VIFF 2013 reviews and previews: Al's top 10 picks (so far)

I have not been able to preview the two VIFF films that most excite me this year - James Benning's Unabomber-themed experimental film Stemple Pass and Bobcat Goldthwait's bigfoot film Willow Creek. But I have been previewing as many films as I possibly can, and writing reviews of most of them. Here are my top ten films of the 20-odd films I've been able to see - all of which I think are must-sees for Vancouver cinephiles, though the odd caveat may apply. Links in the titles below direct to the VIFF catalogue, where you can find information about screening times...

1. Big Bad Wolves

There's something about having a child murderer on the loose that tends to bring out the worst in people. If Fritz Lang's classic M isn't evidence enough of that, this blackly humorous Israeli film Big Bad Wolves (trailer here) should close the argument. It's easily the most mainstream, crowd-pleasing film in the VIFF's latenight series - except that audience members need to be able to stomach some pretty extreme scenes of torture, like toenails getting ripped off, a blowtorch applied to the skin, that sort of thing. If you're hardy enough for that, and like a good thriller, this is a must-see. The plot: after a young girl is abducted, molested, and beheaded - among other indignities - both a rogue cop and the girl's father, a hard-as-stone veteran of Lebanon, focus their suspicions on a helpless-seeming schoolteacher, who protests his innocence even after enhanced interrogation techniques are applied. The film is blackly funny, politically sympathetic (both in the fun it pokes at its would-be vigilantes and at their dealings with a polite, friendly Arab neighbour who drops by their torture-roost), and tonally and visually similar to the Coen's Blood Simple, though its plot bears no resemblance whatsoever to that film. A completely satisfying entertainment.

2. Good Vibrations

A must-see for anyone who liked 24 Hour Party People, Good Vibrations (trailer here) tells the story of Terri Hooley, a one-eyed music lover who founded an important Belfast record store during the Troubles of the 1970's, and ended up distributing several important early punk bands (most famously, the Undertones, the story of whose single, "Teenage Kicks," is told herein). This film should particularly please anyone who, while not being a musician, hopes to contribute to their local scene, be it through journalism, gig promotion, broadcasting, DIY-distribution of records, or through simple infectious enthusiasm. An essential scene mid-point through the film easily stands the greatest filmed representation of the conversion to punk that I have seen: as the 30-something year old Hooley (played by Game of Thrones' Richard Dormer) is checking out his first punk gig, he witnesses (and participates in) a confrontation with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, then slowly starts to take in the music and the vibe of the gig (where Rudi is onstage performing "Big Time" - a real band and a real song, here re-enacted by actors). The changes on his face and the tangible joy he experiences as the song proceeds speak volumes and capture feelings I have felt many a time at punk gigs, but never seen put on screen before. I've talked to two other people who have had a chance to preview this film and both loved it; Hooley himself has apparently seen the film fifteen times...

3. Kiss The Water: A Love Story

It sounds like an unlikely subject for a documentary: a reclusive Scottish woman who dresses as a man - complete with necktie - and lives in a remote rural home which, for most of her life, was without electricity, whose fame lies in her skill at tying flies - flies of the sort used in catching spawning Atlantic salmon, that is. Add to these facts that the subject of the film, Megan Boyd, died in 2001 (obit here), and that the film is completely devoid of her voice, and almost entirely absent her image (which only appears briefly at the very end), and that most of the people who speak in the film are themselves senior citizens, who knew Boyd in life, and you'd be within reason to guess that Kiss The Water: A Love Story is about as compelling to watch as a game of golf. And there you'd be dead wrong; filmmaker Eric Steel enriches Boyd's story with achingly beautiful footage of the Scottish landscape, apparently hand-painted animations of salmon and rivers, and close-ups of gorgeous flies being prepared (though not by Boyd). The stories, too, are very entertaining and revealing - particularly when the Royal Family enters the picture; I saw this previewed with various members of the press - a jaded bunch, oftentimes - and was pleased to note they laughed aloud more than once. Frequently the only other film that came to mind - showing a rather different sort of eccentric's engagement with the natural world - was Thomas Riedelsheimer's Rivers and Tides, about British artist (and Scotland resident) Andy Goldsworthy. Riedelsheimer himself has a film in the fest, about Japanese wind artist Susumu Shingu, but though it too is often beautiful and compelling, the truth is I preferred Kiss The Water. 

Speaking of Scotland, some of these are very, very funny. 

