War Witch (2012)

WHO: Quebecois director Kim Nguyen made this.

WHAT: Filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo with mainly non-professional actors including the multi-award-winning Rachel Mwanza, this film concentrates on child soldiers. I have not seen it.

WHERE/WHEN: At the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, at 8:30 PM.

WHY: The Rafael is has a new calendar available at Frisco Bay cinephile hotspots and as a pdf online.   Some potential highlights include a January 31 screening of the 1926 silent film Sparrows starring Mary Pickford (an early start to a substantial Pickford celebration at various local venues in February), a sequel to last year's subscription-only CFI Film Club and a March 1-3 return of the International Buddhist Film Festival Showcase that includes a rare showing of Naomi Kawase's The Mourning Forest, which you probably missed at Cinequest 2008. But right now the theatre hosts For Your Consideration, a spotlight on the Foreign-Language Film Oscar hopefuls from 14 different countries. Of course, the actual nominees were announced Thursday, so most of these hopefuls would be better described as "former hopefuls"- but not War Witch, which was nominated as Canada's submission and still has a shot to win. Of the other nominees, Austria's Amour is currently screening in 35mm at the Clay and the Guild, and will arrive at the Rafael January 18th. Chile's first-ever nominee No will be released there in March. Norway's Kon-Tiki plays there tomorrow night, but only for California Film Institute members. Denmark's A Royal Affair left Frisco Bay theatres on Thursday.

HOW: I'm not sure how War Witch will screen. The Rafael has both DCP and 35mm capability.

Adam Hartzell's Canadian Frameline

Of all the so-called "special interest" film festivals on Frisco Bay, there's none larger, more festive or more inclusive than Frameline, which began yesterday. This "Cannes of gay film festivals" builds its programming of films to appeal to a core audience of LGBT moviegoers, but invariably brings film programs that straight, cis cinephiles won't want to miss either. I'm personally most interested in delving into the New Queer Cinema retrospective, in seeing George Kuchar's final SF Art Institute "class film", Empire Of Evil at the Roxie. and in attending the Castro for the Iranian film Facing Mirrors, which my friend Michael Hawley calls "the Frameline36 film no one should miss." The Film On Film Founcation dutifully indicates which of the festival's screenings are to be shown on that dwindling festival format: 35mm. But another friend, Adam Hartzell, has got me thinking about another set of Frameline selections. Here's Adam: 

The embarrassment of cinematic riches San Francisco's larger festivals provide can be overwhelming at times.  In spite of that, I always appreciate the opportunity to self-curate a deeper festival focus nested within the larger mission of each festival.  And for the 36th year, Frameline presents so many different aspects of the Queer community on which to focus.  Hmmm, I could center my viewing on Intersex issues, the Bear community, or even the intersection of Queer folk and sports.  Instead, I chose my screeners based on country of origin.  And those who know me know I have more than a soft spot for Canada.

And Frameline has a spot for Canada in its closing film this year.  Cloudburst (Thom Fitzgerald, 2011) features the star power of Olympia Dukakis as Stella, an lesbian of the senior set who wears a cowboy hat but her back is anything but broken, because she won't take any shit from anyone.  And I choose to cuss because Stella never met a swear word she needed to censor.  As for her partner of 31 years, Dot (played by Brenda Ficker of My Left Foot), her language is more polite (and Irish-ly-lilted), but along with her vision being mostly gone, her bones are a bit more brittle, as evidenced by a vibrator-induced fall that leads to a broken butt.  This incident begins the power struggle with Dot's granddaughter who seeks to separate Stella and Dot.  As you can guess by my quick analysis of Stella, she won't let this happen, so she helps Dot break out of the nursing home and they head from Bangor, Maine to the Canadian border, (picking up a young, hunky hitchhiker on his way to Lower Economy, Nova Scotia), in order to get married with hopes this will provide a stronger legal grounding to contest Dot's granddaughter's control of Dot's final years.

The enjoyment of Cloudburst solely comes from the wicked pleasure of the vulgar dialogue given to Dukakis.  Sadly though, that's where the enjoyment ends.  One has to snip out these creative fits of curses and hold on to them as the film rides from one bit of otherwise choppy plot progression to another.  Not  even a great actress like Dukakis can save this from the lesser hands of the editing and direction.

