DVD Clubs

Survivors

by James McNally on April 30, 2010

in DVD Clubs,Television

Survivors: Complete Seasons One & Two

In what is likely to be the only piece of non–Hot Docs–related news for the next little while, I’m happy to announce that BBC America/BBC Canada this week released Seasons (or more accur­ately, Series) 1 and 2 of Adrian Hodges’ post-apocalyptic drama Survivors. I became hooked on this show more than a year ago, and up until now had to resort to some rather dubious means in order to keep up with it. Based on the ori­ginal 70s series cre­ated by Terry Nation (although Hodges calls it more of a re-imagining), Survivors fol­lows a small group of people who sur­vive a cata­strophic virus that wipes out 99% of the world’s pop­u­la­tion in a matter of a few days. The storyline has lots of twists and turns, but the best part for me is just seeing how people might sur­vive when all of their creature com­forts are sud­denly taken away. Who is best-equipped to sur­vive in a world like that? Since the series is based in the UK, at least everyone isn’t going around with auto­matic weapons, so the threat of viol­ence, though ever-present, doesn’t erupt into ludicrous fire­fights every episode.

I’ll have to say that the writing starts to wobble a bit in Series 2, espe­cially when it’s obvious that the pro­du­cers are reluctant to kill off any of their char­ac­ters. But Survivors is hugely enjoy­able, and may even have you thinking about how you might endure if/when everything even­tu­ally goes pear-shaped.

Survivors: The Complete Original Series

The ori­ginal series has also been released. All 38 epis­odes from 1975–1977 are included, as well as the fea­tur­ette “The Cult of Survivors”. Although the fash­ions haven’t aged kindly, the stories hold up remark­ably well, and you can see how the newer show has changed some of the ori­ginal char­ac­ters. As you can see from the extensive Wikipedia entry, this series has attained cult status and for fans of the show, this is likely to be the bigger prize.

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Mine
Mine was the December 2009 selec­tion of Film Movement Canada, a sub­scrip­tion ser­vice that brings the best of inde­pendent cinema to your door each month. Though it’s only recently launched here, Film Movement has oper­ated in the US for sev­eral years, and has long been one of my favourite sources of great films. Mine is screening the­at­ric­ally around the US until the end of March 2010 (more inform­a­tion) and will be avail­able through iTunes this month, too.

Mine (Director: Geralyn Pezanoski): Winner of the Audience Award at the 2009 SXSW Film Festival, Mine is a gut-wrenching look at some of the for­gotten vic­tims of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina: pets and their owners. My wife and I are thinking of becoming dog owners, and after watching this film, I’m more con­vinced than ever that pets really do become part of the family.

In the after­math of Hurricane Katrina, thou­sands of evacuees were forced to leave their cats and dogs behind. Shelters wouldn’t accept animals, and in some cases, people left their pets thinking they’d be gone just a few days. We all know what happened. Many people still haven’t returned to the city, and those who did had to wait months. In the mean­time, more than 150,000 animals died. Thanks to the efforts of volun­teers, sev­eral thou­sand were res­cued, but many were shipped to other states, and when their owners didn’t claim them within a few days, some were adopted out to new fam­ilies. This is where the film gets really interesting.

The failure of the gov­ern­ment to adequately respond to the cata­strophe has been the sub­ject of many fine doc­u­mentary films, but in this case, ordinary people around the country stepped in to do all they could to rescue these pets who’d been left behind. Unfortunately, there is a polit­ical edge to some of these “rescue” organ­iz­a­tions, as some of the former owners soon found out. For instance, many dog owners in New Orleans don’t have their dogs spayed or neutered, whether for fin­an­cial or cul­tural reasons. Among the rescue com­munity, this is con­sidered irre­spons­ible. As well, many of the res­cued animals turned out to have heart­worm infec­tions, some­thing that can be pre­vented with med­ic­a­tion. Again, prob­ably due to fin­an­cial hard­ship or simply ignor­ance, many New Orleans res­id­ents hadn’t treated their pets for heartworm.