 
4. Salmon Confidential

 Salmon Confidential (that links to the official site) is rousing and upsetting. It follows one woman's attempts - against administrative muzzling of scientists and a general climate of terminal Speak No Evilism - to demonstrate that there is something very wrong with BC salmon farming, way beyond the increase in sea lice: that it is bringing deadly European fish viruses, like the dreaded Infectious Salmon Anemia, to our coast and killing off healthy wild salmon in masses as they pass through on their spawns. I can't speak to her methods or conclusions, but based on what one sees in the film, Alexandra Morton presents as passionate, outdoorsy, outspoken, and highly lucid; and her conclusions are very disturbing, as is the implication that the provincial and federal governments are deliberately obfuscating the facts so that there is no panicked worldwide marketplace reaction against BC salmon (the doc also deals with the BC Liberals' Bill 37 Animal Health Act, that would have made it criminal for whistleblowers to speak out about farm animal diseases, and that may yet make a comeback). Not just your average eco-doom doc, the film is attempting to draw awareness to an issue that every BC'er should be educating themselves on and taking action to remedy. Interestingly, the film has already spawned - no pun intended - a debunker's website, Salmon Confidential Exposed...

5. Let The Fire Burn

This is an astonishing, essential, sobering work - one of the most compelling historical documentaries I've seen, and a film not to be missed for those interested in U.S. race relations, radical activism, and the state response to dissenting groups. Let The Fire Burn is constructed from news reports, police camera footage, and the testimony before a public committee held to inquire at to how the police siege of a radical compound in Philadelphia in May 1985 went so horribly wrong. A back-to-nature, anti-technology black liberation group known as MOVE were repeated targets of police violence - as when MOVE member Delbert Africa was clubbed over the head with a helmet and then kicked and beaten on the ground by police during a 1976 raid. MOVE may or may not have helped incite a negative response to their cause - they certainly don't sound like they were ideal neighbours, as suggested by the testimony of both black and white residents of the area they chose for their second home. They had fortified bunkers on the roof, mounted bullhorns blasting profanity-laden political rants, members appearing on the streets and rooftop with weapons, and what certainly appears to have been a generally confrontational, in-your-face attitude. Radicals can be like that. Still, the 1985 Waco-like, police-initiated firestorm that killed eleven members, including five children, and destroyed many adjacent homes, seems clearly to have been both an atrocity - an act of unpunished government mass murder - and one of the greatest instances of police incompetence in recorded history. I confess that I had never heard of MOVE before watching this film, but was utterly gripped by the story and am glad to be less ignorant now. Depressing stuff, but a chapter of American history that should not be forgotten.

6. From Neurons to Nirvana: The Great Medicines

This is a smart, rational, beautifully-crafted and even occasionally inspiring look at the great therapeutic value to be found in the controlled medical use of psychedelics, taking in both past research - like the benefits of treating alcoholics with LSD - to present applications (like giving psilocybin to cancer patients, or treating post-traumatic stress disorder with Ecstasy). BC experimental filmmaker Oliver Hockenhull deftly interweaves talking-head testimonials, both from his own interviews (including local notables like Wade Davis and Gabor Mate) and archival sources (including Richard "Ram Dass" Alpert and Aldous Huxley), with beautifully-shot, trippily-designed approximations of transcendental states. Anyone who has not fallen victim to hysterical sensationalism and fear-mongering about how all drugs are bad (unless patented and mass-produced by corporations) should give the film a look; I've only seen the 69-minute edit of the film (screening October 1st as a matinee, with Gabor Mate in attendance) and recommend based on it that people seek out the longer version screening elsewise in the fest, since the 69-minute version is so bursting with testimonials (from responsible medical professionals) for re-scheduling psychedelics that it comes across as somewhat breathless and over-generalized. While I have not seen the longer version of the film, I fully expect it to be even better...

7. The Kill Team

The Kill Team - official site here - is every bit as compelling as films like Brian DePalma's Casualties of War or more recent fare like Paul Haggis' In The Valley of Elah, but has the distinction of being a documentary. It tells the story of how a group of US soldiers stationed in Afghanistan go rogue and start murdering random civilians, planting weapons on the bodies afterwards and backing up each other's stories. One would-be whistleblower, Spc Adam Winfield, objects, and is threatened and bullied into uncomfortable silence, leaving him in the role of observer and uneasy participant. The documentary tracks Winfield's court martial, and features strangely shameless interviews with two convicted murderers who were part of the "kill team" - young soldiers apparently lacking any moral compass whatsoever. Whether you feel sympathy or not for Winfield - whose own role in events falls far from heroism, and whose eventual testimony came too late to save at least two lives - you'll feel sympathy for his parents, and be wholly compelled by the drama on hand, and what it reveals about the state of contemporary warfare. Note: the film contains some upsetting images of murdered Afghan citizens.