But there are the two more Canadian films to choose from.  First, there's Margarita (Dominique Cardona & Laurie Colbert, 2012), but there's a review hold on that one, so I can't tell you that I fairly enjoyed it and how it provides an interesting opportunity for a critical frame from the POV of a bicycle seat.  The other is the best of the three, Daniel Roby's Funkytown, which proves that along with yogurt, bagels, circuses, protests, and corrupt construction industries, the French Canadians do cinema way better than their anglophone compatriots (Egoyan, Cronenberg, and Maddin excepted, of course). 

Quebec Cinema continues to represent recent periods lavishly on screen. I know none of you saw it, because it was basically just my wife and I in the theatre during the Tiburon International Film Festival this, and pretty much every, year, but one great example of these Quebec period pieces (in this case the 1960s) brought to the Bay Area recently, was the powerful Michel Monty film Life Begins, about a boy dealing with his father's death by popping papa's little helpers. Funkytown recreates 1976, jumping between English and French because, as Roby told Bernard St-Laurent on the CBC's English language program on French Canadian culture, C'est la vie, Montrealers regularly jumped between languages back then. The film primarily focuses on two characters - Bastien (Patrick Huard of Bon Cop, Bad Cop), a radio DJ and host of a show called 'Disco Dance Party' who eschews his family responsibilities for the disco lights, dazzling drugs, and sexy ladies; and Tino (Justin Chatwin from the Middle of Nowhere), a young Italian Canadian carving out a space for his desires within the cultural confines of mandatory heterosexuality.

Other characters with considerable screen time include father-son owners of the 'first disco club in North America' The (later, thanks to the PQ, 'Le') Starlight, a has-been French disco star, a model turned fashion 'reporter' wanting a turn at musical stardom, and an early gay icon in Montreal's disco world.  Each of the characters are handled with enough depth to keep you from feeling they are tossed in as afterthoughts or poor editing choices.  The portrayal of Adriana the model, (played by real life Guess Girl model Sarah Mutch), is particularly refreshing.  When she is interviewing a Montreal fashion designer that doesn't know English, (and Adriana knows no French), Adriana doesn't come off as the cliched 'dumb blonde' but as someone way out of her league positioned merely because she's considered beautiful by the media.

That scene has the Montreal Olympic stadium as its backdrop, and Funkytown begins at the apex of Montreal's standing, the Olympics of 1976, then slowly follows the four years as Montreal's bills came due.  (Montreal didn't finally pay off those Olympic bills until late 2006.  For a long time, the Olympic Stadium, or 'The Big Owe', stood as signage for poor municipal decisions, such as the genius use of the stadium as a bureaucratic dystopia in Denys Arcand's The Age of Ignorance.)  This financial debt due serves as background for the moral/ethical debt due for many of the characters in the film's foreground. 

Something else that Adriana's scene underscores is the interplay between French and English in Montreal and how Roby uses this in his film.  As the interview with St-Laurent on the CBC notes, Roby's decision to mix-up French and English in the film was controversial in Quebec.  Yet I am happy he made this choice because there are moments, such as lovely scene where Bastien hopes to reconcile with his daughter, where the code--switching adds layers of how we negotiate intimacy and emotional connection through the languages we use with different people in our lives.

And what is a festival like Frameline but one expanding the language of cinema in speaking on topics about which we often feel forced to remain silent.

BANG BANG: Adam Hartzell

BANG BANG is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.

by Adam Hartzell

I spend most of my time watching movies out of sync with my time and place. Since I prefer cinema from elsewhere, only one U.S. film makes my Top Ten, though it does make the top spot. Work and financial constraints keep me from traveling abroad for film festival premieres, which means I have to wait until they make it here to San Francisco. So my Top Ten lists usually say something about my cosmopolitan dreams that are anchored awake by my restricted finances and mobility. But here are 10 films which were released this year, or made their way to Bay Area festivals in 2011, about which I have found myself still ruminating in a positive way since they shined their light and heat on my eyes.
　
10. Passion (Khusel Shunal) (Byamba Sakhya, 2010, Mongolia) I knew nothing about Mongolian cinema until this documentary about said cinema, told through a lonely road movie, found its way into the program of this year's San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival. Now I want to know more, which is ironic since the film presents a pessimistic view of Mongolian cinema's future. But it's at least caught the fascination of one viewer even more isolated from this nation's cinema than the Mongolian residents portrayed in the documentary.

