October 2009

Working for Kinosmith

by James McNally on October 31, 2009 · 1 comment

in Personal

Kinosmith

After a few brief weeks of unem­ploy­ment, I began working again at the begin­ning of October. It’s just a few days a week for now, but it’s likely to grow into a full-time pos­i­tion before long. I’m working for a small but mighty dis­trib­utor called Kinosmith. I’d been aware of them for a while, but didn’t realize that the com­pany was only founded in early 2007. Or that up until now, it’s been essen­tially a one-man oper­a­tion. Robin Smith has worked in the Canadian film industry for more than 20 years, for com­panies such as Capri Releasing, Seville Pictures, Lions Gate, Alliance Atlantis, and the Toronto International Film Festival, and he seems to know everyone. But he made it clear upon meeting me this summer that he needed some help. Although my main areas of respons­ib­ility will even­tu­ally be the web site and social media ini­ti­at­ives, for the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of admin­is­trative work. It’s been a great way to begin to under­stand the busi­ness, and I look for­ward to absorbing some of Robin’s expertise as we con­tinue to work together. I con­sider myself extremely lucky to have been in the right place at the right time.

I had been emailing back and forth for the past few months with another industry vet­eran, Oliver Groom, pro­pri­etor of Project X Distribution, a spe­cial­ized DVD label that puts out the work of British film­maker Peter Watkins as well as a few others. We finally decided to meet in person for a drink and since Oliver and Robin had recently partnered up for their DVD releases, Robin came along too. All three of us got along well from that first meeting and after another get-together and a few emails, Robin asked me to come and help him out. He recently moved his home office to Oliver’s house and so even though I work for Robin, I see Oliver a lot as well.

If I haven’t been writing here as often as usual, it’s not because I’ve been watching fewer films. On the con­trary, I’m also helping out by watching screeners sub­mitted to Kinosmith as well as catching up on the films we’re releasing now. Robin has built up a very impressive cata­logue of films in just over two years, and lots of film­makers want to work with him, so things are very busy. It does bring up a bit of an eth­ical dilemma for me. I don’t intend to refrain from reviewing films that happen to be dis­trib­uted by Kinosmith, but I want to be com­pletely trans­parent about my rela­tion­ship to the dis­trib­utor. Do you think it will be enough to put a standard dis­closure notice at the begin­ning of any blog entry that deals with a Kinosmith title? I promise not to give any film pref­er­en­tial treat­ment, but I don’t want to ignore them, either, espe­cially if I’m ever somehow involved in the decision to acquire the film for Kinosmith.

In any case, I’m very excited to be indul­ging my pas­sion for film and learning more about the busi­ness side of things. It’s a great oppor­tunity and I’m very thankful to Robin and Oliver for taking me under their wing.

Tagged as: distribution

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Eh! U European Film Festival 2009

by James McNally on October 28, 2009

in Film Festivals

Eh! U European Film Festival 2009

Now in its fifth edi­tion, the Eh! U European Film Festival seems to be really hit­ting its stride. Billing itself as “the free film fest­ival” (since all screen­ings are sub­sid­ized by the various European con­su­lates), this two-week fest­ival is really a gift to the city’s cinephiles. This year fea­tures 26 films from 23 coun­tries, and among them are no fewer than six sub­mis­sions for the Foreign Language Academy Award. I’ll high­light those six, but be sure to check the fest­ival site for others, as well as the schedule. Screenings mostly take place at the Royal Cinema, with the excep­tions of the opening night film, The Karamazovs (Czech Republic) which plays at the Bloor Cinema, and the closing film, El Greco (Greece) which will screen at the Varsity. In addi­tion to the high-profile films listed below, I can per­son­ally recom­mend an older film from Belgium in the pro­gramme, The Alzheimer Case (review), which screened at TIFF back in 2004.

The fol­lowing are offi­cial sub­mis­sions by their coun­tries for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film:

P.S. For the curious, here’s the com­plete list of sub­mis­sions for Best Foreign Language Film.

Tagged as: #euff09, austria, belgium, bulgaria, europeanfilmfestival, france, germany, netherlands, romania

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International Animation Day 2009 at the NFB

by James McNally on October 22, 2009

in Special Events

Get Animated! (National Film Board)

The National Film Board cel­eb­rates International Animation Day (October 28th) with Get Animated!, a weeklong series of free screen­ings and anim­a­tion work­shops across Canada. From October 23–31, check out events hap­pening near you. In Toronto, events will take place at the NFB Mediatheque (150 John Street).

