2010 March 24 — Toronto Screen Shots

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

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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.