 8. Gold

Cinephiles, wanting to like Thomas Arslan's gorgeously-shot Gold - about German immigrants seeking their fortune during the goldrush, trekking through the BC wilderness en route to Dawson - will wait nervously for signs that the film is not just a variation on Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, perhaps cross-pollinated with Aguirre the Wrath of God (and with a bit of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man thrown in, especially as pertains to the soundtrack, by Earth's Dylan Carlson - he does an excellent job of doing exactly what Neil Young did for Jarmusch's movie). Perhaps I can reassure you, so you will be able to appreciate the film without worrying that it is a mere knock off: Gold distinguishes itself from its forbears quite admirably in the last quarter. Admirers of last year's hit film Barbara, by Christian Petzold, will recognize Petzold's leading lady Nina Hoss as the central figure; people who like movies about strong, independent women will be hard pressed to find one stronger or more independent than her character here, and Hoss' performance is just great...

9. The Closed Circuit

Followers of this blog know that I'm somewhat obsessed with Ryszard Bugajski's 1991 film Clearcut, a feature he made in Canada when the political climate in Poland (and the government's response to his earlier feature The Interrogation) made his working there impossible. I just discovered that my dubious-provenance "public domain" DVD of it, which meshes pan and scan sequences with stretched ones, actually looks pretty good if I adjust the aspect ratio of my TV! Watched it for the umpteenth time tonight and loved it, as I always do. I also really liked Bugajski's new film, The Closed Circuit, which screens in this year's VIFF. It's a grim political thriller about former Party members, now with government jobs, who conspire to contrive charges against three young businessmen, imprison them, and take over their newly founded electronics firm. The scheme is somewhat nasty and labyrinthine, but works quite well, and people who enjoy movies about corporate espionage - even those with no real knowledge of Poland's history - will enjoy watching it fall together. The Closed Circuit may pull its punches a little bit at the end - it allows for a glimmer of hope for a couple of its characters that seems mostly to be about letting the audience off the hook without subjecting them to a thoroughgoing bummer of a movie, but the film is just angry enough elsewhere that a viciously cruel, cynical, hopeless ending would have been entirely appropriate. Still, anyone with a grudge against the abuse of power under Communist rule will appreciate the bleakness of this film, which shows that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The Closed Circuit has proven popular with Polish audiences, though one suspects the Polish government won't be the film's biggest fan... 

10. Borgman

Not to be confused with Manborg, Borgman belongs to a peculiar subgenre of cinema: stories about a stranger who comes to a home, subjects the family to an ordeal, taps into repressed or dormant energies, and by doing so, transforms the family radically - though whether this transformation is a liberation or a destruction is a matter of debate; often it contains elements of both, with destruction usually centering on the man of the house and liberation focusing on the women and children, should they survive. Teorema, The Shout, Brimstone and Treacle, Visitor Q, and maybe Michael Haneke's dark and nasty Funny Games - which gets namechecked in the VIFF calendar description of the film - count as the purest examples I've encountered (it's possible Polanski's Cul-De-Sac belongs on the list too but its been some time since I saw it). Distinct from standard home invasion films like The Desperate Hours, which end with a member of the household eventually repelling the stranger, these films often are quite surreal and seem to contain elements of a social critique, showing that the family somehow needs the influence of the stranger - who ingratiates himself with at least some members of the family, and who generally appears as a cipher for the filmmaker. Indeed, Borgman's filmmaker, Alex van Warmerdam, plays one of the lackeys of the film's eponymous messiah, whose infiltration of the home, methods and agenda are perhaps a little bit more obscure than those of the messiahs in the other films mentioned; you're really not sure where things are going until they've gotten there. Still, you'll enjoy some of Borgman's surprises along the way - which include a singularly cinematic method of disposing of corpses (jaded filmgoers who demand that totally novel, permanently memorable images be emblazoned in their cortex on leaving the cinema should take heart: Borgman has at least one, and returns to it a couple of times). Fans of contemporary surrealist fare like Dogtooth will probably want to catch this, as well as any middle-class masochists who want to suffer for their privileges...

The big VIFF catalogues are now available, and the free guides you see contain a complete schedule of the films, though not all are given write-ups. The Granville cinemas are no longer functional, so the VIFF is spread out amongst a few more cinemas this year - including the Rio and International Village. I'm actually surprised that I have enjoyed as many of the films I've previewed as I have; it looks to be a very, very strong festival this year! Get excited - and start grabbing tickets for the films you most want to see...