I'm behind in blogging about the films I've seen at the film festival, but I just got back from seeing Hunger, about the last days of IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands and it is a total assault on the senses. I don't think I've seen a film that I could smell, before.
The first film was a documentary film about journalism in Colombia. Hollman Morris is a veteran journalist in Colombia, and the film focuses on his life. He spends time trying to document the ongoing conflict going on in the country. He takes camera crews to sites of recent conflict, or to observe the digging-up of mass graves.
I thought it was an okay film. But I think it tries to do to much to build up how hard his personal choices are in a telling-not-showing way. The film spends too much time trying to highlight the difficulty of Hollman's career choices on his family. And the more-direct victims of conflict -- people who don't have as many choices as Hollman has -- they're nothing more than metonym's for Hollman's cause. Their losses or grief seldom get as much exposure as the various award ceremonies we get to observe. And there were too many moody shots of the city at dusk. Pacing was just off.
My friend put it best: "it was an easy topic to have strong feelings for, but I didn't really feel much."
At first I was unimpressed with this film. It seemed like a Peruvian 90210-esque story about how hard it is to be a teenaged kid of the über-rich. It also has a lot of creepy incestuous sexual advances made from the brother toward his sister, which are difficult to watch (and which culminate in his attempted rape of her while she's asleep).
There's an interesting plot about the father's latest (almost too young) girlfriend, who comes from a much lower class, and who is trying desperately to secure her place amongst the privileged, but how she finds the lives of her new peers tedious and boring.
The best moment, I guess, occurs toward the end ( Minor spoilers )
Dear friends,
Haiti needs your help.
This morning, after watching images of howling wind and torrential rain tearing through Haiti, I received a note from a colleague in Haiti explaining the devastation that Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna left in their wakes. Loune Viaud, our Director of Operations in Haiti, explained that the situation is dire and the suffering extreme. She estimates that close to 10,000 people have been driven from their homes by floodwaters in Haiti’s Artibonite Valley, where we have recently expanded our operations to six new facilities.
( cut for length )
Canadians who are looking for a good organization to donate to (who can issue a tax receipt) should consider Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières.
I went to the Conservatives' web site today. Unclean! Unclean!
(This is how I felt when I visited my grandmother shortly after my grandfather passed away, and I found my grandfather's stash of Conservative Party literature. It's like, you know your grandparents had to have had politics, you just never want to visualize it).
Candidates in my riding:
Last election, we also had a Progressive Canadian candidate, a Canada Action Party candidate and a Marxist-Leninist candidate. (I almost spelled, "Lennonist"). None of those parties have candidate information on their sites, yet.
I'm torn about my vote this year. I've voted NDP pretty much my entire adult life (please don't ask about the sins of my youth), but I know the Green candidate and his work in Haiti is stellar. The Greens, unlike the NDP, actually seem to have a stance on Haiti.
I also didn't notice until yesterday that we closed parliament with a Green member.
Sea Point Days is a documentary about a neighbourhood of Cape Town. According to the director, Cape Town is still the most segregated place in South Africa, but Sea Point is one of the few places that has a degree of racial integration.
It's not an "explain the historical context to you" type of documentary. It's more a slice of life thing. We see a variety of people in the film opining about their neighbourhood. One guy, who looks like an Aryan poster child, runs the neighbourhood "Bother the Homeless" society. A couple of elderly women chat about getting older, and occasionally make painfully racist remarks ("There's no place for the white man in the country any more..."). There's a black Muslim man who, while possibly the most open and kind-hearted guy in the film, acknowledges that there's a lot of old hatred that will take a generation or two to get away from.
I did find the film a bit problematic in that the white folk in the film were all middle-class whereas a large number of the black folk were homeless. I suppose I'm glad I saw it, but it wasn't the greatest thing since sliced bread.
So far, Hunger is the most powerful film I've seen at the festival. The director, Steve McQueen, comes from a background in using film as a visual artist. He's only ever created film for galleries before. But he's brought a very powerful sense of visual aesthetic to this film. And it's stunning.
It's about the hunger strike of provisional IRA member Bobby Sands. But it refuses to act like a standard biopic. It doesn't tell us any history of Bobby -- no neat explanations about how he came to join the IRA or even how he was arrested. Instead what we spend time on in the film is the daily lives of the IRA prisoners. Because Thatcher had refused to recognized them as political prisoners, the IRA prisoners were in a constant protest (blanket and no wash -- meaning that they wouldn't wear prison uniforms, only a blanket, and they refused to bathe). The film showed a lot of very painful scenes involving guards forcibly bathing the prisoners (who were not cooperating in the least) and giving them haircuts. It's brutal to watch.
There's a horrific scene of them being searched for contraband. They're run through a gauntlet of guards in riot gear, each prisoner beaten down with batons before having body cavities searched.
And about two-thirds of the way in to the movie, there's a scene in which Bobby talks to a priest about his plan for a hunger strike. The major part of this scene involves a single shot with no camera movement. Bobby and the priest debate the merits of the hunger strike and the position it might put the IRA's leadership in. This one shot is about ten minutes long and contains a good percentage of the dialogue from the film. During the Q&A, McQueen said that they did four takes. Wow.
It's an intense piece, and very hard to watch at times, but wow am I glad I saw it.
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regna