9. Aurélie Laflamme's Diary (Christian Laurence, 2010, Canada) A French language film from Quebec that was part of the NY/SF International Children's Film Festival that ran from October 21-23 at Viz Cinema, it ended up winning an audience award. I would have voted for it as well, had I seen it in the theater along with that awarding audience rather than on DVD for an sf360.org overview I wrote on the festival. It's a teen film that doesn't have to throw an American-Pie in our faces thinking that will entertain the kids and kidults. Marianne Verville is a refreshing presence in the lead role, allowed to be awkward in what is an awkward time of our lives. Plus, although she gets the boy the genre demands, she isn't swan-ed away from her duckling beginnings.

8. The Trip (Michael Winterbottom, 2011, United Kingdom) I am still laughing about the scene where Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are riffing on announcing the inexact time of an ancient battle. Adding to this comedic pleasure was that I got to laugh at this scene along with a friend I hadn’t seen in some time whom I randomly ran into in the lobby of The Bridge theatre before the screening. It was a nice day in the Richmond neighborhood thanks to the run-ins such local establishments afford.

7. Oki's Movie (Hong Sang-soo, 2010, South Korea) I got to see three of my favorite director’s films for the first time this year. (The others were Ha Ha Ha on DVD because I couldn't make the screenings at the San Francisco International Film Festival and The Day He Arrives on screen at the Starz Denver Film Festival in mid-November with the proprietor of the Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee blog, Peter Nellhaus.) Thanks to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, I was able to watch Oki's Movie in the theatre in late June after having already seen it on DVD to prepare a piece for sf360. I'm biased in that I always find something to ruminate on endlessly in a Hong film (even with my least favorite, Woman Is the Future of Man). But Oki's Movie seems to have won over those who haven't been fans of his work. I think a big reason is the auditioning of men in Oki's movie nested within "Oki's Movie" that Andrew Tracy expertly analyzes in the Fall 2010 issue of Cinema Scope magazine.

6. The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls (Leanne Pooley, 2009, New Zealand) Finally getting the theatre release it deserved, The Topp Twins graced our local screens outside of the film festivals that started the momentum (Frameline in 2010 and Mostly British in 2011). I own the DVD and saw the film in the theatre three times, once each at those festivals and once in Berkeley at Shattuck Cinemas with my cousin when it was released. Even after all these screenings, I'm still moved by how much major moments of the lives of these yodeling, country singing lesbian twins are tied up with major political successes in New Zealand history. I am still giddy about getting to meet them for an interview for sf360, the most nervous I have ever been for an interview.

5. Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2010, South Korea) Poetry definitively represents what I have been appreciating lately about South Korean cinema - how much it has opened up cinematic space for its senior actresses. Yun Jung-hee came out of retirement for this virtuoso performance of Lee Chang-dong's as he continues to explore the life of the outsider in South Korea. During my first draft of this brief commentary on Poetry, I went into a rant about how, if there failed to be a Best Actress nom nod to Yun, the Oscars would continue to be irrelevant in my cinematic life. But after writing that draft, I went to talk with Brian Darr of Hell on Frisco Bay blog and he informed me the Los Angeles Critic Circle gave Yun their Best Actress award. As a result, I put my seething rage at the Oscars as a failed institution back into its cage to be unleashed some other day.

4. The Salesman (Sébastian Pilote, 2011, Canada) I am someone upon whom car commercials fail to make the intended impact. I don't desire the products they advertise. And I don't buy into the false sense of freedom the commercials purport to symbolize. (The streets are usually much more crowded than as portrayed in the commercials and buying a car shackles you with debt, high gas prices, and vast acres of asphalt requirements for roads and parking.) That said, I'm primed to appreciate the tragedy in The Salesman, a perfect example of a genre I'm calling 'Post Peak Oil Cinema', where the life of a successful car salesman is turned on its head by the very products he sells so successfully. The Salesman is a sad, sad film that doesn't pummel you but rather slowly piles upon you like the snow that surrounds this little Quebec town.

3. The Life of Fish (Matías Bize, 2010, Chile) My wife and I caught this film during our yearly Caltrain trip to Cinequest in San Jose because it fit with our schedule and it's one of those happy accident, eeny-meeny-miney-mo(e)ments where you select a film with no real sense of what you are getting yourself into and you realize the programmers have made an excellent choice for you. In this film, we travel through a party held in a single house as our main character relives his younger self through his memories and those of others. Simple, poignant, and delightful.

