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October 5, 2009
VIFF part one: Religion, culture, music and more!
Blogging from the Vancouver International Film Festival: Part 1
by Peter T. Chattaway
With over 600 screenings of over 350 films, the
Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) currently ranks as one of the five biggest festivals in North America. But unlike, say, the Toronto or Sundance festivals, it doesn't get a lot of attention outside its tiny corner of the Pacific Northwest. Filmmakers don't come here looking for million-dollar distribution deals, and industry types don't bring their would-be blockbusters here in an effort to duplicate the promotional hype that they do so well at other festivals around the world.
Instead, the VIFF focuses on showing films from around the world, with a strong emphasis on documentaries, Asian films, and of course small independent films that are made by local casts and crews when they aren't busy working on the many American films and TV shows that are filmed here. (Sometimes Hollywood A-listers even get roped into the local scene. In 2002, while X2: X-Men United was being filmed here, there were frequent sightings of Ian McKellen at VIFF screenings -- and then, the next year, local filmmaker Carl Bessai brought a film to VIFF that McKellen had agreed to star in while he happened to be in town.)
This is my 16th year attending the festival, and it's not as easy as it used to be. I no longer live on my own downtown, a 15-minute walk from all but one of the theatres involved; instead, I am a full-time parent with a part-time job who lives an hour's commute away, out in the suburbs. So I wasn't able to attend any of the advance press screenings this year -- but I was able to watch a few screeners on DVD, and my wife has graciously agreed to take the next two weeks off from work so that I can catch as much of the festival as possible.
This post thus marks the first of an occasional series of notes from the VIFF, which began last Thursday (my birthday, as it happens) and runs to October 16.
The movie that opened the festival was A Shine of Rainbows (October 1, 2), a Canadian film which, like many Canadian films these days, takes place in the British isles -- specifically, in this case, Ireland. (What can I say, we're proud of our Celtic roots.) The film stars Connie Nielsen and Aidan Quinn as a childless couple who adopt a boy from an orphanage, and it shows how the boy, who has a speech impediment and is something of a social misfit, gradually comes to like his new home and his new neighbours. But while the mother and the boy hit it off right from the start, the father grumbles that his wife has picked "the runt of the litter," and so the question hanging over the film is whether the boy will get the approval, legal and otherwise, that he needs from both parents in order to stay out of the orphanage.
The film, directed by Vic Sarin (whose credits include Left Behind: The Movie!) and based on a book by Lillian Beckwith, is somewhat predictable -- the minute Nielsen made a certain promise to the boy, early in the film, I knew pretty much how the story's final half-hour would unfold -- and its nods to magic realism tend to fall flat; every time a CGI rainbow or an animatronic seal pops up, the movie breaks whatever spell it's trying to cast. But I found the performances by all three leads rather engaging, and at times even moving; Quinn is aging quite gracefully, Nielsen is radiant as ever, and John Bell, who plays the boy, is a real find.
I'll have more to say about the films that I am catching on the big screen in later posts. In the meantime, here are brief notes on a few that I saw in advance:
The only film I was able to see in advance that put Christian themes front and centre is, alas, one of the more negative or critical specimens. The Spanish film
Camino (October 9, 11, 14) concerns a terminally ill girl whose mother is a devout member of Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic group that was cast as the villain in
The Da Vinci Code. As the girl lies dying in the hospital, she has vivid fantasies of being an actress and playing with her boyfriend, among other things -- but her mother, who believes that family attachments are selfish and that the girl's suffering is a gift from God, interprets nearly everything her daughter says and does as a sign of religious devotion, the better to improve the girl's chances of canonization. That last detail might seem like a bit of a narrative stretch, but the film ends with a title card "dedicated" to
Alexia Gonzalez, a Spanish girl (similar to, but not identical to, the movie's protagonist) who died in 1985 and is "currently in the process of beatification" -- so the film's skepticism is ultimately aimed at something in real life.
Turning to other faiths, I did get to see a documentary called
Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam (October 3, 5), which offers a fascinating look at young North American Muslims -- most significantly a convert from Irish-American Catholicism named Michael Muhammad Knight -- whose rebellion against both mainstream culture and the pieties of their fellow Muslims might ring a bell or two for anyone familiar with the fringes of the Christian rock scene. It should be noted that these musicians are not out to promote the faith,
per se, and indeed, for some of them, being Muslim is a matter of ethnicity or politics rather than religion -- so their lyrics tend to be, shall we say, earthier than the Christian-rock analogy might suggest. As Knight puts it, "In the so-called war of civilizations, we're giving the finger in both directions." But Knight and some of the other interviewees do genuinely wrestle with how to balance their faith and their culture, in ways that many Christians should be able to recognize.
Also worth a look is
Defamation (October 1, 4, 5), Israeli director Yoav Shamir's search for signs of anti-Semitism around the world. Shamir, who says he has never experienced any prejudice himself, visits American groups dedicated to stamping out anti-Semitism, and he follows a group of Israeli teenagers on an international field trip to the concentration camps in Poland -- and along the way, Shamir suggests that Jews both in Israel and abroad have exaggerated the threat of anti-Semitism in ways that are not healthy. But he also stumbles across examples of anti-Semitism in some rather unexpected places; at one point, both Shamir and the viewer are caught off-guard when certain random strangers start talking out-of-the-blue about Jewish "mind control" and
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So the issue
is presented with some complexity, and ideally the film should provoke some healthy debates. Christians who see this film may even want to discuss to what degree we, ourselves, may be prone to exaggerating the degree to which "the world" is out to get us.
Finally, just for a complete change of pace, I really liked
In Search of Beethoven (October 5, 6, 14), and not just because Ludwig van Beethoven is one of my favorite composers. Director Phil Grabsky deftly blends talking heads (some of whom sit at their pianos, the better to demonstrate the points they are making), excerpts from Beethoven's letters, and musical montages to flesh out the composer and the era in which he lived. One new thing I learned from this film is that Beethoven's second-longest composition, after his one-and-only opera
Fidelio, was
a mass that he composed toward the end of his life, and this gives the film an opportunity to touch, however briefly, on Beethoven's religious inclinations.
That will have to do for now. More later!
