vietnam

Bi, Don’t Be Afraid! (Bi, dung so!)

by James McNally on November 10, 2010

in Film Festivals,Reel Asian

Bi, Don't Be Afraid! (Bi, dung so!)

Bi, Don’t Be Afraid! (Bi, dung so!) (Director: Phan Dang Di): This debut fea­ture from Vietnamese dir­ector Phan Dang Di has picked up some impressive awards, including a few at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It’s the story of an extended family with six-year-old Bi at its centre. He lives with his par­ents and his mother’s unmar­ried sister, and near the begin­ning of the film they are joined by his paternal grand­father, who has returned gravely ill from many years spent abroad. No one seems to know where he’s been or what he’s been doing, and Bi’s father spends the rest of the film avoiding his own father. And the rest of his family, for that matter. Instead, he stays out late every night, drinking and flirting with a young masseuse.

As his par­ents’ mar­riage slowly dis­in­teg­rates, Bi is busy dis­cov­ering the world around him. He spends lots of time hanging around at the ice factory, where his older friend An works, and at the river­side where the wild grass grows. He develops a bond with his grand­father and enjoys the time he spends with his aunt.

Meanwhile, his aunt is burning with lust for one of the high school stu­dents she teaches. Everyone seems uncom­fort­able with her unmar­ried status, including her, so she goes along on a setup to meet a single man and even has sex with him. Nothing seems to shake her desire for the stu­dent, though.

This is a film with lots of mys­teries, none of which are revealed. In one sense, this leaves room for the char­ac­ters to act in unpre­dict­able ways, but it also leads to some baffle­ment. Bi’s seeming unaware­ness of the implo­sion of his family is sad, unless you see it as evid­ence of the resi­li­ence of children.

The film is beau­ti­fully shot, and lan­guidly paced, but in the end, the nar­rative left a few too many things left unsaid for me.

Bi, Don’t Be Afraid! is playing Thursday November 11 at 9:00pm at Innis Town Hall as part of the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival. Tickets are $12 and are avail­able online and at the door.

7/10(7/10)

Tagged as: #reelasian10, vietnam

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TIFF 2009: Preliminaries, Part 1

by James McNally on August 8, 2009

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

TIFF season is upon us again. For the past few weeks, I’ve been patiently entering each batch of announced films into a spread­sheet, and noting with growing alarm the number of great films that are making their way to my city. Each year, I pre­view a few in the hope that it helps me narrow things down. In this first post, I’ll focus on documentaries:

Bassidji

Bassidji (Director: Mehran Tamadon): This looks timely in light of the recently con­tested pres­id­en­tial elec­tion in Iran. The film­maker fol­lowed mem­bers of the Islamist cit­izen militia over three years in an attempt to under­stand their rabid sup­port for Iran’s Islamic revolu­tion. These are the same people who have been blamed for much of the post-election viol­ence inflicted on pro­testers. There are alleg­a­tions that the gov­ern­ment con­trols them at arm’s length in order to deny respons­ib­ility for any “excesses.”

***

Cleanflix

Cleanflix (Directors: Andrew James and Joshua Ligairi): I remember reading a few years ago about sev­eral Utah com­panies who rented “edited” ver­sions of Hollywood movies to devout Mormon cus­tomers. All the sex, viol­ence and bad lan­guage had been removed. I always wondered how long and how coherent the res­ulting movies could be. This doc­u­mentary fol­lows these entre­pren­eurs, some of whom exper­i­enced a few R-rated plot twists of their own.

Official site of the film

***

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (Directors: Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith): Daniel Ellsberg was a trusted Pentagon insider until he leaked The Pentagon Papers, exposing how the gov­ern­ment had been lying about the Vietnam War. Nixon became so enraged and obsessed with pun­ishing Ellsberg that it con­trib­uted to bringing down his gov­ern­ment and ending the war.

Official site of the film

Tagged as: #tiff09, censorship, iran, mormonism, nixon, religion, vietnam, watergate

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Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived

by James McNally on April 21, 2008

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived

Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived (2008, Director: Koji Masutani): This film is some­what awkardly titled. It’s not a re-creation of an alternate timeline where JFK sur­vives. Rather, it’s a carefully-argued essay whose thesis is that, based on the way John F. Kennedy dealt with sev­eral mil­itary crises early in his pres­id­ency, he would not have escal­ated the war in Vietnam and that per­haps the tragedy of almost 60,000 American dead (not to men­tion 2,000,000 Vietnamese) could have been averted.

