Angelina Jolie somewhere, or soon will be.

More good bets

There is of course, lighter fare on offer, including comedy (Josh Appignanesi's The Infidel), animation (Garri Bardin's The Ugly Duckling, Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist and a new film from Jan Švankmajer), science fiction (Gareth Edward's Monsters), zombie sex gore (Bruce LaBruce's L.A. Zombie) and a rubber tire that possess telekinetic powers (Quentin Dupieux's Rubber), which sound rather enticing when you string them together in a row.

One of the things that I am most excited about for this year's festival is the fact that the Park Theatre on Cambie will be a VIFF venue. Now I can traipse right across the street and see a bevy of extraordinary films.

Speaking of which, as soon as VIFF: The Movie is greenlighted, I'll let you know.