2. Nostalgia for the Light (Patrico Guzmán, 2010, France/Chile/Germany) This was a truly amazing film I saw in the Dolby screening room as part of the press screenings for the San Francisco International Film Festival this year. Guzmán’s pairing of professional astronomers with amateur archaeologists works on so many levels. Even though the archaeologists are searching for the remains of family members killed by their own government, somehow, in spite of all this, Guzmán leaves us with tremendous hope for humanity.

1. Deaf Jam (Judy Lieff, 2011, USA) I have not had the experience with a film for a long time like I had with Lieff’s documentary about high school Deaf poets venturing out into the venues of a (hearing) poetry slam. Cinema transfixed me again at the Mill Valley Film Festival like it did the first time I could not stopping about the impact a film had on me. Lieff captures the vibrancy of American Sign Language through several tactics of translation. Her willingness to mess with the text of subtitling the poems in the opening sequence is mesmerizing. At the same time, she even took the risk not to translate the ASL later in the film and it is just as powerful sans subtitles. Mixed in with this story of the life of young Deaf folk is a story about the struggles of immigrant children whose parents’ citizenship comes after they enter adulthood and a friendship between a young Israeli Jew and Palestinian Muslim. Lieff and the subjects of her documentary show us how ASL is as perfect a language of cinema as any other, leaving you hoping Lieff and the students she films don’t stop here. We need these stories. We need this kind of active, engaged cinema.

________________________________

Adam Hartzell is totally bummed that sf360.org is no longer publishing because he had a blast writing for them for three years. He continues to write for Brian Darr's San Francisco film blog, Hell on Frisco Bay, and the premier English language website on South Korean cinema, Koreanfilm.org. He began this year as a guest on an episode of the VCinema podcast where he discussed the original version and the recent re-visioning of the South Korean classic The Housemaid (MP3). He has had a few magazine pieces in Kyoto Journal, a chapter on The Power of Kangwon Province for The Cinema of Japan and Korea (Wallflower Press), and next year he will have a bunch of essays in the upcoming publication of World Directory of Cinema: Korea (Intellect, Ltd.).

Adam Hartzell on Curling

Two weeks ago I took a two-day jaunt away from Frisco Bay, down to Hollywood to watch six films at the AFI Fest. I got to see Pedro Almodóvar and Antonio Banderas introduce my favorite of their collaborations, Law Of Desire at the famous Grauman's Chinese (digitally- the only dint on my first trip inside this genuine movie palace), and see five films new enough not to have reached Frisco Bay yet, including the latest films by Chantal Akerman, Alexander Sokurov, Hong Sangsoo, and Béla Tarr. All four of these were excellent (Sokurov's Faust less decidedly so than the other three) and I hope and expect to get chances to re-watch them with local audiences some time next year, assuming local film programmers are wise enough to bring them to town.

I also saw the California premiere of Silver Bullets, one of the half-dozen features the prolific young director Joe Swanberg has completed since his third one Hannah Takes The Stairs played here nearly four years ago. If Silver Bullets (my own first encounter with his directing work) is at all typical, I can understand why he polarizes audiences (and perhaps programmers as well); though there's evidence of conceptual brilliance, it's overshadowed by a half-heartedness of execution that asserts itself as a visual style. Or perhaps in place of one.

I believe I keep track of the Frisco Bay screening scene well enough to assert that Canadian DIY director Denis Côté's exhibition history here is on track to becoming the mirror image of Swanberg's. If the latter's work has been absent from local screens after seeing his first three films brought to town, Côté has had a steady increase in global acclaim for his first five films, none of which have shown locally. Finally, he broke through when his fascinating short Les Lignes Ennemies screened earlier this year at Yerba Buena Center For The Arts (which has a terrific December-January lineup by the way). And this week (for only one and a half more days, "thanks" to the holiday Thursday) his latest feature Curling is playing New People Cinema. I saw it in Toronto last Fall, and can highly recommend it, but my friend Adam Hartzell is much more attuned to particulars of the cinema of Canada, so I'm proud to host his review here on my blog. Adam:

In my continuing project to companion books with films, I found reason to read André Loiselle's Cinema as History: Michel Brault and Modern Quebec before the San Francisco Film Society's week long run of Denis Côté's Curling at their new home in the New People theatre. The retrospective of director and director of photography Michel Brault's work at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley in March of 2006 made me a huge fan of Brault specifically and solidified my interest in French-Canadian cinema generally. Loiselle's book would have been required reading for that retrospective, but since it was published in 2007 by the Toronto International Film Festival Group, adding it to my personal syllabus was impossible without breaking laws of physics. So Loiselle’s excellent book on Quebec’s history and Quebec Cinema’s history as told through the work of Michel Brault became the reading rock I slid towards the house of the wider cinematic sheet that is Cote’s Curling.
　
Loiselle's argument is that Brault has "never ceased to reflect, and reflect on, Quebec society" (page 182) as consistently, prominently, and for as long as any other Quebec filmmakers. With a couple exceptions (which Loiselle notes being the topics of queer culture and the media panopticon that made themselves present in Quebec cinema of the 80's and 90's), Brault was involved in echoing and projecting every major aspect of Quebec history activating during his time behind the camera - from early commercial cinema (Little Aurore, the Martyr Child, on which Brault was assistant director to Jean-Yves Bigras) to the emerging direct cinema (Les Raquetteurs with Gilles Groulx and the classic Of Whales, the Moon and Men, with Pierre Perrault); onward to auteur cinema (Mon Oncle Antoine, directed by Claude Jutra); to the rise of feminist cinema (Scream from Silence, directed by Anne Claire Poirier); to delayed acknowledgment of non-Quebec, francophone populations in Canada 9Éloge du Chiac) and Quebecois minorities (Les Noces de papier, Paper Wedding); and finally to the shift from film to digital cinema (his 2002 film La Manic). Denis Côté's Curling reflects what appears to be a recent evolution of Quebec Cinema that Brault would possibly have touched on himself were he still making films - the sadness of the suburban, exurban enclaves of Quebec in the age of the post-peak oil slide, something that can resonate throughout similar establishments in North America.
　
Curling follows the claustrophobic and creepy disturbing life of Jean-François that he imposes on his 12-year-old daughter Julyvonne (played by the real-life father-daughter team of Emmanuel and Philomene Bilodeau). We are first exposed to the prison around both our characters when Julyvonne is told she has astigmatism and that she must have realized something was wrong by not seeing the chalkboard at school. It is here we learn she doesn’t attend school. And it is here that her father is brought into the frame and focus is retained on him while Julyvonne, in the center of the image, becomes slightly blurry, offering a wonderful moment of breaking the fourth wall so we can better identify with Julyvonne’s plight while metaphorically visualizing through an astigmatic image the askew view her father nests Julyvonne within. The rest of the film develops this dysfunctional world Jean-François has created for himself and his daughter while other individuals, such as his bosses and co-workers, try to pull him out of his paranoia and open up the world to him and his daughter. The title of the film relates to the brief moments in a curling club where Jean-François finally gets, as Côté puts it in an interview with Jason Anderson in the Fall 2010 issue of Cinemascope, “a spark in his eye”. Curling the movie extends the arguments in the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community where Robert D. Putnam describes the decline in ‘social capital’ or the active civil engagement that makes for strong democracies, by having Jean-François working in a bowling alley and later discovering a brighter social world in the heavily lit dome of a curling club. “People ask me,” says Côté in that same interview, “’Why curling?’ Well, first of all, curling is a collective sport, so he could get closer to his community if he would curl.” Côté clutters this cinematic curling house with several stones obstructing Jean-François from making better choices for himself and his daughter, but it’s a different type of curling that finally further feeds the initial spark in Jean-François‘ eyes.
　
There is a striking similarity in the winter scenes of the abandoned economy of this Quebec town to the one we found in the excellent debut film The Salesman by Sébastien Pilote at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, where it deservedly won the FIPRESCI Prize. Both these films highlight the ennui and socially-distant communities we have created through our cheap-oil-fueled, car-dependent housing developments beyond our denser, socially-networking urban centers. Marcel Lévesque (played powerfully by Gilbert Sicotte), as a successful car salesman, represents the person who thinks he’s benefited from this community that cheap oil built in The Salesman, whereas Jean-François is, from the very beginning, the self-perpetuating victim of this development of isolated housing. (After the visit to the eye doctor, Jean-François is actually ‘pulled over’ by a cop for not driving, as if being without a car is suspect. Whereas part of the plot of The Salesman is Lévesque pushing greater car dependency and financial ruin on a soon to be laid-off factory worker.) This is one of the developments in Quebec cinema that can resonate with those of us outside of Quebec who are experiencing the social isolation our suburbs and exurbs cause, either for ourselves, or for our elders who have retired within these cul-de-sac-ing mazes that falsely pass for community. And this is one of the developments in Quebec cinema Brault may have touched on were he still behind the camera in some way in the same way he chronicled the history of Quebec in the era of cheap oil.