Friday, April 27, 2007

We Are Together (Thina Simunye)

by James McNally on April 27, 2007

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

We Are Together (Thina Simunye)

We Are Together (Thina Simunye) (Director: Paul Taylor, UK, 2006): It would be pretty hard to make a bad film from such prom­ising material, and I’m glad to say that dir­ector Paul Taylor has not made a bad film, though he takes us through some pretty grim territory.

12-year-old Slindile Moya lives with sev­eral of her sib­lings at the Agape orphanage in South Africa. Both of her par­ents have died from AIDS, and her older sib­lings can’t afford to care for the younger ones at home any­more. What holds this incred­ibly close-knit family together is music. The younger ones sing in a choir at the orphanage, and when the whole family is together, they are always singing.

When a chance comes for the choir to record a CD and go on a fund-raising tour for the orphanage, the chil­dren are incred­ibly excited, but when the trip falls through and Slindile’s older brother suc­cumbs to AIDS, our hearts break with her. But as usual, the music pulls everyone through, and they finish the CD anyway, hoping for other oppor­tun­ities. There are a few more twists and turns in the story that I won’t share, but through it all, Slindile keeps singing and smiling.

It might appear that it was easy to make this film. These are incred­ibly beau­tiful chil­dren making aston­ishing music, and if you just left a camera rolling, you’d get a good film. But dir­ector Taylor takes us into some incred­ibly intimate places and lingers there, let­ting the full emo­tional impact of these children’s lives take hold of the audience.

As with Born Into Brothels, the film has led the film­makers to become involved in a char­it­able pro­ject, and I recom­mend that you buy a CD of the gor­geous music of the Children of Agape, which will go to sup­port the children’s edu­ca­tion costs.

Unfortunately for us, the film premiered last night at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, and so the dir­ector was there with 14 of the chil­dren. Here in Toronto, we had one of the pro­du­cers, Pauline Von Moltke, who was gra­cious enough to con­duct a Q&A. Unfortunately, my recording wasn’t very good, so I’m not going to post it.

Official site for the film

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs07, children, HIV/AIDS, southafrica

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The Big Sellout (Der Grosse Ausverkauf)

by James McNally on April 27, 2007 · 2 comments

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

The Big Sellout (Der Grosse Ausverkauf)

The Big Sellout (Der Grosse Ausverkauf) (Director: Florian Opitz, Germany, 2006): Beautifully shot on film, The Big Sellout is yet another strong polit­ical doc­u­mentary, this one on the theme of privat­iz­a­tion. Since privat­iz­a­tion is a key­stone of neo­lib­eral eco­nomic policy all over the world, the film takes us to sev­eral dif­ferent loc­ales to see its effects on real people. What we dis­cover is that the effort by mul­tina­tional cor­por­a­tions to turn the neces­sities of life (health­care, elec­tri­city, even water) into com­mod­ities is having a dev­ast­ating effect on the people of the devel­oping world.

In the Philippines, Minda spends all of her time trying to scrape money together for dia­lysis treat­ments for her teen­aged son. In South Africa, Bongani is part of a group of skilled act­iv­ists who restore elec­trical ser­vice to those whose power has been cut off for non-payment. In Bolivia, Rosa is a grand­mother who stood up to the face­less cor­por­a­tion that was attempting to privatize her city’s water supply. And in England, Simon the train driver details the breakup of British Rail and the decline of rail ser­vice in that country.

In every case, privat­iz­a­tion was the cul­prit, but to be fair, Opitz attempts to engage with the eco­nom­ists at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund who often impose privat­iz­a­tion as a pre­con­di­tion for lending to devel­oping nations. Surprisingly for the dir­ector, he gets very little cooper­a­tion from these shadowy bodies, who are ostens­ibly required to be trans­parent and account­able to their member nations. The one eco­nomist he does inter­view is Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank who now dis­agrees with the rush to privatize everything, and who has become an opponent of most of the eco­nomic policies of globalization.

I was reminded when watching this film of sev­eral other strong anti-globalization doc­u­ment­aries of recent years, including The Take, The Corporation, and even The Yes Men. The Big Sellout adds some heartrending per­sonal stories from sev­eral corners of the world, and it’s clear that privat­iz­a­tion is really only helping those with too much money make even more of it. Without having to pay lip ser­vice to the demo­cratic ideals of national gov­ern­ments, cor­por­a­tions are con­cerned with just one thing: the pur­suit of profits. The profits may come, but the human costs should be tal­lied against them.

The only weak­ness in the film may be that I was left won­dering what I could pos­sibly do, in my com­fort­able First World life, to combat this creeping sick­ness. The film’s German web site has some edu­ca­tional mater­ials, so I hope these get trans­lated for the English site soon.

Here is the Q&A with pro­ducer Florian Opitz from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 12:37

Official site for the film

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs07, bolivia, Documentaries, economics, germany, globalization, Hot Docs, philippines, politics, privatization, southafrica, uk

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Driven By Dreams (À force de rêves)

by James McNally on April 27, 2007

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Driven By Dreams (À force de rêves)

Driven By Dreams (À force de rêves) (Director: Serge Giguère, Canada, 2006): This film recently won Quebec’s top film honour, the Jutra award, for best feature-length doc­u­mentary. It’s a gently-told cinema verite account of five eld­erly people, ran­ging in age from 74 to 92, as they con­tinue to live their lives to the fullest. They paint, they make music, they fly radio con­trol air­planes, and they talk about dying. It’s a quiet film, set mostly in rural Quebec, and it takes its time with its sub­jects, but mixed in with the con­tem­pla­tion is a healthy dose of humour.

We exper­i­ence with these unique and lov­able indi­viduals the pain of losing a spouse, or being forced out of your home, or the small indig­nities that go with aging. This is the sort of film that was really made in the editing, and although the fin­ished film feels seam­less, the editing pro­cess took quite a while. As well, the film was helped immeas­ur­ably by the soundtrack, which fea­tured a big band com­posed of seniors, and which appears at various points in the film.

This film touched on some of the same issues as The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun, but without (for me) the same emo­tional power.

Here is the Q&A with pro­ducer Sylvie Van Brabant from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 11:48

7/10(7/10)

UPDATE: The film was awarded the Special Jury Prize Canadian Feature Documentary at the Hot Docs Awards cere­mony held on April 27. Congratulations to dir­ector Serge Giguère and everyone involved in the film.

Tagged as: #hotdocs07, aging, canada, quebec

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