It’s that time of year again: here are my reviews of some documentaries screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival, which kicks off at seven venues across the city starting Sept. 24.
Very Semi-Serious
An alternately humourous and moving profile of New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff and his stable of contributors, who “darken his doorway” every week with samples of new work for him to accept or reject. Mostly the latter. Contributor David Sipress has had 501 cartoons published in the magazine, but it took 25 years of rejections before his first cartoon appeared.
“Cartoons make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar,” notes the greying, bohemian-looking Mankoff, himself a longtime scribbler for the publication. Not surprisingly, other well-known New Yorker cartoonists such as Roz Chast and George Booth come across as a quirky and likeable, which goes double for young newcomers Liana Finck and Ed Steed.
A Syrian Love Story
Saghda’s face was bloody and swollen when Amer first caught sight of her through a hole in a Syrian prison wall, he recalls to filmmaker Sean McCallister. After their release, the Palestinian freedom fighter and Syrian author/activist fell in love, married, and raised three boys in the Mediterranean town of Tartus.
Over the course of five years the filmmaker captures the family’s physical and psychological upheavals, from their home in Syria to a refugee camp to Europe. The thinning Saghda wears a thousand-yard stare and a cloak of shame for fleeing her land and cause. Will the battling couple survive their scars, and will their children adapt to their unpredictable circumstances? In a world of desperate, displaced people, McCallister’s film gives universality to one story of love, family, and longing for home.
Monty Python and the Meaning of Live
In 2014, the surviving members of the British comedy troupe performed their first public performance together since 1980, with 10 sold-out shows at the O2 Arena in London. Film directors Roger Graef and James Rogan captured the elderly but still-sharp Pythons in rehearsal, months before they staged “One Down, Five to Go” — a reference to the late Graham Chapman. Terry Gilliam confesses he was always “in awe” of the other Pythons and explains the group’s true function: to shock people out of conventional habits of thought through absurdity. A must-see for Python fans.
Deep Time
In the space of five years, hydraulic fracturing transformed a small, humdrum town in North Dakota into a sprawling mess, making it the perfect setting for this meditation on geological time and the collective curse of short-term thinking. Using footage from his previous film, 2009’s Crude Awakening, filmmaker Noah Hutton performs a small, subtle magic trick at the very end of the film, giving Deep Time a powerfully understated poignancy.
Hadwin’s Judgement
Spectacular camerawork in the B.C. temperate rainforest brightens this compelling documentary take on the John Vaillant’s award–winning 2005 book, The Golden Spruce. Logging company employee Grant Hadwin was an intense and physically powerful man who struggled to reconcile his job marking out roadways for clearcut operations with his growing identification with nature.
While travelling his old-growth stations of the cross, this tortured soul conceived and committed an act of sabotage that seemed completely at odds with his professed love of trees and indigenous culture.
Alice Cares
“I don’t feel like having a robot in my house. I prefer a living human being” a skeptical Dutch senior tells a small American-made “caredroid” with a gift of synthesized gab. “Oh, that’s a shame,” Alice replies.
The robot has cameras in its eyes, and we get to see members of the Amsterdam-based research group SELEMCA track the progress between Alice and three elderly women taking part in an experiment in automated extended care. As a document about where we may be heading with robotics and a demographic bomb of aging boomers, the film would have profited from a few more talking heads, and a few less scenes of octogenarians puttering about their apartments with a caredroid seated nearby like a faux-sentient throw pillow.
But different strokes, I guess; some reviewers have written fondly of little Alice, but I’m more inclined to liken her uncanny behaviour and appearance to Chucky or any number of Hollywood’s scary, autonomous dolls.
@geoffolson
