Four days of socially-minded cinema
Over the weekend of Nov. 13-16, in various venues around the city, the Guelph Film Festival celebrated local and international filmmakers whose works are, by turns, socially-minded, beautiful, and thought-provoking. Formerly known as the Festival of Moving Media, but rebranded as the Guelph Film Festival to return more to its 30-year roots, the weekend was packed with screenings, workshops, and social discourse – all in the snowy backdrop of a newly wintry weekend.
The Ontarion got a chance to see some of films screened. Here are a few thoughts on each.
69: Love, Sex, Senior
Dir. Menna Laura Meijer – Netherlands, 2013
Slow, methodical, and almost painfully monotonous, the Dutch 69: Love Sex Senior sheds light on the love lives of a group of Dutch seniors. Detailing their exploits, and exploring their interconnected relationships, audiences get a first-hand look at life after love and love at the end of life.
Though the film raises strong points about the nature of sexuality, and argues that love is not just for the young, the film’s slow pace makes for a painfully boring viewing. Excluding its close-up interviews, the film is shot in a fly-on-the-wall style. Its subjects are candid and more than willing to discuss their opinions on love, sex, and death.
Additionally, its subjects more than welcome a physical examination of their bodies. A particularly moving scene occurs between an elderly gay man and his lover. As their bodies intertwine in a romantic display of passion, the elderly man breaks down into tears as his lover strokes his hair.
Though the film’s subject matter is compelling, its slow pace and fly-on-the-wall cinematography make for a strangely depressing film. 69: Love Sex Senior is advertised as a celebration of life and a candid look at love at old age; instead, the film’s bleak cinematography and morose colour pallet make it a sombre affair closer in atmosphere to a wake.
For a film originating from a country whose capital city has the most popular and well-known Red Light District in the world, it is surprising that 69: Love Sex Senior is so colourless.
Triage: Dr. James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma
Dir. Patrick Reed – Canada, 2008
Humanitarianism is about helping people without regard for your own safety. With former Medicins Sans Frontieres President of the International Council James Orbinski as its subject, Patrick Reed’s Triage touches upon themes of mortality and morality, health and humanitarianism. The film asks its audience, “If you had a chance to make a difference in someone’s life, how far would you go?”
If you ask Dr. Orbinski, you can’t go far enough.
The film focusses on Dr. Orbinski’s return to Somalia and Rwanda after 15 years; as an MSF doctor, Orbinski was treating casualties of the Rwanda genocide at the frontlines. He had firsthand experience with the horrors of the war, and his involvement in the conflict profoundly changed his life and the lives of the doctors and patients around him.
Interspersed throughout the film are interviews with political analyst Gerald Caplan, who offers informational sound-bites on the nature of conflict and humanitarianism, as well as the events surrounding the Somalian and Rwandan conflicts.
Though an ultimately powerful and compelling film, Triage suffers due to the same problems that plague its many predecessors. This is, quite obviously, an important film that captures the brutalities of war firsthand. That it also offers profound statements on humanitarianism is further proof of its success. However, it is a film caught between its subject – Dr. Orbinski – and its subject matter – humanitarianism and conflict.
In an early scene, Caplan explains that Dr. Orbinski is a rare example of a humanitarian. Caplan argues that humanitarians are a strange species, forever caught between cynicism and optimism. Caplan’s remarks echo my opinions on Triage; this is a moving film that has a profound effect on its audience, but it is ultimately caught between delivering a powerful message and telling a powerful story.
Divide in Concord
Dir. Kris Kaczor, Dave Regos – USA, 2014
There’s always something to be said about persistence. There’s even more to be said when the frame of reference is a place like Concord, Massachusetts – site of the first shots of the American Revolution and of Walden’s Pond, made famous by American author Henry David Thoreau’s seminal environmental text Walden.
In its picturesque, truly American normalcy, an 84-year-old woman named Jean Hill sets out to make history by issuing a town-wide ban on bottled water. With the help of some younger likeminded people, and at the behest of the town’s staunch opposition, the fiery Jean sets out to make waves and spark a real change in her small town and others.
As a film, Divide in Concord is a feel-good story that is cautiously optimistic about the future of bottled water. There is a distinctive attention to the stubbornness of the contemporary American right that resonates well with the festival’s underlying theme of social change – where does one’s individual rights end and where does social consciousness begin?
In the case of Concord, Massachusetts, it’s almost split down the middle, with strong cases to be made on both sides.
The Secret Trial 5
Dir. Amar Wala – Canada, 2014
Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel The Trial is about a man who is placed, with no warning, under arrest, and faces trial for a crime of which the details are not made known to him. Kafka’s cautionary tale of bureaucratic malice reaches some seriously chilling, real-world dimensions in Amar Wala’s documentary The Secret Trial 5, a story of five Canadian Muslim men who were detained for a combined total of 50 years. Between 1999 and now, not one of them had been charged with a crime during their detainment, or were made clear of any details of their detainment.
For this poignant, subdued documentary, The Trial seems to have become more of an instruction manual for Canadian Immigration Services than a cautionary tale. With vague, post-9/11 rhetorics of national security and anti-terrorism, the Canadian government has used the “security certificate” bill, which grants the federal government the right to detain people assumed to be linked to terrorist activity, without themselves or their lawyers knowing the nature of their crime.
Definitely unconstitutional and almost certainly illegal, the bill saw five men; Mohammad Mahjoub, Mohamed Harkat, Hassan Almrei, Adil Charkaoui, and Mahmoud Jaballah, in a position where they were not charged, not put on trial, and detained with no explanation.
The film does a deft job of portraying the “business as usual” approach taken by the federal government in cases like this. By taking away the humanity of presumed “terrorists”, usually on a racist/classist subtext, it is easy to paint these people as enemies right off the bat. Fortunately for us, director Amar Wala brings the humanity back to these people in a provoking and sometimes chilling way.
Seth’s Dominion
Dir. Luc Chamberland – Canada 2014
A documentary about one of Canada’s most treasured and compelling cartoonists, Luc Chamberland’s Seth’s Dominion – part animation and part live-action – is a fascinating portrait into the personal and artistic lives of an enigmatic artist.
Seth, a Guelph-based cartoonist, sets his work in an often fictionalized and cultural memory-preoccupied Canadiana. With an art style reminiscent of the 30s and 40s, Seth’s work is gentle, provoking, and often quite melancholic. This is not to say it’s depressing – it’s often a much-needed slice of life to reflect on and implicate oneself in.
Director Luc Chamberland probes into Seth’s life as a silent, but not voiceless, observer. With old film used at times to give parts of the film an 8mm home-movie look, Chamberland understands and respects the sanctity of his subject’s attachment to memory both personal and cultural, and works in tandem with Seth’s drawings to really highlight this preoccupation with a time bygone. Like Seth’s comics and graphic novels, the film moves at a lovely pace, and seems to occupy a distinctive sense of time and memory that is difficult to portray with only words.
See the Arts & Culture section for an interview with Seth and director Luc Chamberland.