Archive for the Film category
June 25th, 2009
Josh Kim’s 2006 short, The Police Box
Where has Hong Kong gone? Once a world filmmaking capital, it has nearly vanished from the silver screen. Each year, far fewer feature films are made here than in cities such as Vancouver, Seoul and Tehran. What’s more, many recent Hong Kong movies, geared towards the lucrative mainland market, lack the local flavour that once made them so distinctive.
That’s something one of Hong Kong’s newest and most energetic film festivals hopes to change. After a one-year hiatus, I Shot Hong Kong is back, with a programme of 26 proudly local short films, music videos and documentaries.
“Hong Kong has lost its status as a premier filmmaking centre,” laments Craig Leeson, who helped found the festival in 2005. “In the late 1980s and early 90s, we were making 300 films a year here. From the start of 2001 until now, we’ve been making less than 50 a year. I think one of the reasons for that is that there’s no support for independent filmmakers or new talent. We’re not propagating filmmakers at the grass-roots level.”
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July 13th, 2008
If it hasn’t yet been made clear to my regular readers, I’m on the verge of moving to Hong Kong, maybe for only a year, but likely for much longer than that. What this means, of course, is that I’m going to leave Montreal. (I would take my beloved city with me, but the South China Sea is a poor substitute for the Saint Lawrence.) Lately, as I contemplate my impending move, I have been coming to terms with the memories I will leave behind in the city I have, over the past six years, deliberately fashioned as my home.
At night, when I lie awake, unable to sleep, my mind floats through the laneways I have strolled at night, past the mountain, its cross, the silos on the Lachine Canal, the sign blinking Farine Five Roses and down to the St. Henri bedroom in which I first lived as a new Montrealer. I think of those first nights I spent here, listening, as I lay in bed, to the sound of trains coupling in the distance. I think of the six years of memories and experiences, all of them linked inextricably to the life and landscape of the city around me.
Guy Maddin, the maker of eccentric films best known for his 2003 movie, The Saddest Music in the World, has a somewhat different relationship with his hometown. While I left the city of my birth at the age of 17, in search of a place that better suited my outlook and personality, Maddin has spent all 52 years of his life in Winnipeg, one of the coldest and most isolated cities on the continent. Now he has made a movie—ostensibly a documentary—about the city in which he has spent his life.
“Always winter, always sleepy… Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Winnipeg. Snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg,” he intones in the opening sequence of My Winnipeg, which is currently playing in Montreal at the Cinéma du Parc as well as at various arthouses and small cinemas around North America. In his inimitable style, drawing heavily from the aesthetic of silent films and the kitschy melodrama of b-movies, Maddin creates an image of a city propelled by drowsy inertia, its inhabitants’ attempts at escape foiled by the heavy pull of memory and nostalgia.
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June 4th, 2008
The night before last, as the remnants of a thunderstorm drizzled down on Bernard Street, I walked to the Outremont Theatre to see Yung Chang’s documentary Up the Yangtze for the second time. Seeing it again only confirmed that this is truly a remarkable film — and one of the best and most important foreign-made movies made about modern China.
That’s quite a statement, I know, but what makes me say that is the profoundly human way in which it approaches a truly monumental subject: the impact of the Three Gorges Dam on the people who live in the basin of the Yangtze River. Two million people have already been displaced by the dam’s flooding and another two million are expected to be moved as a result of design flaws and environmental degradation. The film focuses on one of the “farewell tours” that take tourists up the river to wave goodbye at the disappearing landscape, and it follows two teenagers, Yu Shui and Jerry—one shy, stubborn and poor, the other arrogant and middle-class—who leave home to work on one of the boats.
Yu Shui’s story is the most compelling of the two and she, more than Jerry, becomes the real focus of the film. After her family’s hometown, Fengdu, is abandoned and rebuilt across the river—the old town will soon be flooded—her family builds a shack near the water where they can grow their own food. They eat well but have no money, so instead of going to high school, Yu Shui takes a job on a farewell cruise, scrubbing dishes in the boat’s kitchen. Before making his film, Chang earned such trust from the Yu family that he was able to film some truly extraordinarily intimate family scenes.
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May 8th, 2008
The Champ de Mars is one of Montreal’s most storied places. It derives its name from the French colonial era, when it was a military parade ground, but in the eighteenth century it was the site of the city’s northern wall. After the wall was torn down in the early nineteenth century, the Champ was used as a farmer’s market. Eventually, in the twentieth century, it was converted into a municipal parking lot.
