Film reviews: Reel 2 Real casts a pragmatic child's-eye view over the harder edges of life

Nina and the Hedgehog’s Secret finds light in economic anxiety; Adventures in the Land of Asha is a thoughtful corrective to settler history; Coco Farm thrills with an unreasonably fun takedown of corporate capitalism

By Adrian Mack

Coco Farm.

The Reel 2 Real Film Festival for Youth runs at the VIFF Centre and Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre from April 7 to 16

THE WISE PROGRAMMERS of the Reel 2 Real Film Festival for Youth have never shied away from difficult material. Here are three titles that make great entertainment while remaining honest about the world outside the picture house.

NINA AND THE HEDGEHOG’S SECRET

At VIFF Centre on April 7 at 12 pm, followed by a reception

Like their previous features, the newest animated film from the French duo of Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli brings a light touch to some hard-edged subject matter. In 2016’s Phantom Boy, a preteen undergoing chemotherapy helps unravel a plot to destroy New York. Here, 10-year-old Nina determines to get to the bottom of a factory closure and associated criminal plot that has brought economic insecurity to her modest family home. She’s aided by Mehdi, her neighbour in their downmarket apartment complex, and guided by an imaginary hedgehog—designed, inimitably for Gagnol and Felicioli, as a callback to the origins of animation, in this case looking like a Max Fleischer invention. It all leads to a pleasing action finale in the abandoned factory but the key scene comes early, when Nina encounters her newly unemployed father’s detachment for the first time. She doesn’t understand and he can’t communicate, and it’s a quietly devastating moment for viewers on either side of the child-parent equation.

ADVENTURES IN THE LAND OF ASHA

At VIFF Centre on April 13 at 10 am

It’s 1940s rural Quebec, or “somewhere in the north of America” as we’re informed over the film’s scarily frigid opening credits, and the land remains unsettled. Arriving from the city with his mother, who’s a doctor, nine-year-old Jules is entering the foreign territory of his uncle, the mayor of a small town with big dreams of expansion—meaning the acquisition, legal or otherwise, of a nearby reserve. The more immediate issue for Jules, besides having his beloved dog Sparks banished from their new home, is the fear and superstition aroused by a skin condition that he conceals with long woollen gloves. As such, he’s also banished to an equally frigid-looking attic bedroom and then made to homeschool. In this quasi-supernatural tale from filmmaker Sophie Farkas Bolla, Jules eventually embarks on an enlightening adventure into the wilderness with Asha, a girl from the Meskwaki, or Fox Indian nation, whose fate in French Canada you’ll probably guess. It’s an uncomplicated message movie, but beautifully shot and certainly engaging, especially when Asha and Jules launch a nighttime raid on a settler encampment using projectiles made of red-hot bark.

COCO FARM

At VIFF Centre on April 16 at 6 pm following the closing awards ceremony

The closing night film at this year’s festival is a slam-dunk. The tale of a very precocious city-kid opening an organic egg company after being reluctantly migrated into the Quebec countryside by his financially strapped and widowed dad, Coco Farm manages to be neither condescending or misty-eyed about rural life, while honest about the social media-global corporate Borg that we’ve saddled our children with. What’s impressive here is that Max, in cahoots with his deceptively talented country cousin Charles and their brand-savvy new friend Alice, must overcome successive levels of resistance to their business plans. Winning over the locals is the first step, providing Coco Farm with one of many rousing set-pieces, while eventually a retired and somewhat bibulous butcher called “Beer Belly” insinuates himself into the operation, lending the film a redemption arc that’s genuinely touching in the hands of actor Benoît Brière.

It might seem odd that we’re cheering on this (admittedly magical) child’s adventures into the free market, in a time when “blame capitalism” is the prevailing sentiment, but director Sébastien Gagné’s gently subversive feature makes its biggest villain out of the regulatory authorities that should work for us, but don’t. This combo of idealism and realpolitik is dynamite.  

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