In the Animation Feast pro­gramme, I loved Land of the Heads, which I saw last month at the Montreal World Film Festival, and Cordell Barker’s prize-winning Runaway. And in the International Showcase, Skhizein (review) is a can’t-miss. It’s also avail­able in the cur­rent issue of Wholphin (#9).

I recently received a copy of the gor­geous NFB anim­a­tion com­pil­a­tion Animation Express on Blu-ray, which con­tains many of the films being fea­tured. Watch for a review soon!

Tagged as: animation

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The September Issue

by James McNally on October 22, 2009 · 1 comment

in Doc Soup,Documentaries,Film Festivals

The September Issue
Editor’s Note: Doc Soup is a monthly doc­u­mentary screening pro­gramme run by the good folks at Hot Docs. It gives audi­ences in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver their reg­ular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs fest­ival itself.

The September Issue (Director: R.J. Cutler): Vogue’s September issue is its largest and most important of the year, and work begins on it almost a year in advance. R.J. Cutler and his small crew were granted unpre­ced­ented access to the pro­cess of put­ting the whole thing together.

The film begins with Vogue’s Editor in Chief Anna Wintour opining that fashion intim­id­ates a lot of people, and there­fore those people mock it. She could very well have been speaking about her­self. Infamously lam­pooned by Meryl Streep in the film The Devil Wears Prada (based on a memoir by a former Vogue intern that por­trays Wintour as a bit of a tyrant), Wintour has a repu­ta­tion for mean­ness and ici­ness that has always seemed a bit undeserved to me. In fact, I’ve always had a bit of a crush on the so-called “Ice Queen.” My wife worked for sev­eral years as a copy editor at a fashion magazine here in Toronto, and her stories have made me feel a lot of sym­pathy for Ms. Wintour. She seems to be someone who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and the world of fashion seems over­pop­u­lated by fools.

Cutler’s film has only con­firmed my opinion of Wintour, although there are com­par­at­ively few fools on dis­play. When she’s asked late in the film what her greatest strength is, she unhes­it­at­ingly replies, “Decisiveness.” It’s what has pro­pelled her and Vogue to the top of the notori­ously fickle fashion world. She is an editor, someone who is called upon every day to decide between com­peting cre­ative work, and that calls for a cer­tain ruth­less­ness. Fashion is cre­ative, but it’s also a busi­ness, and without someone making hard decisions, Vogue would cer­tainly falter.

We meet two other types of people in The September Issue. The cre­ative and gen­er­ally hard-working people who act as writers, editors, pho­to­graphers, art dir­ectors and designers. And then there are the syco­phants, the air-kissers and ass kissers. The latter type is refresh­ingly more absent than I’d feared, but the examples on dis­play (the buf­foonery of André Leon Talley, the spine­less­ness of design dir­ector Charles Churchward) add a healthy dose of humour to the film, even if we’re cringing as we’re laughing.

The film actu­ally spends more time with Creative Director Grace Coddington than it does with Wintour. The fire to Wintour’s ice, Coddington is a former model who has has worked with Wintour at Vogue for more than twenty years. Despite the fact that she was ini­tially hos­tile to the film­makers, she ends up opening up the most to them, and her pas­sion, cre­ativity and candor warm up the film con­sid­er­ably. One gets the sense that her ongoing battles with the editor over photo shoots are an integral part of what makes the magazine so con­sist­ently excellent.

But back to Wintour for a moment. As she talks about her English upbringing and the achieve­ments of her sib­lings (“What I do amuses them, I think”), what comes through to this Canadian is reserve and per­haps shy­ness (why do you think she wears the sunglasses so often?) rather than any sense of hos­tility. I think Americans are simply a more gregarious people than most, and so her gen­tility comes across as some­thing more sin­ister. She’s con­sid­er­ably more relaxed around her daughter, Bee Shaffer, and the scenes showing her sup­port of young designer Thakoon also showed me a more tender side.

I found The September Issue hugely enjoy­able, both for the inside look into the work of so many people coming together to create the magazine, and also for the revealing por­trayal of the dynamic between a few of the people sur­rounding Anna Wintour. Although she barely lets her guard down, the little bit she does show dis­pels the myth that she’s heart­less. If any­thing, it shows that she’s just incred­ibly busy, and her effi­ciency is a sur­vival tactic. The film has only heightened my respect and admir­a­tion for her. Which is just a fancy way of saying that my crush is not only intact, it’s increasing. When she does finally retire, I des­per­ately hope she’ll write a memoir. Maybe she can call it, Yes, I Wear Prada. You Gotta Problem With That?