The end result was that many of the rescue organ­iz­a­tions saw the ori­ginal owners as neg­li­gent, and after treating the animals for sick­ness, they would spay or neuter them and then adopt them out to more “suit­able” fam­ilies in their areas. When the ori­ginal owners were finally able to track their pets down, the rescue organ­iz­a­tions would tell them that their pet had a new family, and the new family didn’t want to give it up.

We follow sev­eral of these heart­breaking cus­tody battles throughout the course of the film. Though it’s only hinted at, race and class are central to how the stories are played out. Since pets are con­sidered prop­erty under the law, it should simply be a matter of having one’s prop­erty returned, but in the emo­tional bat­tle­field of pet own­er­ship, things are rarely that simple. Having already sur­vived the hur­ricane and the loss of their homes and pos­ses­sions, the res­id­ents of New Orleans have no money to hire law­yers to pursue their missing pets, so a number of volun­teers help them to find law­yers who are willing to work pro bono on the cases. It’s an ugly pro­cess, and one par­tic­ular phone con­ver­sa­tion (part of which appears in the trailer embedded below) between the owner of a missing dog and the head of the rescue organ­iz­a­tion who got him out of New Orleans sums up the film in a nut­shell. People who love animals can often forget that there is a person attached to that animal. If you care about animals, you cannot pre­tend that that rela­tion­ship never existed.

You don’t have to be a dog lover to enjoy Mine. And even if you think you’ve seen all there is to see about Hurricane Katrina, don’t let that keep you away from this insightful film, which has exposed the class divi­sions of our society more clearly than any­thing I’ve seen in a long time.

Official site of the film

8/10(8/10)

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Film Movement Canada

Finally, the DVD sub­scrip­tion ser­vice I’ve been men­tioning since 2006 is avail­able in Canada! That first link is a tiny bit unfair, since it deals mostly with Ironweed Film Club, another DVD ser­vice that has been avail­able in Canada all along. But while Ironweed’s focus has been doc­u­ment­aries, and of late, mostly envir­on­mental docs, Film Movement has over the years focused on inter­na­tional cinema, with quite a few fest­ival gems avail­able nowhere else. In fact, just a few months ago I was com­plaining via Twitter that Film Movement had picked up a number of great films that were not being dis­trib­uted in Canada, including Munyurangabo, Lake Tahoe, and Somers Town. I haven’t done an exhaustive com­par­ison, and I know that there may still be some titles that won’t be avail­able to Canadian sub­scribers, but this is a huge win for cinephiles in this country.

For as little as about $10/month (based on a 12-month sub­scrip­tion), you’ll get a new film sent to you, cur­ated by Film Movement’s team of pro­gram­mers. Part of the fun is just let­ting them sur­prise you, and I guar­antee you’ll find some gems you would oth­er­wise have missed. Subscribers also get dis­counts on buying DVDs from their extensive back cata­logue, too.

To make the offer even more irres­ist­ible, how about a promo code for an addi­tional 5% off? Just enter “hel­loc­anada” in the promo code box before you check out. But the code is only good until November 30th, so don’t hes­itate. Let’s show them that Canadians love great cinema, and make them wonder why they took so long to get here!

Film Movement Canada

P.S. The November selec­tion is Uruguayan film Gigante (review), which screened at this year’s TIFF.

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Gigante

Gigante (Director: Adrián Biniez): Fabian Jara (Horacio Camandule) is the tit­ular giant, working as an overnight security guard at a large gro­cery store in Montevideo. He spends his evening shifts watching security cam­eras of other night employees doing their jobs, including a crew of female cleaners. He gradu­ally comes to fall in love with one, even though he doesn’t know her name. He begins fol­lowing her from afar in the morn­ings, dis­cov­ering her routines. On the week­ends, he works as a bouncer at a nightclub, though he’s far too gentle a giant to really hurt anyone. Although he loves aggressive heavy-metal music, he’s far too shy to actu­ally approach his crush. Instead, his stalker-like beha­viour increases, although each time the film steers toward darker ter­ritory, Jara’s basic decency sur­faces, pre­serving the light tone. Eventually, he dis­covers her name is Julia, and by the end a work-related crisis throws them together at last.

