FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead

Alan Franey says his first year at the new Vancouver International Film Centre on Seymour Street has been a little frustrating. While the artistic director of the Vancouver International Film Festival has grown accustomed to the constant media attention during festival time, since the centre started regular screenings in January, attendance has not been as good as it should be, he says.
Franey is not the only theatre manager struggling to hold his ground in a world of DVDs and broadband Internet, but he is beginning to see just how much of a focal point the film festival is for people. “It must be that a lot of our audience sees more films during the film festival than they do the rest of the year,” he says. “It’s extraordinary and I hadn’t appreciated quite how much that’s true.”
It is VIFF’s 25th anniversary this year and Franey is keen to remind people of the “convivial,” social aspect of the film festival and cinema-going. He believes it is particularly important given that a good proportion of the films at this year’s festival have urgent messages that we need to hear, share and discuss.
“We have almost a last chance to change the direction that the world is going,” Franey says, pointing to films that are sounding alarm bells about food industrialization, oil and the “New Crusades.” While these subjects have become VIFF staples, Franey sees the new crop of films as more forward looking and predictive than in the past.
At the top of his list is the French documentary Black Gold, offering four one-hour features about the history of oil. “It’s the scariest treatment of the subject that I have seen,” Franey notes, adding that it provides some astonishing footage of what Texas used to look like in the ‘20s and ‘30s compared to how it looks now.
In American Zeitgeist, 40 political commentators, including Noam Chomsky and Christopher Hitchens, trace the development of al-Qaeda from the Soviet-Afghan war era. Two other films with a political focus are We Feed the World, which shows the impact of modern food industry practices in the West, and My Country, My Country, which offers an intimate portrait of the lead-up to the first post-Saddam elections in Iraq.
Common Ground is sponsoring My Country, My Country at VIFF this year and I thoroughly recommend it. This fly-on-the-wall documentary opens in a Baghdad home on the eve of last year’s elections in Iraq. A young boy asks his father if he is going to vote. The camera alights on the father’s pensive face. The rest of the documentary explains the implications of this apparently innocent question, and we are led into the tumultuous situation of modern Baghdad, viewed through the eyes of a Sunni doctor and political candidate for the Iraqi Islamic Party.
Laura Poitros’ roving camera travels everywhere, from the fences at Abu Grahib to inside the US assault ‘copters flying over Baghdad. My Country captures the fear, and encouragingly, the humour and resilience of the people of Baghdad. The occupying US forces come across as largely out of touch and slow footed. Spending one and a half hours with Doctor Riyadh and his family will give you a better understanding of the situation in Iraq than watching endless hours of news reports ever could.
We Feed the World is an unsettling Austrian documentary, which meticulously documents how the mechanization of modern food production has created a monster. It reveals how the Western agro-industry’s insatiable hunger for yield creates poorer-quality food, mind-boggling waste and impoverishes our environment and those who rely on it for their living. An Austrian farmer says he gets less money for his grain than road grit, while enough bread to feed Austria’s second biggest city Graz is destroyed each day.
Filmmaker Erwin Wagerhof has impressive access to the farms, factories and processing plants. In particular, one unforgettable segment tracks the journey of a broiler from a newly-hatched egg to shrink-wrapped chicken at a state-of-the-art poultry processing plant. There is also a candid interview with Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck, who coolly suggests that NGOs are “extreme” for expecting access to clean water as a right.
On the lighter side, for pure fun Franey recommends Paheli, a Rajasthani Bollywood film, and John Malkovich provides comic relief in Colour Me Kubrick, a fact-based story about a con artist who pretended he was the publicity-shy film director Stanley Kubrick.
Franey expects that the documentary Loop, an “armchair extreme nature communion,” which follows people who have found balance in their life through the outdoors, will have wide appeal. Old Joy remains one of Franey’s favourite films from the Sundance Film Festival, and while the film is set in Oregon, it could have been filmed in BC. Franey feels that it is a must-see for BC filmmakers on how to “… capture the landscape with that integrity and truth.” Franey expects Shortbus, a drama by queer filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), to generate controversy with its graphic scenes of unsimulated sex.
Looking to ride on the coattails of March of the Penguins, the ice-bound nature film The White Planet (La Planète Blanche) features some beautiful footage of Arctic wildlife, including a polar bear family at play, migrating caribou herds and underwater shots of diving guillemots. Unfortunately, this straightforward – Bjorkish soundtrack aside – documentary lacks the narrative focus of Penguins, and to rise above the level of the average, dumbed-down piece of nature fluff, it should have stated more clearly how climate change affects this ecosystem.

The Vancouver International Film Festival runs September 28 to October 13. For more information, visit (www.viff.org)Robert Alstead is currently making a documentary about Critical Mass in Vancouver entitled You Never Bike Alone.