by Robert Alstead

The Vancouver International Film Festival is in full flow until October 14. Of the selection of films I’ve seen, one theme that keeps cropping up is the land, and the way that our culture and identity feeds off it.

Homeland – Four Portraits of Native Action focuses on four Native Americans struggling to protect their homelands against government-sanctioned, environmental exploitation. The treatment of the subject is first class, combining high-end production values (it was shot on HD) with the intimacy of a “point of view” documentary style. In each of the four featurettes, Native activists talk about their attachment to the land and community, and the struggle to hold out against corporate plunderers. Landscapes are captured in evocative cinematography, and archive footage is well chosen. A northern Cheyenne negotiator explains how her people could be millionaires “overnight,” by signing over resource rights to their lands. Instead, for the last 30 years, the impoverished community has chosen to fight big coal and methane gas interests, clamouring at the edge of their reservation. A young chief from the Gwich’in nation in Alaska, where the Porcupine caribou herd is threatened by drilling in the Alaskan wildlife reserve (a situation captured well in the gutsy Being Caribou) succinctly spells it out: “Their survival is our survival.”
Oct. 5, 9:45 pm, VanCity Theatre; Oct. 6, 2:30 pm, VanCity Theatre; Oct. 9,
10 am, Pacific Cinematheque
Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, set on the rugged Tibetan plateau of Kekexili, combines breathtaking cinematography with a tense storyline about a group of volunteer game wardens vying with poachers to protect the chinu, a Tibetan antelope, from extinction. Based on a true story, the film has picked up awards wherever it goes. It’s easy to see why.
Oct. 8, 1:30 pm, Visa Screening Room; Oct. 11, 9:30 pm, The Ridge.
Angry Monk profiles Gendun Cheophel, a rebellious Tibetan monk, and brilliant scholar, who, after 30 years in a monastery, decided he’d had enough of monastic life and wanted to experience the outside world. The documentary works as a historical travelogue of Tibet and India, covering the years leading up to Tibet’s occupation, and challenging stereotypical notions about Tibet. Ultimately, it’s a little anticlimactic, but writer-director Luc Schaedler offers the encouraging observation that Tibetans are both experiencing a renaissance, and a newfound confidence in their culture, in spite of the Chinese occupation, as the rediscovery of this worldly monk who, according to one of his friends, “smoked, drank, and screwed women,” illustrates.
Oct. 4, 10 am, Pacific Cinematheque; Oct. 12, 7 pm, Ridge Theatre; Oct. 14,
1 pm, Granville 7.
In Souvenir of Canada, Vancouver’s own Douglas Coupland provides a very personal, scrapbook-style, musing on national identity. In particular, the film focuses on Coupland’s Canada House project, in which he turned a CMHA bungalow, built in the ‘50s in Vancouver, into an art installation populated with his Canadiana, before it was bulldozed. Watching the doc is an entertaining, albeit ephemeral experience, leaving one wishing that Coupland had probed deeper into the national psyche.
Oct. 2, 9:30 pm; Oct. 4, 12:30 pm; Oct. 11, 9:45 pm, all at Granville 7.
On the comedy side, the unusual Czech film Skritek is a modern burlesque, focusing on a dysfunctional nuclear family. The film pays tribute to the silent movie era (people grunt and make noises) and the motion is speeded up. At times hilarious, some scenes, such as the one set in a slaughterhouse, are deliberately disturbing.
Oct. 8, 10 pm, Granville 7; Oct. 13, 7:15 pm, Granville 7.
Why We Fight, Eugene Jarecki’s celebrated documentary on the US “military-industrial complex,” is quite different, and one of the festival’s must-see films.
Oct. 2, 1 pm and Oct. 5, 9:30 pm, Granville 7.
“It had its moments” is a common euphemism heard at the fest for sub-par films, and A Bag of Rice – a drawn-out, flat, and directionless DV drama – fits. When the bag of rice arrived an hour into the film, and sat against the wall, it was a moment. While This Charming Girl is better, it still tries one’s patience. It’s shot well, even stylishly, but the plaudit-winning portrait of the girl’s troubled psychological state is laboured. When the undercurrent of tension bubbles to the surface in one excellent scene, unfortunately, it doesn’t balance out the rest of the film’s dreary pace.
Veteran documentarian Werner Herzog has always been magnetically drawn to danger, and those who court it. His latest, Grizzly Man (playing outside VIFF), is close to home. Herzog followed Timothy Treadwell, a self-styled animal rights activist and ursus lover, who lived with grizzlies in the Alaskan wilderness for 13 summers, even assigning them names, until he and his girlfriend were eaten by one of the bears. Making extensive use of Treadwell’s own footage, the doc explores a number of important questions about man and his relationship with the wilderness.


Robert Alstead, who also writes for iofilm, is currently making a documentary about cycling called You Never Bike Alone.