May 2009

Cure for Love

by James McNally on May 24, 2009

in Documentaries

Cure for Love

Cure for Love (Directors: Francine Pelletier and Christina Willings): I first heard about this doc­u­mentary almost a year ago, and excitedly wrote to the film­makers asking for a copy. To my shame, I’ve had that copy for almost eight months and am only now get­ting around to it. Although it was an inquis­itive email from one of the dir­ectors that jolted me into action, I’m happy that my review also coin­cides with the end of the Inside Out fest, which I’ve just been too busy to cover, des­pite my best intentions.

Cure for Love begins cryptic­ally with a wed­ding cere­mony between a self-described gay man and his les­bian friend. Brian and Ana ori­gin­ally met online through the Living Hope Youth Forum, a bul­letin board for evan­gel­ical young people strug­gling with same-sex attrac­tion. In gen­eral, the evan­gel­ical sub­cul­ture frowns upon homo­sexu­ality and con­siders its expres­sion a sin. Many min­is­tries have cropped up to help people to curb their desires and Living Hope is just one example of these so-called “ex-gay” min­is­tries. This film intro­duces us to Brian and Ana, as well as to two other friends who met through Living Hope. John and Darren end up taking a dif­ferent journey than their friends, each embra­cing their sexu­ality while attempting to hang onto their faith. This film very sens­it­ively listens to its sub­jects as they describe their pain and their efforts at resolving the very real con­flicts within themselves.

John’s story is maybe the most affecting for me. This incred­ibly intel­li­gent and artic­u­late man describes how in high school he would cut phrases like “not man enough” and “I hate me” into his arms with knives in order to fend off more ser­ious thoughts of sui­cide. He describes being put on anti-psychotic med­ic­a­tion and seeking help from various “ex-gay” min­is­tries such as Living Hope and Exodus. He finally comes to the con­clu­sion that there must be some­thing wrong with a set of reli­gious beliefs that in the end led him to try to des­troy him­self. Even so, he care­fully exam­ines bib­lical and theo­lo­gical evid­ence to help him accept who he is and to enjoy a romantic rela­tion­ship with another man.

Darren also becomes uncom­fort­able with the teaching of groups like Exodus. In their founders’ stories of anonymous sex and rampant promis­cuity, Darren fails to find any­thing resem­bling his own story. He admits that he never even kissed a man until he was 27, and that instead of feeling dirty, he felt incred­ibly free. It’s painful to watch him recount how he had to pull back from a rela­tion­ship with a man he clearly loves because that man had not yet been able to accept his own homosexuality.

Cure for Love

Brian and Ana are per­haps the most enig­matic. Ana seems unhappy but resigned to a mar­riage she describes as “like having a room­mate for life.” Her unyielding view of what she thinks the Bible teaches about homo­sexu­ality will not let her change her mind, even as she and Brian visit with their old friend John and his new boy­friend Chris. Brian seems to be making the best of it. His “suc­cessful” mar­riage has given him new oppor­tun­ities to speak at churches and “ex-gay” min­istry con­fer­ences and he seems to enjoy these rewards enough to stop short of where John and Darren have gone. Maybe the prestige and sense of com­munity he enjoys is enough to sub­limate his desire for a real romantic and sexual rela­tion­ship. It’s Ana for whom I feel the most, since she’s not enjoying the same sense of reward or fulfillment.

Although dir­ectors Willings and Pelletier do occa­sion­ally bring in rep­res­ent­at­ives of some “ex-gay” and “ex-ex-gay” groups, I appre­ci­ated that they kept the focus very tightly on this small group of friends. Because they’re friends who have reached dif­ferent con­clu­sions, their attempts to remain close pro­ject a sense of dis­com­fort that makes you hurt for everyone involved. Cure for Love takes a very sens­itive approach to a com­plex inter­sec­tion of sub­cul­tures, and suc­ceeds in showing its sub­jects as real human beings.

It will be showing at the Frameline San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival on June 20 and at Vancouver’s Queer Film Festival in August, but this is the sort of doc­u­mentary that really needs a tele­vi­sion broad­cast or some other way to reach a much wider audi­ence. I sin­cerely hope it gets that opportunity.

