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Sundance? Stick with Victoria

Charms of the Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival.

Dorothy Woodend 27 Jan 2006TheTyee.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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It is film festival season, and if you've been following the Sundance buzz, the word is tractor sex (ok that's two words). Not sex on tractors, but sex with tractors: man and machine are finally melded into one. If you think this sounds like it could end up with one of the parties in traction, instead of in a tractor, you might be right. Destricted might have had people wandering dazedly out of the theatre, and trying to hump a Hummer, but that's what festivals are about, the chance to see (and do) things slightly off the beaten path.

With that in mind, hop on a BC ferry, (please refrain from sticking anything in the fore or aft,) and head to our capital city. It might not be Sundance, or Rotterdam, or even Berlin, but there are pleasures to be had closer at hand, and I'm not talking about Onan: Death Valley.

The Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival starts this Friday with Mozartballs (I tell you, the jokes just write themselves). Larry Weinstein's film is the story of a woman named Steph Waller, who thinks she is really Mozart trapped in a woman's body. Luckily enough, her girlfriend, Lynette, thinks so, too. That is just the beginning of Weinstein and writer Thomas Wallner's balls-to-the-wall, Mozart-style romp through an ensemble of genuine eccentrics and oddballs. So many balls, so little time.

A world of independent meanings

It also sets the tone for a festival that is out there. The programming is diverse -- divided into Canadian features, documentaries, shorts and world cinema -- but it's the word independent that jumps out at you. It's not an easy word to use, coming as it does, with a heavy freight of meaning. Among other Canadian films festivals (the giants of Vancouver and Toronto, as well as a host of smaller events) where does Victoria fit in? Do they even want to fit in? Or are they content to forge their own way, out there on their own, on the very edge of Canada, before a whole lot of ocean. This is a jumping off point, but there are some strong currents at work here, and one in particular is the ability to program smaller independently made films.

Independent is pretty much the modus operandi of Sombrio Beach, a documentary from local filmmaker Paul Manly. Sombrio Beach, so-named by the Spanish for its dark cast, has been the home to diverse tides of people, miners, a native fishing village and finally surfers and hippies. In the 1990s, the BC government bought the land from a private owner and incorporated Sombrio beach into Juan de Fuca Provincial Park, thereafter to be home to a constant stream of grey, wrinkly hikers in their Gortex outfits, and young men hefting cases of beer. Manly began filming during the tearing down process and carefully recreated the community's history, with the help of personal photographs and interviews with the people who once called the beach their home. You can virtually smell the wood smoke and feel what it's like to wake up in a tent on a cold damp morning. The community hung together for over thirty years, before BC Parks, the little green men in their little green outfits, "chainsawed their houses in half and set them on fire."

The film focuses mostly on longtime Sombrio residents, including Rivermouth Mike, who lives up to his moniker and the Johnson-Oke family, two parents and a mess of kids, who grew up surfing before they could walk. The film can be seen as part of a larger trend of shutting down the various hidey-holes where the freaks and weirdoes can live and let their freak flags fly. Unlike the Paris Commune of 1871, no one was shot by the French Army, but life was never quite the same afterwards. Tragedy, even on such a small scale, comes down to the idea of live free or die.

The Koots

In the press material for the film, Carol Roy, an instructor from Trent University, states, "Sombrio is about a sense of place and brings together the threads of sustainable lifestyle, history and ownership of land, and the stories of creative individuals who dared to live by their passion, skills and ingenuity away from the consumer world." In other words: they paved paradise, and put up a provincial park. Sombrio Beach premieres Sunday, January 29th at Plan-B (1318 Broad St. at 9:30pm).

If the beauty of Vancouver Island doesn't get you, the beauty of the Kootenays certainly will in director Aubrey Nealon's paean to place, A Simple Curve. Although this is a fictionalized version of the hippie experience, I'm here to tell you it comes pretty close to the real thing. The film opens in regular, old theatres February 3rd, but if you'd like to gaze on majestic vistas, then come and take a gander. Unlike many made-in-BC films, this is well made, beautifully photographed production and the acting isn't eye-bleedingly awful either, thankfully.

However, the thespians are up against some major competition. The Koots outshine just about everything else in the movie. I spent twelve years -- age five to age 17 -- staring at this same landscape (that's me in the red pants with the horse!) Having been part of many generations of Kootenay dwellers, I couldn't help but think, I've seen this all before. I think I've had the same conversation, practically word for word, about carob that the central character has in the film. The pull of place is a difficult thing, no getting away from it. This is a young man's film, and that's not necessarily bad, concerning as it does, men and their father(s), all two of them. In this film, women are either dead, or not central to the process. Still it deserves its due; it's clean, well made and a nice piece of craftsmanship.

The rest of the Canadian contingent is rounded out with a strong showing from Quebec, including Claude Gagnon's Kamataki, winner of the Fipresci International Film Critic and People's Choice at the Montreal Film Festival. The film tells the story of a young man who comes back to life while working as a potter with his elderly uncle in Japan. The film is also screening as part of the Kinderfilmfest/14plus 2006: Migration and Family at the Berlin Film Festival.