It’s the slightest of premises, basic­ally a “nerd gets the girl” story, but the per­form­ance of Camandule as the inno­cent “Jarita” (as his co-workers jok­ingly call him) is com­pletely endearing. Leonor Svarcas as Julia is just the right com­bin­a­tion of dorky and alluring to be believ­able as a woman Jara believes he might actu­ally have a chance with. The film has the lan­guid pacing and gentle humour that Uruguayan film is becoming known for, and it was a pleasure to recog­nize Juan Andrés Stoll from Hiroshima (review) in a small role. Though it’s not great cinema, this is a per­fect fest­ival film, a crowd-pleasing slice of life that for me per­son­ally was a wel­come res­pite from the steady diet of abusive fam­ilies, sui­cide, dis­ease and obses­sion I’ve been watching so far at this festival.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Adrián Biniez from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 24:40

Here’s a clip from the film, which is avail­able now on DVD in the US through the excel­lent Film Movement sub­scrip­tion service:

7/10(7/10)

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Small Town Gay Bar

Small Town Gay Bar (Director: Malcolm Ingram, USA, 2006): This film was part of the June 2007 release from Ironweed Film Club, and fea­tures two short films as well that I haven’t yet watched. I missed this when it played ori­gin­ally at this year’s Inside Out fest­ival, so was glad to see it on DVD so soon.

While my own exper­i­ence with gay bars has been pretty lim­ited, I under­stand that they serve a vital social func­tion within the com­munity, serving as sanc­tu­aries from a world that is very often hos­tile to gay people. The situ­ation is even more dire in the rural South, where pre­ju­dice has been tol­er­ated and even encour­aged for a long time. This small film keeps its focus tightly on a very spe­cific area, north­eastern Mississippi, and on the pat­rons of a bar called Rumors, loc­ated in tiny Shannon, pop­u­la­tion 1,726. In rural com­munities where everyone knows everyone else, it’s not unusual for gay people to stay “in the closet” and so the bar becomes the only place where they can actu­ally be them­selves. However, since Mississippi is in the middle of the “Bible Belt,” the bars are often tar­getted by con­ser­vative church groups and forced out of busi­ness. Part of the film covers the his­tory of gay bars in this part of the state, and Crossroads, once loc­ated in larger Meridian (pop. 39,000), seemed to be just the sort of place that con­ser­vat­ives would want to close. As one former patron put it, the sense of des­per­a­tion was so strong that it became a sort of circus, a place where “any­thing went” and so local law enforce­ment found a way to close it. Happily, this same former patron bought the prop­erty and reopened it as a much more con­genial place, recog­nizing that people were being forced to drive sev­eral hours to Memphis for lack of a local place to go. I found myself reminded very much of British pub cul­ture while watching the film, where the bar is not only a place to drink and meet romantic part­ners, but a hub of inform­a­tion and a sur­rogate family. Ingram’s film does a great job of cap­turing a sense of place and of the very unique people who pop­u­late it.

Perhaps the only weak­ness I found in the film was in its choice of counter-voices. Reverend Fred Phelps (of GodHatesFags.com fame) was born in Meridian, so I can see why the film­maker wanted to fea­ture him, but giving this nutbag so much screen time was unne­ces­sary. Ingram also inter­viewed Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association, another extreme organ­iz­a­tion with their headquar­ters in nearby Tupelo. While this gen­er­ated lots of sparks, I was rather hoping to hear more from local reg­ular people and even local pas­tors instead of people whom the majority of Americans would view as raving lun­atics. As well, it would have been inter­esting to hear why the pat­rons of Rumors and the other bars haven’t just given up and moved to larger cities where they could live more openly.

As a side note, I was intrigued when I heard so many Toronto bands on the soundtrack (Metric, The Hidden Cameras, Broken Social Scene) and guessed, right­fully, that dir­ector Malcolm Ingram was indeed from Toronto. I’d love to hear what drew him so far from home to tell this story.

Official site for the film

7/10(7/10)

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