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: christianity, faith, homosexuality, religion

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Cannes Film Festival 2009

by James McNally on May 22, 2009

in Cannes,Film Festivals

Cannes Film Festival 2009

For the past week, I’ve been observing the annual Cannes Film Festival from afar, con­tent to exper­i­ence it via Twitter and the blogs of critics I admire. Although I doubt I’ll ever actu­ally get to attend, I love the anti­cip­a­tion it builds for films that may or may not get to us here in Toronto at TIFF each fall.

On the festival’s web site, I always head straight to the press pages where I grab all the press kits I can find. Although press kits are straight-up mar­keting and make every film sound like a mas­ter­piece, they’re the best way to get a syn­opsis and a look at some images. Combined with some smart cri­ti­cism from sites like Indiewire (@indiewire on Twitter) and indi­vidual critics like James Rocchi (@jamesrocchi), Spout’s Karina Longworth (@KarinaLongworth), Variety’s Anne Thompson (@akstanwyck), and IFC’s Alison Willmore (@alisonwillmore), I almost feel like I was there. And I didn’t need to buy a tuxedo either.

(UPDATE: 5/24/09): Just thought I’d post some of the award win­ners here for future reference.

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Steel Homes

by James McNally on May 21, 2009 · 2 comments

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Steel Homes

Steel Homes (Director: Eva Weber): I’m not in the habit of reviewing shorts, but as it hap­pens, I ran into the dir­ector of Steel Homes at a Hot Docs party and she eagerly pressed a copy of her film into my hand. The reason I usu­ally don’t review shorts has nothing to do with the per­ceived quality of the films, and everything to do with my per­ceived lack of talent at writing about them. Nevertheless, here I go.

Eva Weber has taken a look inside a self-storage facility and has asked some ques­tions. What kinds of people keep their stuff here? Why do they do it? Why are there some things we can’t keep with us and yet can’t throw away? In ten short minutes, the film eleg­antly attempts to answer these ques­tions by means of a per­ceptive camera moving at a stately pace, accom­panied by voi­ceovers from some of the ten­ants who rent lockers. These anonymous-looking build­ings have popped up all over the developed world, places to store the over­flow of “stuff” that we acquire during our life­times. But what emerges is that people aren’t just keeping excess material goods here. In many cases, they’re con­structing shrines to lost rel­at­ives or even to their own lost youth or ideals. In one case, a man has lost his home and is storing things here until he can get back on his feet again. His shrine is to a lost life as well, per­haps the life of the man he thought he could be.

By focusing only on the ster­ility of the facility itself, and never on the human objects it con­tains, the cine­ma­to­graphy is super­fi­cially dis­tan­cing, but it only makes the voi­ceovers more heart­breaking. As these very artic­u­late sub­jects recount their attempts to grasp immor­tality by hanging onto a person or a memory, the images rein­force the futility of that quest.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about this short doc­u­mentary is that it left me wanting more.

Official site of the film

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs09, shorts

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SoleJourney

by James McNally on May 19, 2009

in Documentaries,DVD

SoleJourney

SoleJourney (Directors: Kate Burns and Sheila E. Schroeder): I’ve admired the work of Rev. Dr. Mel White and the Soulforce organ­iz­a­tion for years now and this doc­u­mentary, par­tially funded by Soulforce, prom­ised to shed some light on the organization’s con­tinuing fight against the anti-gay agenda of Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family organ­iz­a­tion. Unfortunately, the film comes up short for a number of reasons.

First and fore­most, it’s not ter­ribly clear what the main focus of the film is. The title itself con­fused me until I real­ized it was refer­ring to the 1000 Watt March, a Soulforce “action” in which GLBT fam­ilies marched from Denver to Colorado Springs (home to Focus on the Family), a dis­tance of 65 miles, in five-mile “relays.” But the march doesn’t even really enter into the film until about the halfway mark. For the first 30 minutes or so, we get some­thing closer to a his­tory of the begin­nings of Soulforce, and its con­nec­tion to the non-violent res­ist­ance philo­sophy of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. Although Rev. Dr. White does appear in the film, I didn’t feel there was enough of him for this to be con­sidered a real his­tory of his organ­iz­a­tion. Instead there were lots of news clips emphas­izing the media’s view that Focus on the Family is an influ­en­tial and important organ­iz­a­tion. I found this unne­ces­sary, and it seemed to unbal­ance the film and expose its lack of structure.