For horror fans, there is a couple of Quebec films: Sigma from young helmer Jesse Heffring, which won the CineMuerte winner for Best Canadian Film of 2005, and Director Robin Aubert's St. Martyrs of the Damned, which functions both as a Lynchian creep fest and an indictment of Quebec culture's endless self-replication.

Documentaries

There are some truly interesting films in the nonfiction category including: Boys of Baraka, FUCK, a/k/a Tommy Chong, Going through Splat: The Life and Work of Stewart Stern, Zizek and Workingman's Death. The latter pair is the most profound, but Stewart Stern is also an interesting choice. This is a man who was, in essence, born to tell stories. First-time filmmaker Jon Ward is a little unsteady with shaping his film; stories begin and then simply go nowhere, but he is blessed with a central subject who is riveting when he just sits and talks. A case in point is Stern recounting his experiences as a soldier in the Battle of the Bulge. When Stern is allowed to tell a story, the film is fascinating -- as much an indictment of the Hollywood machine as it is the story of one individual and his extraordinary life.

In the more extreme category, there is the Canadian premiere of Fuck, featuring appearance from Alanis Morissette, Bill Maher, Kevin Smith, Ice-T, pornstar Ron Jeremy, anchorman Sam Donaldson, comedian Janeane Garofalo and the late, great Hunter S. Thompson. Director Steve Anderson (The Big Empty) uses animation from Bill Plympton to tell an interesting tale of Fuck's ancestry, development, and the future of the word, which is more than the tense "will be fucked." The word itself is used a total of 629 times in every possible way, noun, verb, adjective and good old-fashioned expletive. Which would make it the all-time champ according to a recent poll, which rated the number of swear-words in a narrative film. Top prize was taken by Rod Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, which clocked in at a grand total of 560, although there is still some fucking debate on the topic.

Anderson's documentary recently screened at the AFI in Los Angeles, where the following exchange, according to IndieWire, took place: "So, what was your fucking budget for this fucking film." This was one of the questions posed to the film's producer during the Q & A session following the screening. The answer, of course, was, "None of your fucking business!"

World cinema

Although a number of films in the international category screened at the VIFF this year, this is a good opportunity to catch some you may have missed. Mon Ami Machuca from director Andrés Wood is Chile's submission to the Academy Awards, and well worth seeing. As is Omagh, the retelling of the IRA bombing that killed 31 people in a small Irish town. It is not an easy film to watch, but necessary. So too, Le Grand Voyage, which won the Luigi De Laurentiis Prize at the Venice Film Festival for best first feature.

A number of films have already opened with limited runs elsewhere, such as Fateless, and Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic, while still others are having their BC premiere at the festival. In addition, there are a number of North American premieres including 33x Around the Sun, The Taming of the Shrew and Loach is Fish Too from director Yang Ya-zhou and starring Ni Ping. If there is any one film to fill up your dance cad, or card, either word is appropriate here, then save some space for Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in Michael Winterbottom's Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.

Tristram Shandy, the unfilmable novel from Laurence Sterne, has been filmed, which is akin to catching a wild goose on the wing. This is a movie within a movie within a movie, within a prolonged comedy sketch. Where does reality leave off and reality begin? Such is the question that also plagues Sternes' eponymous character, who keeps doubling back to revisit his own birth, his accidental circumcision and other life changing events. The novel made Sterne a literary superstar, a po-mo-hero, before there was even such as thing as mo (meaning modernism). Don't leave before the end credits roll, or you will miss one of the funniest bits in the entire film.

Continuing the British smarty pants invasion is Taming of the Shrew, a modern retelling of Shakespeare's old chestnut with Shirley Henderson as the hellion who won't be tamed, by man, beast or tractor. All other pants invasions are of more carnal nature.

Sex, sex, so much sex

But does sex really make everyone lose his or her collective minds? Perhaps, it does. But then it was meant to, designed by biology to supersede all rational thought, which is the most interesting thing about it. No wonder intellectuals have such a difficult time with it, artists too. Just ask Caveh Zahedi, who has made an entire career out of his sexual dysfunctions. Zahedi brings new meaning to the phrase "coming soon to a theatre near you," in I Am a Sex Addict, the director's largely autobiographical exploration of the mystery that is horny. Now that Woody Allen, as an actor at least, is tottering off the screen, Zahedi seems poised to take his place. This film follows his meandering journey from France to California, and finally to Sex Addicts Anonymous, which if his subsequent seven-year marriage is any indication, seems to have done the trick, (a trick that any number of prostitutes couldn't), and solved his problem. But then again, they don't call it the seven year itch for nothing.

Victoria isn't Park City, Utah. Despite the presence of some big sexy features, it isn't quite as out there as Sundance, and maybe that's for the best.

British artist Sam Taylor-Wood interviewed recently in the Observer about her contribution to the Destricted omnibus has this to say about fellow artist Matthew Barney's contribution: "It's complete genius. Who else would have thought of a man inside an articulated lorry, being rubbed by a part of that lorry? And then, when you look closely, you see that he's got a turnip up his arse."

Stick with Victoria; just don't stick anything anywhere else.

Dorothy Woodend reviews films for The Tyee every Friday.  [Tyee]

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