Last Night with Riviera
Films to flavour your dreams, words to kickstart your morning
Tales from Young Nations (Commonwealth Film Festival, part 3)
Last night I caught writer-director Amnon Buchbinder’s Canadian coming-of-age drama Whole New Thing. Buchbinder had delivered a fascinating screenwriting masterclass the day before. Distancing himself from the trick-and-pony workshops and secret-to-success gurus, the author of The Way of the Screenwriter (also a lecturer at York University’s film Department in Toronto) takes a much more philosophical approach to the craft. Anyone interested in the art of screenwriting but wary of easy formulas should not only read this intriguing book but catch Buchbinder’s low-budget gem, Whole New Thing.
Whole New Thing is part of a large contingent of Canadian films at the Commonwealth Film Festival dealing with coming-of-age stories (interesting that ‘young’ nations such as Canada and Australia should be so good – and prolific - in the genre).
Talented newcomer Aaron Webber is Emmerson, a smart 13 year-old living with his back-to-nature hippie parents in Nova Scotia (Rebecca Jenkins and Robert Joy). Like many of us before him, Emmerson has a crush on a teacher (played by co-writer Daniel McIvor). Unlike many of us before him, he chooses to do something about it.
This, thankfully, isn’t a coming out story. It’s a warm and witty portrait of adolescence and the foolishness of love, filled with authentic (if eccentric) characters. Like all good coming-of-age stories, it chronicles the ripple effect that one character’s journey can have on the quests for identity, maturity and self-actualisation of everyone around them. It does so through sharp characterisation and textured relationships which ring true without the need for clichés. The dialogue is pitch perfect and one of the film’s great pleasures.
Like The Squid & The Whale, Whole New Thing is a hugely rewarding, understated piece of filmmaking which provides insights into family, adolescence and relationships, without ever feeling the need to lecture or moralise. Shot in 15 days on a tiny budget, this indie gem is worth getting excited about and comes highly recommended.
Dead Time is another Canadian coming-of-age tale, but light years away from Whole New Thing is both form and content. Steve Sanguedolce’s unique film uses a wide array of experimental techniques to paint an expressionistic portrait of a handful of young people struggling with heroin addiction, abuse and life on the street. Dead Time is a gritty soap opera told through a voice-over narration by the documentary subjects culled from hours of interviews. The protagonists however, are played on screen by actors. The viewer is further distanced from reality by the film’s goergeous psychedelic style, which combines toner-dyed, hand-processed 35mm film with a fantastic, sound effects-laden score by the filmmaker himself. The result for the viewers is somewhat akin to a drug-fuelled experience. While it brings you closer to the people whose tumultuous lives the film describes, it’s a relentlessly bleak journey which may leave you with a bit of a hangover. --
Also blending fiction with documentary, Eric Khoo’s Be With Me is one of the most accomplished films to come out of Singapore. Like a few other films in the festival, it takes bold new stylistic directions in telling its story, allowing for a refreshing filmmgoing experience.
The film weaves together three stories about a theme often present in the work of Asian filmmakers such as Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-Liang, Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-Wai or Malaysia’s James Lee: the incapacity for increasingly isolated city-dwellers to express and communicate their feelings for one another.
One story sees an overweight security guard develop an obsession on a beautiful office worker he’s never met, while another charts a schoolgirl’s unrequited crush on another. As befits a film about communication breakdown, Be With Me is almost entirely silent. In both these stories, characters attempt to communicate through letters, text messages or email, but fail to articulate their feelings.
In reaction to these dead-end affairs, the third story is steeped in tragedy yet ultimately full of hope. Based on memoirs of Theresa Chan, a deaf and blind woman who plays herself in the film, the third segment explores how willpower and human decency can overcome even the most stringent of barriers and allow stangers to connect meaningfully. Theresa’s “narration” takes the form of written text appearing as sub-titles, but the real dialogue can be read on the actors’ faces. Eric Khoo orchestrates a silent symphony of distress signals and declarations of love whose poignant melody echoes long after the audience exits the cinema and switches their mobile phones back on.
It’s been a busy week in Manchester, and the Commonwealth Film Festival has a lot more to offer than excellent films. I managed to squeeze in a few Kabaret films made that week by local DIY video-makers, attend a panel discussion on digital exhibition and its debated potential to promote independent film culture in the UK, and even a play incorporating BMX stunts and jaw-dropping video projections.
There’s really nothing like seeing films in the context of festivals. Revisiting an event I used to program and marvelling at new editorial directions and programming ideas has been a richly satisfying experience. The week’s gone by in a flash though, and I’m back on a plane tonight already, first to Paris, then on to Morocco, where I hope to blog live from the Meknès Internatianal Animation Festival next. Till then...!
posted by Matt Riviera @ 22:12