Now in its 20th year under the firm stewardship of festival director and art-film connoisseur Alan Franey, the Vancouver International Film Festival (September 27 to October 12) remains the same as it ever was: committed to an intelligent mix of new movies from Asia and Canada (and new nonfiction from around the world), and admirably resistant to the market pressures that sometimes threaten to make its East Coast Canadian sibling, the Toronto International Film Festival, look like one big studio junket. Hardly a haven for awards strategists and sales agents, Vancouver is chiefly for filmmakers and viewers — a fact reiterated at almost every post screening discussion here, but particularly this year at the now legendary Q&A that followed the aptly named
Operation Filmmaker.
If you haven't heard by now, documentarian Nina Davenport's politicization of the
Project Greenlight formula — here the vaguely talented young hopeful hails from war-torn Baghdad — is a total knockout. But the blows delivered after one of three VIFF screenings are what accounts for the persistent buzz.
Among those who defended Davenport against audience accusations that she had exploited and otherwise unduly dissed twentysomething Iraqi playa Muthana Mohmed — a PA on lefty Liev Schreiber's
Everything is Illuminated set — is the
Boston Phoenix's Gerald Peary. After several viewer indictments of Davenport, who's seen in the film giving money and other support to the reluctantly self-sufficient Mohmed, Peary stood up and said, "Don't you people understand that this film is a
comedy? In Toronto, people were rolling in the aisles! You're all so serious!"
Neither was knee-jerk political correctness on the agenda of another Davenport fan, Jim Finn, whose own VIFF film
La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo (
The Shining Trench of Chairman Gonzalo) [pictured above] — something of a Hi-8
La Chinoise — is a thoroughly fascinating, scrupulously provocative mock-doc about young female members of the Shining Path, the Peruvian Maoist revolutionary terrorist group, circa 1989.
"I'm an independent filmmaker," Finn announced when the Q&A for
Operation was threatening to get bloody. "And I can tell you," he joked, "that we're all assholes, pretty much."
Speaking more seriously a few days later, Finn gave props to the VIFF for its programmers' enthusiastic support of indie filmmakers with something to say and limited means with which to do it. "You get here [to Vancouver]," Finn says, "and right away you can tell that the festival people have not only seen your film, but they know it well and they understand it. They really want you to be at the festival. And in my experience, that's pretty rare."
Like his staff members, including
Cinema Scope editor-in-chief Mark Peranson, Franey is an unmistakably devoted cineaste. He still vividly remembers attending the original incarnation of the VIFF with his dad in the early '60s, when the great Michelangelo Antonioni came to town and critic Pauline Kael served on a jury. This year, Franey's fest drew a record 150,000 people and plenty of positive feedback, which encourages him to continue focusing on the fest's mission to serve not only artistically significant work, but that which, like Finn's film, could use a leg up.
"As much as we like seeing
Pirates 3 and
Shrek 3, et cetera," says Franey, "the truth is that for anyone who cares about cinema, the diversity of voices and the excellence of other forms of cinema is incredibly threatened. So that's why we stick to our guns. We're a nonprofit cultural institution. We don't think we should be paying Canadian taxpayers' money on promoting the latest Hollywood release."
The closest this year's edition came to routine stargazing was the ritzy French farce
Priceless, with
Amelie's Audrey Tautou as a Cote d'Azur golddigger whose latest "catch" turns out to tend bar. Screened on closing night, the movie served to prep the well-dressed crowd for an aptly swank afterparty at the Sheraton Wall Center. Maybe it even warned a few wealthy spouses with roving eyes not to mistake one of the Sheraton's expert cocktail-mixers for the next Mr. Moneybags.
But for this decidedly non-bourgie reviewer,
Priceless wasn't worth a Canadian nickel past the first half-hour; indeed, the sight of Tautou and Gad Elmaleh's hardly suave martini man squirming in bed sent the sleepy critic straight back to the hotel, where clean sheets and a DVD of the VIFF's, um,
Young People Fucking awaited.
Likewise more valuable than
Priceless was the $25,000 cash-prize award — announced before the screening — to
The Planet, one of nearly a dozen films in the fest's "Climate for Change" series, sponsored by the pro-Earth activists at Kyoto Planet. Not a Nobel Prize, perhaps, but a little green won't hurt
The Planet — nor its three heretofore unknown Swedish directors (Michael Stenberg, Johan Soderberg, and Linus Torell).
Unlike Earth, the "ecosystem" that Franey mentions — that of Canadian festivals — isn't endangered in the least. "What we share [with the TIFF] is English Canada, and that's a small market about half the size of California," Franey says. "And yet we have two festivals less than two weeks apart. It works, because it's actually not a competitive relationship between the two [festivals]. As a matter of fact, Toronto — which does well at maintaining that very public, business, glamorous face — helps save us a bit of those commercial pressures. We've always operated as a complimentary opposite [to Toronto], and I see no reason to change that."
Labels: Festivals
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 11/06/2007 10:28:00 AM
Comments (0)