When we do get to the march itself, we simply get random shots of small groups of people walking along the highway, inter­spersed with some footage of their reg­ular family lives at home. Although these fam­ilies are def­in­itely worthy of having their stories told, I wanted more of the at-home stuff and less of the anti­cli­mactic “march” stuff. I even enjoyed the talking head inter­views more than the cov­erage of the march, although none of it seemed to ever coalesce into a larger whole. I found the soundtrack cloy­ingly sweet, too, although it def­in­itely con­trib­uted to the overall “inspir­a­tional” feeling I think the film­makers were aiming for.

Soulforce’s mis­sion is to combat “religion-based oppres­sion” of LGBT people but there was very little about the reli­gious basis of that oppres­sion. In that respect, I found the film com­pared quite unfa­vour­ably with Daniel Karslake’s For the Bible Tells Me So (review), which even used some of the same footage of the demon­stra­tions at Focus on the Family’s headquar­ters. That film also man­aged to fea­ture some LGBT fam­ilies in a sens­itive way, and I’d hoped that SoleJourney might have built upon the earlier film. Instead, I don’t think it will have much appeal to anyone who doesn’t already believe in what Soulforce is doing.

Official site of the film

6/10(6/10)

Tagged as: christianity, faith, homosexuality, humanrights, religion

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Hot Docs 2009 Meme-tagged!

by James McNally on May 16, 2009

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Sarcastic thanks are in order to doc blogger Pamela Cohn, who has dragged me into a blog­ging meme based on this year’s Hot Docs fest­ival. As if I haven’t done enough writing about it already (and with another five reviews or so still boun­cing around in my head), here goes:

  1. Film that Tugged at My Heartstrings the Most: This one’s a tie: Aron Gaudet’s The Way We Get By and Greg Barker’s Sergio. In fact, these two knocked me out so thor­oughly that I’ve been unable to write about them yet. I hope that will change, but I’m finding it very dif­fi­cult to put into words how each of these films made me feel. To sum up poorly, both made me think about how what we do with our time on this planet has a lot to do with how we will be remembered. And that each of us very much wants to be remembered.
  2. Strangest Cinematic Moment: Even though I watched it at home via screener, there came a point in John Maringouin’s Big River Man where I thought that the unhinging of Slovenian dis­tance swimmer Martin Strel’s mind might just take mine with it.
  3. Best Party: The day job kind of pre­cluded my full immer­sion in the night­time scene, but luckily my pal Joel Heller (pro­ducer of the hil­arious and utterly charming Winnebago Man) invited me to a couple of post-screening gath­er­ings. I was at the infamous Conference Room F party while it was still coales­cing in Joel’s suite. I got to meet some amazing people (including, finally, the above-mentioned meme-tagger her­self!) even though I could only stay an hour.
  4. Overall High Point: Probably for me, the final post-Winnebago Man party on Saturday night. There was a rumoured trip to Toronto Island that didn’t come off, but I had a great time at the Victory Café instead and got to meet some really inter­esting people. I did skip the post-party karaoke, which was prob­ably best for everyone.
  5. Favourite Pitch: You see, this is where I show how much of an imposter I really am. I did not attend the Toronto Documentary Forum, the Dragon’s Den of doc­u­mentary pitching, and there­fore I have no opinion on this at all. Hopefully after my exper­i­ence at SIFT in a few weeks, I’ll know a good pitch from a bad one (and hoping mine won’t be one of the bad ones!)

Now, I’m sup­posed to tag another five people who can con­tinue this thing. Unlucky vic­tims: Bob Turnbull, Shannon Ridler, Trista DeVries, Sarah Gopaul and Kurt Halfyard.

Tagged as: #hotdocs09, memes

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