The September Issue opens in Toronto on Friday October 23 at the Varsity Cinema.

Interview with Grace Coddington about the film

Official site of the film

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: fashion, Magazines, publishing, vogue

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The Experimental Eskimos

by James McNally on October 21, 2009

in Documentaries

The Experimental Eskimos

The Experimental Eskimos (Director: Barry Greenwald): In the early 1960s, the Canadian gov­ern­ment car­ried out an “exper­i­ment” by sending three Inuit boys who showed aca­demic promise to be edu­cated in the public schools of Ottawa. Separating these boys from their fam­ilies for most of their teenage years had long-term neg­ative effects, but the edu­ca­tional oppor­tunity also helped them achieve great things for their people.

Peter Ittinuar and Eric Hanna Tagoona were child­hood friends in Rankin Inlet when gov­ern­ment offi­cials arrived to admin­ister IQ tests at their school. Zebedee Nungak was sim­il­arly tested in his com­munity, Puvurnituq. Among their class­mates, these three scored highly and sud­denly they were whisked off to a new life in “the South.” Their foster fam­ilies likely meant well, but for­bid­ding them from speaking in Inuktitut and con­stantly trum­peting the superi­ority of the “white” way of doing things only lowered their self-esteem. In Eric’s case, he says he forgot almost all of his native lan­guage within the first year. When the trio returned north after high school, they were treated with sus­pi­cion. When they forgot Inuktitut words or skills from their youth, they were ridiculed. But they also knew how poorly the Inuit were treated in com­par­ison with the rest of Canadians, leading each man to become polit­ic­ally active in the volatile cli­mate of the early 1970s.

Perhaps the most vis­ible was Ittinuar, who became the first Inuk MP, elected in 1979 as a member of the NDP. Later he would be involved in the cre­ation of Nunavut, the largest self-governing abori­ginal ter­ritory in the world. Nungak was deeply involved in nego­ti­ating the James Bay Agreement in which the pro­vin­cial gov­ern­ment of Quebec settled with the native com­munities in order to build a vast hydro-electric pro­ject. And Tagoona was a key Inuit leader who pres­sured the Liberal gov­ern­ment to include native rights in the Constitution, which was repat­ri­ated in 1982. But as the years passed, each man also struggled with the effects of the exper­i­ment, and with the com­prom­ises made to achieve these polit­ical gains. All of them felt a bit like out­siders to the com­munity they had worked so hard to rep­resent, and the con­sequences included alco­holism, drug addic­tion and failed rela­tion­ships. As the film ends, the three are pur­suing a fin­an­cial set­tle­ment from the Canadian gov­ern­ment for what Zebedee Nungak refers to as “post-traumatic stress disorder.”

The film is struc­tured around a reunion between the three friends in Rankin Inlet, and each man is given gen­erous camera time to tell his own story, as well as to com­ment on the struggles of his friends. It’s clear that all three have been dam­aged by the exper­i­ment, but what’s also clear is that without it, each man may have remained in his com­munity, per­haps only achieving his boy­hood dream of becoming a good hunter. The paradox is implicit in the film, and yet I would have liked Greenwald to explore it a bit fur­ther. When all three are together, they seem eager to talk about the neg­ative effects, to the exclu­sion of the way their exposure to “white” society dir­ected their anger into polit­ical action. This type of reflec­tion would have made their stories a bit more com­plex. As well, it would have been inter­esting to hear more from the “white” side, including the government’s own assess­ment of the suc­cess or failure of the exper­i­ment, and any recol­lec­tions from some of their Ottawa class­mates and friends.

Overall, though, the film offers a per­sonal look at a pivotal time in the devel­op­ment of abori­ginal polit­ical aware­ness in Canada, and in par­tic­ular at three fas­cin­ating men who have each made invalu­able con­tri­bu­tions to Inuit and Canadian history.

The Experimental Eskimos is screening as part of the 2009 Docfest Stratford (Stratford, Ontario) on Saturday October 24 at 4:30pm at Stratford City Hall. It will then screen as part of the Regent Park Film Festival here in Toronto on Thursday November 5 at 7:30pm.

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: aboriginal, inuit

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