March 2010

NFB Presents Green Screens

by James McNally on March 29, 2010

If I’m honest, I’d have to say the Toronto’s NFB Mediatheque programs so much great stuff every day of the week that I can’t keep up with it all. Just recently, I discovered that they host a monthly environmentally-themed screening series called Green Screens. These socially-conscious films are screened for free (FREE!) and are followed by Q&A sessions or panel discussions with subject matter experts. Their partner for this series is the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy.

April’s selection is The Arctic Circle: Battle for the Pole, a stunning HD film about oil exploration and extraction in the Arctic. It screens Wednesday April 7th at 7:00pm at the NFB Mediatheque (150 John Street) and admission is FREE. The film will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by Dr. Peter J. Ewins, Senior Officer, Species Conservation, WWF-Canada.

Tagged as: arctic, nfb, oil

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Le Coach

by James McNally on March 28, 2010 · 3 comments

in Film Festivals

Le Coach (Director: Olivier Doran): Max Chene (Richard Berry) is a “coach” who helps to motivate everybody from professional athletes to government ministers to business executives. After his gambling debts get out of control and his wife throws him out, he is approached to take on a unique client. Patrick Marmignon (Jean-Paul Rouve) is an ineffectual manager at a company who is about to make a very important presentation to a potential Chinese investor. The CEO hires Max to coach him but tells him he must not let Marmignon know that he’s being coached. Why? Because Marmignon is the nephew of the company’s Chairman of the Board. At least that’s what everyone thinks.

This typical comedy setup never really catches fire, although there were a few mildly funny scenes. It’s a typical buddy comedy in which each character learns something from the other. In Max’s case, he hasn’t learned to apply his coaching techniques to his own life, despite his cool exterior and seductive way with women. For Marmignon, he must learn to overcome his milquetoast personality and succeed, not only in business, but with the woman of his dreams, who just happens to be the head of HR at his company. It’s all a bit silly, but it did entertain me for 90 minutes or so.

6/10 (6/10)

Tagged as: #cinefranco10, cinefranco, france

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Welcome

by James McNally on March 25, 2010

in DVD

Welcome (Director: Philippe Lioret): The title of Philippe Lioret’s latest film drips with irony. The French coastal town of Calais, where the film is set, resembles a fascist police state, at least when it comes to illegal immigrants and anyone who tries to help them. We meet 17-year-old Bilal, an Iraqi Kurd, just as he arrives in Calais, after a harrowing three-month journey from Iraq. He’s desperate to get to London to be reunited with his girlfriend Mina, who obtained legal immigration status a few months earlier. Calais is a gathering point for hundreds of illegals trying to get to England, and the police are ruthless in harassing and turning them back.

Bilal first attempts to cross by paying a “handler” 500 Euros to be smuggled over in the back of a cargo truck, but he is caught and turned back. Soon he is splashing around awkwardly in the local pool, where ex-champion Simon (Vincent Lindon) is a coach. Bilal uses some of his remaining cash to pay Simon for swimming lessons, and it soon becomes clear to the older man that his young student is planning an audacious swim across the English Channel. Seeing a chance to impress his estranged wife, who volunteers at a soup kitchen for illegal immigrants, he takes the boy into his home and begins training him more seriously. His own swimming career and his marriage are in ruins, but Bilal awakens his idealism and his paternal instincts. Unfortunately, his snooping neighbour disapproves and calls the police, who practically break Simon’s door down looking for anything suspicious.

This gives the film the flavour of a thriller even as it functions more like a melodrama. The mournful piano score isn’t really necessary when the story and characters are this sympathetic. Lindon is an actor with just the right look, his sad and expressive eyes always communicating more than his gruff exchanges with Bilal, mostly in English, both characters’ second language. Firat Ayverdi, who plays Bilal, does a convincing job of developing from a beginner in the water to a strong swimmer, although his dramatic arc is less ambitious.

Though I often wondered why the police didn’t just look the other way (it would get the migrants out of France, after all), or why Simon didn’t just smuggle Bilal to London himself in his car, the film does a great job of conveying the plight of refugees in Europe, who are not welcome but who are also forbidden to leave. The unfair reality is that some of them make it where they want to go, and many of them don’t. More shocking than that, though, was seeing the atmosphere of paranoia, fear and mistrust that has seeped into the formerly liberal culture of Europe. Though many of the aspects of the film felt melodramatic, the horrifying reality of people being prosecuted for such humanitarian acts as feeding or sheltering refugees cannot be denied.

Welcome was released on DVD in Canada by E1 Entertainment on March 2. Buy it from Amazon.ca. Extra features include a 25-minute making-of featurette that, alas, is only in French.

US customers can buy Welcome from Film Movement. Extras include the short film The Berlin Wall.

8/10 (8/10)

Tagged as: france, iraq, swimming

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Soundtrack for a Revolution

by Drew Kerr on March 24, 2010

in Doc Soup,Documentaries,Film Festivals

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.