While the field was restored and converted into a public park in the 1980s, it still maintains the essence of the parking lot it once was. Despite its stunning view of the downtown skyline and its location next to City Hall and the tourist hub of Place Jacques Cartier, the Champ de Mars feels like it isn’t quite living up to its potential. Something needs to be done to make it relevant, once again, to Montrealers.
Just a couple of ideas ago, I was walking through the Champ with my friend Sam, and he proposed a great idea: why not project movies on the blank concrete wall of the Palais de Justice? Free film projections are already a big hit at Place des Arts during the World Film Festival, and thanks to Montreal’s liberalism, we wouldn’t be stuck with a bunch of family-friendly schlock. It would be a great way to bring people together while highlighting one of the city’s historically significant public spaces as well as some of its best views and architecture.
They could even be war films. How appropriate.
May 4th, 2008
Some cities ravaged by war slump into decline and desperation. Others rebound with as much vigour as before. Kabul seems to be the latter, which is not surprising considering its 3,000-year history as a crossroads of culture, commerce and empire. In this clip from documentary film Kabul Transit, the camera floats through the streets of the Afghan capital, past hawkers selling tea, lunch, fabric, chickens. Men dash across the street pushing wheelbarrows or pulling wagons piled high with boxes. People are everywhere. Like turn-of-the-century New York or present-day Shenzhen, it strikes me as being a kind of hustler’s city, where everyone is trying to aggressively make up for time lost to poverty and violence.
April 14th, 2007
It turns out that I’ve been oblivious to some strange goings-on just two blocks from my apartment. Since last summer, a group of artists have been producing some interesting and inventive videos in a loft they call the Moment Factory, at the corner of Hutchison and Van Horne. Most interesting of all is their new series, Minute Moments, which consists of minute-long videos produced by various Montreal artists.
Thien Vu Dang, alias VJ Pillow, and Yasuko Tadokoro, aka VJ Mademoiselle, have produced some of the best work for Minute Moments. I first encountered Pillow and Mademoiselle at a strangely fascinating improv session in which they jammed with a scratch DJ named Manna and the Toronto-based experimental musician Lee Pui Ming. Manna mixed sounds and Lee, through a realtime audio and video feed from Toronto, contributed what might best be described as piano noise and animalesque wails. Pillow and Mademoiselle, meanwhile, did a great job of mixing video footage from the streets of Hong Kong with live shots of Lee and Manna. It was downright hypnotic.
The Minute Moment clip I’ve shared above isn’t quite as trippy. Shot by Pillow and featuring Mademoiselle, it was filmed on a lonely industrial street on the edge of Mile End. It opens with a few lines in French, credited to Jean-Luc Godard, which can be translated as “I am not sad that you are leaving. I am not in love with you. I will not join you in Brazil. I do not kiss you tenderly.” As Mademoiselle wanders down the street, yellow balloon in hand, she passes by a piece of graffiti lurking in the background: “Love is a mystery,” it reads.
April 5th, 2007
Director Gary Burns (Waydowntown) moves from fiction to documentary mode, teaming up with journalist Jim Brown to bring us Radiant City, a look at suburban sprawl from the point of view of a typical family living in a new tract development in Calgary, interspersed with commentary from the likes of Mark Kingwell and James Howard Kunstler. It is now playing in select cities (but not in Montreal, yet).
Toronto documentarian Gregory Greene, meanwhile, presents a sequel to his earlier End of Suburbia, with a look at how we move forward in an era of energy scarcity: Escape from Suburbia, which is due out in theatres soon. Interviewees include the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins, the Hon. Ed Schreyer, economist Jeremy Rifkin, and researcher/journalist Richard Heinberg, among others.
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February 27th, 2007
Images of war-torn cities are perversely fascinating. Grozny, Mogadishu, Kabul—they are hollow emblems of urbanity where people try to survive within the rubble of their own lives. Cities don’t simply die when they are torn apart by bombs and artillery; they transform into something battered and ghostly, something undead.
Of course, this is all conjecture on my part. I have never known anything even remotely similar to war. My perceptions are shaped by film and news footage. But bloody cinéma vérité and gruesome documentaries cannot convey the terror and deprivation of life in an actual war zone. For people like me, the psychological—if not geographic—gulf is too great.
