A Story of Coincidence and Chance

I mentioned in a quick post the other day that iNumber Number has taken the spot as my favourite film of the festival. I see a lot of very serious films at TIFF each year: documentaries about sober and sometimes sombre subjects and sad dramas. But iNumber Number is just all-out-action in the form of a heist film.

The (South African) director let us know before the screening that he gets a lot of questions about the title: apparently when speakers of the Zulu language adopt new words into the language, they put the letter ‘i’ in front of the word. Thus ‘iNumber’ (pronounced “e-number”) is the Zulu word for number, much as iRobot and iCar are the Zulu words for robot and car. (One might guess that iPhone is the Zulu word for phone; that wasn’t an example he used, though) More to the point, though, “iNumber Number” is underworld slang for heist — kinda like, “we got a smash and grab number going down this week.”

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Mirrored from Under the Beret.

My sixth film was my first dud. It was the first film where, in the latter part of the showing, I found myself thinking, “Is this going to end soon? My butt hurts.” I have spent a lot of time thinking about it, since, because I think the message of the film makes me annoyed.

The film is called The Militant (or El Lugar Del Hijo, which Google translates as “The Place of the Child”), and it’s an Uruguayan film.

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Mirrored from Under the Beret.

My fourth TIFF film was a documentary called Mission: Congo. Its opening night was on Friday, but I caught it at its second showing on Saturday night. I caught it immediately after Bad Hair.

Mission: Congo kinda skewers US televangelist Pat Robertson and since the film’s premier a number of articles have been written in places like The Huffington Post, Indiewire, The Daily Beast, and The Guardian. In the Q&A, afterward, we learned that Robertson’s organization is considering legal action. That’s always fun.

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Mirrored from Under the Beret.

My second TIFF film was a documentary called The Square (or Al Midan): the titular square being Tahrir Square in Cairo. The film is directed by the woman who directed Control Room, Jehane Noujaim. It’s a slick, well-produced documentary and it would not surprise me if it became a contender for an Academy Award.

As an aside, the screening took place at the Bloor Cinema (now called the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema) and I think it might well be the first time I’ve been in that theatre in ten years.

The film, itself, documented about 30 months of the Egyptian revolution, starting in January, 2011 and ending with the unseating of President Morsi this past July (talk about up-to-the-minute relevance).

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Mirrored from Under the Beret.

The Great Kilapy is an Angolan film — a period piece with surprisingly good production values. It takes place in the final years of the Portuguese rule of Angola, and the costumes, locations and vehicles do a great job of transporting us to the mid-sixties. The film has a framing sequence that takes place in the present day where an older Portuguese man tells the story of “The Great Kilapy” to his children (“kilapy” is a Kimbundu word for “fraud” or “swindle”).

João Fraga is a mixed-race Angolan man living in Lisbon in 1965 at the start of the film. He has a suave demeanor and knows how to make women fall for him. He’s also good at financial legerdemain — some of his friends call him “Mr. Engineer” because he knows how to engineer a scheme or two. Lisbon is good to him: he enjoys the party life, and his primary lover is the daughter of a Minister who slips him a respectable stipend and keeps him attired in tailored suits. He really only has two big problems in his life. First, he’s not “a one-woman man” (and poly doesn’t seem to have been invented yet) which inevitably leads to broken hearts and angry break-ups. Second, a large number of his friends and former schoolmates have fallen in with the MPLA and the Security Police are confident that he’s also involved. For his part, João is sympathetic to the pro-independence MPLA but is too busy womanizing and funding his big-spending lifestyle to be politically active.

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Mirrored from Under the Beret.

In the Fog is a Belorussian film set in WWII. The film starts with the hanging of three partisans by the occupying Nazi police. The scenes are slow, and leisurely — it nicely sets the expectation of pace for the rest of the film.

But it turns out that the three hanged me were originally arrested with a fourth guy: our protagonist, Sushenya. Because Sushenya was spared the gallows, everyone assumes that he must have ratted out his colleagues. Sushenya knows that that’s what everyone thinks, and it’s no surprise when two partisans, Burov and Voitik, show up at his house at night. They’re there to kill him for helping the Nazis.

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Mirrored from Under the Beret.

I wish I could say that I liked Krivina more than I did. It has a lot going for it: a Bosnian living in Toronto returns after he hears reports that a friend of his, Dido, is wanted for war profiteering. He spends his time going from old address to old address, Dido’s relative to next relative. There’s almost a Godot-like quality, but rather than being a study of waiting, and life on hold, the overriding feeling is one of trauma and PTSD.

It’s a slow, languorous piece and I confess that I was impatient with it at times. It’s also a “but the aliens were really the humans after all” kind of story — the kind of story with a twist at the end that is supposed to make you go, “oooh”, but instead makes you think, “uh… is this your first screenplay?”

Mirrored from Under the Beret.

The Color of the Chameleon is a Bulgarian film about secret police. The film is a little bit dark, and also a little bit absurd. Our anti-hero, Batko Stamenov, seems to have an aptitude for lying. And Onanism. So he gets recruited by the Secret Police to infiltrate a student group that’s geeking out over an anti-establishment novel called Zincograph (which is also the name of the novel that the film is based on). Oddly, the plot of the book seems to inspire him to start a career as a zinc etcher.