Also, with this post we welcome a new voice to Toronto Screen Shots. Drew Kerr is the brother of regular contributor Jay Kerr and will be helping with our 2010 Hot Docs coverage and hopefully beyond.

Soundtrack for a Revolution (Directors: Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman): Soundtrack For A Revolution revisits the story of the American civil rights movement from the 50s and 60s, covering familiar territory, but adding the fresh element of having music from the era performed by mostly contemporary artists. One look at the roster of acts (notably Joss Stone, John Legend, The Roots, Angie Stone, and Wyclef Jean) immediately gave me reservations, since I’m not much of a fan of today’s r&b music. I found most of the performances, however, to be entertaining and moving. The goal of directors Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman (who both won an Oscar in 2003 for their documentary short Twin Towers) was to use these acts as a gateway for a younger audience into learning about the story behind this important time in American history.

The musical performances, as strong as many of them are, end up taking a back seat to the compelling modern day interviews with the people who were directly involved, the “foot soldiers and leaders.” Prominent figures such as Congressman John Lewis, Julian Bond, Ambassador Andrew Young, and Harry Belafonte all offer their recollections of the experiences they endured, covering significant periods and moments in the movement such as the lunch counter sit-ins, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus strike in Alabama, the Freedom Riders who tried to integrate long-distance bus travel in the South, the 1963 March on Washington, and the assassination and funeral of Martin Luther King. The interviews are intercut with still images and archival footage, some of it restored specifically for the film and every bit as disturbing and shocking today as the first time you saw it, providing a powerful, if somewhat brief summation of the time. The film clocks in at only 82 minutes and a healthy portion is used for the music, so only so much can be covered. Only a brief description of the background on some of the songs is given, so they’re really given their own voice through the performances. The songs are mostly freedom songs that evolved from slave chants and the black church, providing a vital function in unifying the oppressed as they stood up to their oppressors. “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”, “We Shall Not Be Moved”, “Eyes On The Prize”, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around”, and “We Shall Overcome” are just some of the numbers that are featured in the film.

The documentary, which was also executive produced by actor Danny Glover, was shortlisted this year for the documentary feature Oscar nominations (15 films are shortlisted and only five are selected for the official nomination). It didn’t make the final cut, which is a shame, because it’s certainly worthy.

Official site of the film

9/10 (8/10)

Tagged as: civilrights, music

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Les femmes de l’ombre (Female Agents)

by James McNally on March 24, 2010 · 2 comments

in Cinéfranco,Film Festivals

Les femmes de l’ombre (Female Agents) screens as part of Cinefranco 2010 on Tuesday March 30 at 7:00pm at the AMC Yonge and Dundas.

Les femmes de l’ombre (Female Agents) (Director: Jean-Paul Salomé): Films about World War 2 resistance fighters are very hot right now. In the past few years, we’ve had Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (Germany), Black Book and Winter in Wartime (The Netherlands), Flame and Citron (Denmark), and Max Manus (Norway), to name just a few. Now from France comes Les femmes de l’ombre, or as it’s more prosaically titled in English, Female Agents.

Tellingly, though, the French title, which translates roughly to “the women in the shadows,” references perhaps the greatest film about the Resistance ever made, Jean-Pierre Melville’s L’armée de l’ombres (Army of Shadows) (review). It might be an homage to the Melville film, but it actually ends up making Les femmes de l’ombre look even less substantial.

Sophie Marceau plays Louise Desfontaines, a seasoned Resistance fighter who has just lost her husband in a shootout with the Nazis during an operation. Soon she’s in London meeting her brother, who’s fighting with the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). He recruits her for a crucial mission just a few days before the planned D-Day invasion of France: rescue a captured geologist from a German-occupied hospital before the Nazis can torture him into revealing information about the invasion plans.

There follows a Dirty Dozen-style recruiting campaign, in which she bullies, coerces, and blackmails three other women into helping: Jeanne, a tough prostitute on death row for killing her pimp, innocent Gaelle who happens to be an explosives expert, and Suzy, a former showgirl who has a broken engagement to a powerful Gestapo officer in her past.

After parachuting into occupied France, they join Jewish noblewoman Maria who is already undercover as a nurse at the hospital. The actual escape is exciting and breathlessly paced. Unfortunately, the entire film feels similarly breathless. Plot details quickly became hard to follow, and many times I found myself what exactly was happening.

Characterizations were fairly simple, as well. There is an attempt to make Louise’s complicated relationship with her brother a major theme, but it never feels fully realized. Similarly, Suzy’s impending reunion with her ex-fiancé Colonel Heindrich (Moritz Bleibtreu) should have held more tension, especially when she realizes she’s been recruited to assassinate him.

The film offers a welcome, if belated, tribute to those women who took up arms, often when their husbands or brothers or fathers had already been killed, to fight Nazi occupiers. And it’s handsomely photographed and briskly paced, too. But the viewer never really gets inside these characters to feel the mixture of national pride, anger, hatred, as well as fear and desperation that must have driven them to such acts of bravery.