Narrated and written by Professor James Blight of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, who was Errol Morris’ advisor on The Fog of War, Virtual JFK exam­ines six dif­ferent crises faced by the young pres­ident in his abbre­vi­ated time in office. Two involved Cuba (the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 and the Cuban mis­sile crisis in 1962), one was European (the con­struc­tion of the Berlin wall in 1961), and the other three involved Southeast Asia (two con­front­a­tions over Vietnam, one over Laos). In every case, Kennedy stared down the hawks in his admin­is­tra­tion and the mil­itary com­manders who were advoc­ating war. In every case, his cau­tion avoided cata­strophe, most not­ably in the Cuban mis­sile crisis, which many his­tor­ians believe was the closest the world ever came to nuc­lear war. Blight has every reason to believe that Kennedy would have pre­vailed on the sub­ject of Vietnam as well. What he doesn’t dis­cuss is the pos­sib­ility that this had any­thing to do with JFK’s assas­sin­a­tion, although that hypo­thesis has been cir­cu­lated by more than a few people.

Overall, this was enjoy­able and well-argued, but not excep­tional. On a per­sonal level, I enjoyed seeing so much footage of Kennedy’s press con­fer­ences. His cha­risma is clearly evident in his good-natured exchanges with journ­al­ists, even when he was under con­sid­er­able stress. It also sur­prised me how much Kennedy had to deal with in such a short time. The world was going through some major upheavals, and we’re for­tu­nate that Kennedy was guiding a rest­less America with such a steady hand. This film shows us how much more tragic his death was than we may have believed. Apart from all the usual sen­ti­mental stuff about Camelot and the loss of hope, America lost a man of cau­tion who had been a war­rior of peace.

Incidentally, some reviewers have com­plained that the film makes a blunt par­allel with George W. Bush and his hand­ling of the Iraq war, but the con­nec­tion is never made overtly. In the times we’re living in, how­ever, it’s hard not to find a cri­tique almost every­where we look.

Official site of the film
Watson Institute for International Studies page on the film
Trailer

7/10(7/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs08, history, jfk, vietnam, war

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Hot Docs Monday

by James McNally on April 27, 2004

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Vietnam: Ghosts of War (Canada, Director: Micheael Maclear) — Michael Maclear is an insti­tu­tion in Canadian broad­casting. Not only was he the first Western journ­alist to report from North Vietnam during the war (even wit­nessing Ho Chi Minh’s funeral), he was the pro­ducer of the only ser­ious attempt to doc­u­ment the entire his­tory of the Vietnam con­flict (the 1980 min­iseries The Ten Thousand Day War). In this film, Maclear travels back thirty years later, to a Vietnam at peace. The thesis of the film is that super­powers (first, France and then the US) mis­read the situ­ation in Vietnam and that they con­tinue to do the same thing today in the Iraq war. The film points out how “arrog­ance and ignor­ance” make it very easy to start a war and very dif­fi­cult to end one. Maclear has a very idio­syn­cratic style and it didn’t always work for me (for instance, the film doesn’t follow a pre­dict­able nar­rative arc and felt about half an hour too long), but I appre­ci­ated the per­sonal view­point and the way he com­bined ori­ginal footage from the 60s and 70s with new stuff shot just this past year. (8/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs04, vietnam

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The Fog Of War

by James McNally on September 6, 2003

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

The Fog Of War (USA, dir­ector Errol Morris): This was a very strong doc­u­mentary focus­sing on the life of Robert McNamara, the Defence Secretary who served under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. McNamara, now 85 years of age, talks at length about his exper­i­ences and the les­sons he has learned. His mind still razor-sharp, he admits that he made many mis­takes in the “fog of war” and that he was respons­ible for many thou­sands of lives being lost. But he doesn’t really admit guilt. He talks about how he made the best decisions he could at the time, and how his advice often went unheeded. He and Johnson even­tu­ally dis­agreed so severely about policy on the Vietnam war that he either resigned or was fired. He says he can’t remember which it was, but that one of his friends always reminds him that of course, he was fired. I never got the feeling that he was trying to jus­tify him­self, and yet Morris is such a clever film­maker that he leaves quite a bit of room to ask ques­tions, even while painting a mostly sym­path­etic por­trait of a very powerful man. A fas­cin­ating experience.

(9/10)

Tagged as: vietnam

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