March 2009

Sweet November

by James McNally on March 31, 2009

You see, I can go ahead and use that post title because I can guarantee you that I will never be reviewing either the 1968 tearjerker of the same name or the soggy 2001 remake with Charlize Theron and Keanu Reeves. Instead, here’s what I’m excited about:

4–8 November, 2009 — Sheffield Doc/Fest (Sheffield, England)
6–15 November, 2009 — CPH:DOX (Copenhagen, Denmark)
19–29 November, 2009 — International Documentary Film Festival (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Now I need to find some way to finance my way to cover all three and give me an excuse to soak up hundreds of documentaries in chilly northern Europe! Film festival programmers, magazines, web sites, distributors, publicists, I am available to do your bidding. Get in touch!

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Les fourmis rouges (Red Ants)

by James McNally on March 30, 2009 · 1 comment

in Film Festivals

Les fourmis rouges (Red Ants) (Director: Stéphan Carpiaux): You only need to look at the film’s poster to determine the appeal of Stéphan Carpiaux’s debut feature. The stunningly beautiful Déborah François plays 16-year-old Alex, who lives alone with her father and helps him run his garage in the Belgian countryside. Unfortunately, the film itself isn’t really anything special, and if it weren’t for the magnetism of young Ms. François, I probably wouldn’t have watched this until the predictably upbeat ending.

Alex and her father Franck are still grieving the loss of her mother and his wife in an auto accident several years before. As Alex grows into womanhood, she begins to resemble her mother more and more, even as she attempts to replace her in Franck’s life. This leads to some awkward longing glances between the two, though neither seem articulate enough to deal with this taboo directly. Her father’s debts are piling up as he neglects his business, and he’s rebuffing the efforts of Anne, a bookkeeper who wants to help but who complicated things years before when she expressed her romantic interest in Franck too soon after his wife’s death. Alex is also a loner, and despite her looks, only seems to be bait for teasing from the boys at school.

In order to help with the mounting bills, she takes a job looking after Irène, an older English woman who lives with her adopted “nephew” Hector, who is a musical genius but also an oddball with no friends. Predictably, the relationship with Irène starts out rocky, thaws a bit, and then chills again. The woman is wholly dependent upon Hector and refuses to let him pursue his musical education. There is an entirely predictable subplot about her trying to prevent him from attending the Conservatory and another unconvincingly linking Alex and Hector romantically.

It was frustrating to watch these inarticulate characters struggle to try to deal with their pent-up emotions. As well, there were so many clichés in the storytelling that it became distracting. Of course, Alex runs away from home wearing a clingy dress, and then is caught in a downpour. Combining the use of pathetic fallacy (because she is sad, it rains) with the chance to show her soaking wet in a clingy dress might have seemed economical to the director, but it made me cringe.

To make matters even more confusing, there is a repeated story about the progression of a line of red ants that made no sense to me, unless it had something to do with the recurring images of windmills. I don’t think I’m that deaf to metaphor; I just couldn’t put it together.

Les fourmis rouges is not exactly a terrible film. It’s just not as serious as it thinks it is, nor as fresh. The exception, of course, is Déborah François, whom I think I could watch in anything from now on.

6/10 (6/10)

Tagged as: belgium, cinefranco, coming-of-age

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2009 Cinema Eye Honors Winners

by James McNally on March 29, 2009

in Awards,Documentaries

Tonight was the second annual Cinema Eye Honors ceremony, held in New York City. The Cinema Eye Honors were created last year by AJ Schnack with the support of Thom Powers and Indiepix as a response to what they felt was an unfair eligibility policy for documentary films to be considered for the Academy Awards. It seems a bit strange, then, that three of the four films honoured tonight were contenders for Oscars this year (although Waltz with Bashir (review) was nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category). That being said, I’m so glad that Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze (review) got some deserved attention after being overlooked by the Academy.

Here is the full list of winners from tonight’s ceremony:

Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Filmmaking

Man on Wire (review) produced by James Marsh and Simon Chinn

Outstanding Achievement in Direction

Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir

Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography

Peter Zeitlinger, Encounters at the End of the World

Outstanding Achievement in Editing

Jinx Godfrey, Man on Wire

Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design and Animation

Yoni Goodman, Waltz with Bashir

Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition

Max Richter, Waltz with Bashir

Outstanding Achievement in International Feature

Waltz with Bashir, directed by Ari Folman and produced by Ari Folman, Serge Lalou, Gerhard Meixner, Yael Nahlieli and Roman Paul

Outstanding Achievement in Debut Feature

Yung Chang, Up the Yangtze

Audience Choice Prize

Up the Yangtze, Yung Chang

Tagged as: cinemaeyehonors

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Over the Hills and Far Away (The Horse Boy)

by James McNally on March 29, 2009 · 3 comments

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs,SXSW

Over the Hills and Far Away (The Horse Boy) (Director: Michal Orion Scott): I was happy to see this film while in Austin for the South by Southwest Film Festival because the family it’s about live in the hill country just outside of Austin, and my companion at the screening actually worked as the father’s masseuse for a while. The film had also just won the Lone Star States award for the best Texas film that day and the crowd was buzzing in anticipation.