Batko also has an annoying landlady who mistakenly screws up his position with security services. Being an informant made him feel important, and losing the job brings out his resentment. So he kills his landlady and hides the body in an alcove in his house — he bricks up the alcove to hide the body. He also bricks up her bunnies.

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Mirrored from Under the Beret.

It’s TIFF time, again, and I caught my first two (well, three really) films tonight. My first screening was a film about Haiti — TIFF seems to have one about every other year, and I always make a point of catching that screening.

According to the programme, the film was meant to be preceded by another film called Peripeteia, but there was some screw up and we ended up seeing that one second. Peripeteia is a fairly avant-garde film, and I can’t say that I love avant-garde. It starts out with a title card informing us that the painter, Dürer, produced “Head of a Negro” in 1508, but that all information about the subject has been lost to “the winds of history.”

Cut to a black actor who looks vaguely similar to the sketch. He’s in sixteenth-century Europeean garb, walking through the fields of the dreariest British countryside. It looks Too Fucking Cold, and we can hear non-stop winds. He walks a bit. We cut to him in a different field. He stands dramatically. Cut to him near a lake.

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Mirrored from Under the Beret.

Man, I'm exhausted. I feel like I haven't stopped doing stuff for the last two weeks straight. Final two films were today.

First up: I Am Slave, a feature film by Gabriel Range (director of Death of a President and The Last King of Scotland). This was a tricky film, and I found myself constantly going back and forth about whether or not I liked it.

The story centres on Malia, seen in the film in two time periods -- as a twelve year-old girl growing up near the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan, and in the present, as an eighteen-year-old young woman in London.

Pretty much at the beginning of the film, we see Malia arriving through the airport in London. She's entering the country to work as a domestic servant for a wealthy Sudanese family. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that she doesn't really have a choice in the matter. The family make clear to her that she's not allowed to leave or speak to anyone. She lives in a cold storage room in the house. The windows are barred; a security system sounds an alarm if she tries to sneak out at night.

Through flashbacks, we learn that Malia was separated from her parents during a raid on her village. She was taken prisoner by the armed raiders and sold into domestic slavery, first to a household in the northern part of Sudan, and six years later, sent to London to serve the cousin of her first "owner".

During those six years, her father constantly searches for his lost daughter, moving from town to town, taking odd jobs, trying to hunt her down.

The topic is not about sexual slavery, and there are no creepy overtones of sadism. The slave masters are not sympathetic, but they're (mostly) not beating her or subjecting her to petty tortures (although there are punishments when Malia disobeys them). They keep her controlled in an almost cult-like practice of keeping her afraid and removed from any kind of support structure. Strangely, that made the masters seem so much more real. You could really see how someone like that could exist and live their lives thinking that they're entitled to domestic servants that they don't have to pay.

The other major character of the film is Said, the family's chauffeur. Said appears to be an Arab man who has been living in London for a while. At first, I thought he was going to be playing the role of creepy guy who has the upper hand but he doesn't. He seems to be the only one who strikes up a friendship with Malia. At first, he doesn't know that she's forced to serve the family, but finally pieces it together. And then there's this jaw-dropping scene. Malia is talking to Said in his car. She has spent a week locked in her room in punishment, and Said asks her where she's been. This is the moment that Said understands that Malia is there against her will.

Said: "You need to go to the police. They can't do this."

Malia: "No, I can't go to the police. I need to leave this place."

Said: "Right. Get away."

Malia: "I'll contact the police when I'm free."

Said: "Now you're talking."

Malia: "I need a place that I can go to. Someplace safe."

Said: "Do you know anyone in London?"

Malia: "I know you."

Said: "Uh-huh. But do you have some place you can stay?"

Malia: "I can stay with you."

At which part, he totally starts backpedaling. He has a wife and family, see. And his place is small. And he really needs this job, and can't do anything to jeopardize that. He fully understands what's going on in that moment. But he doesn't want to risk his job.

I think it's the quotidian that really makes it so horrible. The everyday qualities of the story line. If the characters has been any more larger than life, I think I would have mentally categorized them as fictional, and the film wouldn't have had as much of an effect on me.

I found myself constantly hyper-aware of race in the film. Malia and her family are Nuba; the slave-owning families are Arab. They're all Muslim (although the film does briefly broach the topic of prejudice that I'm given to understand exists in Sudan: the prejudice toward black Muslims by the Arab population).

Nonetheless, I did keep thinking: "oh, look. Helpless black people. Evil Arabs. Hm." I'm pleased to report that no white person rode in to the rescue. In fact, I think that the only white speaking role might have been the customs official. I think I'd want to see it again to fully figure out what I think of the race dynamics of the film.

The film ended with some stats. It suggested that estimates suggest that there are 5,000 people living in domestic slavery in London. And that the Sudan might have something like 20,000. Those are pretty sobering numbers. I confess that I'm more interested in knowing how many people are like Said.