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December 29th, 2006
Running across the boulevard Saint-Germain, through the Carrefour de l’Odéon, we dashed into the box office and bought our tickets, ducking into the darkened cinema just as the opening credits finished. We sat down in the back row, interrupting a clearly annoyed couple’s face-sucking session, and watched as the first short began: “Montmartre.”
Paris, je t’aime, which we had just handed over our seven euros to see, is a collective film (it’s composed of eighteen segments) directed by a number of big names from around the world, including the Coen Brothers, Gurinder Chadha and Olivier Assayas. Each segment is set in a different part of Paris and deals with, in some way, love. In “Loin du 16ème,” Walter Salles depicts a young Latin American mother who must leave her own child in a suburban daycare in order to care for another in the wealthy sixteenth arrondissement. Sylvain Chomet’s “Tour Eiffel” is an irreverent and off-kilter take on the life of mimes.
Paris, je t’aime is more than just a collection of disparate shorts. Its producers like to call it a “collective film,” since it understands the futility of trying to reduce the Parisian experience into a single story—any attempt to do so will result in an enjoyable but empty Amélie fantasy. Instead, Paris, je t’aime suggests that Paris is a city of vignettes, a collection of dramas that share the same stage. Of course, every city is like this to some extent, but in Paris the effect is exaggerated by geographical compactness. Central Paris is a neat circle just ten kilometres across, ringed by the Périphérique highway; within its boundaries, the city is a treasure chest of humanity.
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October 24th, 2006
I was having coffee with a French immigrant recently and the conversation swung towards Schwartz’s. He recalled seeing a group of kids, on a class trip from somewhere else in Canada, lining up to eat there. “When I went on school trips in France it was always about going to castles or battlefields, ‘Napoleon did this and that here,’” he said to me. “Here it’s different. There aren’t any castles; the culture here is a popular culture. People go to Schwartz’s because of that. It’s where you feel the history of Montreal and its immigrants.”
With that in mind, it was about time that Schwartz’s got its own movie. Last night, Garry Beitel’s documentary, Chez Schwartz, premiered at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma.
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October 10th, 2006
Manufactured Landscapes follows Edward Burtynsky’s photographic exposition of unprecedented human transformation of the landscape.
Edward Burtynsky’s China photos explore what has always been a veritable fount of intriguing images. Recalling Antonioni’s 1972 Chung Guo China, which in a coolly detached manner examined the ordinary, everyday facet of a society that was nevertheless rife with political tension, his work, with equal detachment, goes underneath the surface of prosperity, and discovers tension of an entirely different kind: us vs. nature.
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October 9th, 2006
The Cinéma Beaubien, which is, along with the Parc, one of the few remaining arthouses in Montreal. Photo by Antoine Rouleau
On October 27th, like a zombie in a George Romero flick, the Cinéma du Parc will rise from the dead. The Parc closed early last August after seven years as Montreal’s premiere English arthouse, its last remaining repertory cinema and the epicentre of the local cult film scene. Now, its new owner, an old hand in the arthouse biz, has said that he will focus on first-run arthouse and foreign films instead of repertory fare. “If I play Clockwork Orange, it will be part of a retrospective of the films of Stanley Kubrick,” he told the Montreal Gazette last week. “There is no place for repertory cinema with DVDs.”
That’s a shame. Although the list of theatres that have closed over the years is many times longer than the list of those currently operating, Montreal remains a good city to catch a new foreign or independent film. But there is no longer any cinema that offers regular and extensive repertory programming, aside from the government-funded Cinémathèque, despite a clear a demand for eccentric programming. After the Parc closed, a few people formed the Film Club, a weekly gathering at a bar on the Main where people can take in a free flick with cheap beer and popcorn. Cinema Politica, weekly screenings of politically-conscious films at Concordia University and the Université du Québec à Montréal, has proven popular since its launch a couple of years ago.
But these are not replacements for good cinemas; they only speak to the demand for film screenings that are a community event. Cinemas such as the Parc offer this on a permanent basis, although the effect is diluted if the programming becomes less adventurous. Even that, the survival of the new, reborn Parc isn’t certain. The life-death-ressurection cycle is common to arthouse cinemas everywhere, but lately, the combination of mainstream mega-cinemas and DVDs seem to be making their struggle to succeed much more difficult. Without them, what then will happen to the cinema-as-social-space, the cinema-as-neighbourhood-landmark?
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