We’re introduced at the beginning of the film to Rupert Isaacson and Kristin Neff, a couple seemingly blessed by the gods of genetics, as they meet and fall in love while both are traveling through India. Then we learn that these two very attractive and intelligent people have had a child and that something is terribly amiss. Rowan, at the tender age of two, is diagnosed with autism. It helps to explain, but does nothing to relieve the terrible tantrums and distant behaviour his parents have endured. Lots of home movies communicate very quickly the tedium that their lives have become, managing this beautiful but mysterious little boy. Then Rupert, a former horse-trainer, noticed something. Rowan seemed to have a special bond with the horses on their farm, and while mounted on a horse, the tantrums almost magically disappeared. Magic, as it turns out, is central to this story. Rupert is also a human-rights worker and journalist who has studied indigenous cultures in Africa and Asia, and he has a special interest in shamanic healing. He puts the pieces together and decides to take his wife and son on a healing journey to Mongolia, home of the reclusive Reindeer People, the Dukha, who are renowned as the best shamanic healers in a land of avid horsemen.

I should mention that by this point, Rowan had seen many traditional medical professionals and was on an onerous regime of medications that didn’t seem to be helping all that much. Although Kristin, herself a psychologist, initially resisted the idea, eventually she decided to support the trip, even if it only turned out to be an adventure for the family. Rupert is more confident than that, and enlists a film crew to document the whole thing. In the Q&A which followed the screening, director Michal Orion Scott said he couldn’t resist the idea, especially because he thought the shamanic healing probably wouldn’t work.

The resulting film is an interesting combination of stunning travelogue, family portrait, and talking head doc about autism. The talking heads are a sore point for me, actually. Esteemed autism experts from Temple Grandin (herself autistic) to Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen weigh in on the condition, with various opinions. The only consensus seems to be that we don’t yet really understand all of autism’s dimensions. By contrast, the Mongolian healers seem to treat young Rowan as if he’s demon-possessed. They speak of evil spirits, and suggest that a female relative on Kristin’s side of the family is still tormenting the boy. Perhaps the director is signaling his own uneasiness with Rupert’s utter belief in the power of these shamans, but it ends up making the film feel a bit muddled.

I won’t spoil the ending of the film, but I will say that Rupert gambles just about everything on this trip. Not only is there a documentary film, but he’s written a book (The Horse Boy) and started a foundation and therapy centre for autistic children where they can work with horses (The Horse Boy Foundation).

Another of my issues with the film is the amount of projection going on. Especially considering that Rowan’s mother is a psychologist, I was amazed that the family seems to make huge leaps in logic when it concerns Rowan’s “bond” with animals, with the animals’ power to heal, and ultimately with the wisdom of indigenous shamans. My reservations were somewhat put to the side by the film’s end, but I still had lots of questions. Unfortunately, they weren’t the sort of questions I could ask in a fifteen-minute Q&A after the film.

Even with my slight reservations, this is a genuinely moving film about a fascinating subject. It also happens to be set in a spectacularly beautiful place. It will be screening at the upcoming Hot Docs film festival here in Toronto, and I’m hopeful that I can get an interview with either the director, Michal Orion Scott, or Rowan’s dad Rupert Isaacson, should either of them make the trip.

Here is the Q&A with director Michal Orion Scott and Rowan’s parents, Rupert Isaacson and Kristin Neff, from after the screening (the first question is from a young autistic man who was attending the screening with his parents):

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Duration: 14:08

Official site of the film

7/10 (7/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs09, #sxsw09, autism, parenting

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Enfances (Childhoods)

by James McNally on March 28, 2009 · 1 comment

in Directors,Film Festivals

Enfances (Childhoods) (Directors: Yann Le Gal, Ismaël Ferroukhi, Corinne Garfin, Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige, Isild Le Besco, Safy Nebbou): This very interesting idea, brought to realization by French director Yann Le Gal, brings together six short films, each concerning a pivotal moment in the childhood of six great film directors: Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ingmar Bergman. I hadn’t heard of any of the segment’s directors before, but three or four of the segments were outstanding. My favourite is the story of how Fritz Lang, at the age of ten, discovers a family secret that changes his politics and his whole outlook on life. Also excellent was the recollection by Jean Renoir of how his friendship with a peasant child who teaches him how to hunt and steal gives him an appreciation for the injustice of class distinctions. The segments on Welles and Hitchcock, though good, were perhaps the weakest. But the segment on Jacques Tati was perhaps the closest in spirit to an actual Tati film. The gangly Tati is too tall to fit into his class photo, so he wanders off into the school on an almost wordless adventure. The way he ends up in the photo is pure physical comedy. The segment on Bergman rounds out the film, and if I’d been more familiar with his work, I might have appreciated it more.

I really enjoyed the way each segment not only told a story from the director’s life, but was also directed in their signature style. Although these omnibus films are always bound to be uneven, these six stories moved along at a great pace and made for a very enjoyable (and hopefully enlightening) experience.

Official site of the film