The Tracker - an Australian Western

By Robert Alstead
The Vancouver International Film Festival is on right now. For those still trying to decide what films to see here are some recommendations.

Hukkle
The most remarkable thing about Hukkle (Oct 8, 10pm, GR5), the debut feature from Hungarian director György Pálfi, is that there is no dialogue. A delightful film, it takes you on an aural and visual tour of a small rural community at the height of summer. Opening with an old man with recurring hiccups it presents a rich soundscape of country life with close-ups of minute insects to the hulking agricultural machinery that harvest the fields and turn raw grains into bags of flour. The cinematography is exquisite and full of surprises. There’s also a vague thriller element and some amusing visual humour, but really much of the enjoyment is in seeing the interconnectedness of rural life: a frog skims across a pond, before being snapped up by a large fish, which is hooked by a fisherman… and so on. A perfect antidote for those averse to subtitles, it stands up to more than one viewing.

Rivers and Tides
Words are also in short supply in Rivers and Tides (Oct 10, 7pm, Ridge; Friday 11, 1pm, GR7), Thomas Riedelsheimer's reverent and beautifully shot portrait of the earthworks of Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy. The laconic Goldsworthy is an unusual artist - he creates artworks destined to be worn down or destroyed by the elements, sometimes in a matter of minutes. He travels half-way around the world to painstakingly shape ice with his bare hands on a frosty beach, before it thaws in the dawn sun and disappears, and then he is away. Goldsworthy explains this behaviour as his obsession with “growth, time, change and the idea of flow in nature". Fortunately, he photographs and archives his creations. And they are also beautifully captured in flux here.

The Tracker
Stepping back in time, The Tracker (Oct 8, 11.30am, GR6; Oct 9, 7pm, Vogue) is an atmospheric play on the revenge Western set in the Twenties Australian outback. An Aboriginal tracker leads a group of three white men into the outback in the hunt for a fugitive Aboriginal who has allegedly raped and killed a white woman. Director Rolf de Heer bends the rules of conventional cinematic storytelling with longer-than-expected sequences set to music - bluesy, aboriginal laments with slide guitar and hammond organ - and cutaways to aboriginal paintings to depict violent incident. The portrayal of the shifting power struggle between the sadistic racist leader of the expedition and the charismatic tracker make this one to catch.

Fix: The Story Of An Addicted City
Nettie Wild’s verite style documentary Fix: The Story Of An Addicted City (Oct 3, 12pm, GR3; Oct 10, 4.30pm, GR5) is essential viewing for anyone living in Vancouver. This is an unflinching and provocative look at the drug-related problems in the Downtown Eastside, an area that has the highest rate of HIV infection in North America. We follow long-term addict and articulate spokesman for harm reduction Dean Wilson, and organizer of the Vancouver Area Network Of Drug Users (VANDU) Ann Livingston, as they campaign for the establishment of a safe injection site in Vancouver, the first in North America.

Graphic images of self-destructing lives are intercut with candid in situ interviews with Eastside residents (even as they shoot up), a sympathetic local cop, mayor Philip Owen, and a gastown architect who seems more worried about the loss of business than life in the area. Depressing stuff, yes, but the clean-living Livingston, a gutsy woman who juggles motherhood with her compassionate vocation, emerges as a pillar of strength in this place of misery. We need more like her.

Bowling For Columbine
One of the big talking points of VIFF is Bowling For Columbine, Michael Moore’s impassioned attack on American gun culture. The title was drawn from the massacre at Columbine high school in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20 1999 which resulted in the deaths of 12 pupils and a teacher. Moore shows just how easy it is to acquire a firearm - he just opens a bank account and receives a free gun - and through interviews with, among others, articulate goth rocker Marilyn Manson and NRA spokesman Charlton Heston (an interview that Moore lucked on after following a star map to his house) asks pertinent but difficult questions about Americans’ firearms fixation. Why does America need more guns than there are televisions or voters? And how come Canada, which has 7 million guns for its total of 10 million households, doesn’t suffer the same kind of atrocities?

The film has received rousing ovations at festivals around the world, including the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in May, where it also became the first documentary in almost 50 years to win the coveted Jury Prize. Bowling For Columbine, which is sponsored by Common Ground at VIFF, is sure to stimulate heated debate when it gets its North American release, due 18th of this month.

Robert Alstead runs the movie ezine iofilm. Visit: www.iofilm.com



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