Film reviews: Worthwhile trips, from haunted Senegal to off-the-hook Vancouver streetball courts, at VIFF
Must-see docs and views from around the world at the fest till October 11
The ultra-kinetic thriller Saloum.
The legendary crew in Vancouver streetball documentary Handle With Care.
The Vancouver International Film Festival runs to October 11. See full schedule and ticket information for online and in-person screenings here.
Saloum
Senegal
October 8 at 6:30 pm and October 10 at 1 pm at the Rio Theatre
Jean Luc Herbulot’s ultra-kinetic thriller starts like a hardboiled crime film and then makes an emergency landing (literally) inside a vicious supernatural horror flick. A group of coldblooded mercenaries called Bangui’s Hyenas are meant to be smuggling a Mexican cartel member into Dakar, but end up in the haunted region of the title, where the ghosts of the past play havoc with the film’s narrative and also our shifting sympathies. There’s a lot going on here. The film’s impressive craft and visual flair is matched by its storytelling ingenuity and a political conscience, arriving at a climax that recalls, if anything, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, but doubly exotic! AM
Banking meets fascism in the beautiful and measured Azor.
Azor
Switzerland
October 2 at 1:30 pm at the Annex and October 8 at 6:30 pm at the Hollywood Theatre, and online via VIFF Connect to October 11
The scariest movie at this year’s festival is about banking. Specifically, the happy relationship between high finance and fascism, in this case Argentina’s military dictatorship, on behalf of which Swiss private banker Yvan is welcomed in 1980, where Azor begins. Accompanied by his shrewd wife, Inés, he’s there to pick up the pieces after the disappearance of his partner, who might have lacked the stomach for the job. But this and everything else is uncertain and beautifully underplayed in writer-director Andreas Fontana’s film, including Yvan’s personal ethics, even if the political realities that provide the film’s historic context couldn’t be more unambiguous. Eventually the church shows up in the figure of a monsignor who wafts into the film like a dissolute perv. That thrillingly awful touch aside, it’s also a beautiful and measured film, like a mini-Godfather, but focused on a threat way more real and present—right now, this instant!—than any Italian Mafia. AM
Handle With Care: The Legend of the Notic Streetball Crew
Canada
October 8 at 9 pm at the Vancouver Playhouse and October 10 at 8:30 pm at the Rio Theatre, and online via VIFF Connect until October 11
Local filmmakers Jeremy Schaulin-Rioux and Kirk Thomas were barely out of high school when they started following around the Notic Streetball Crew with their VHS recorders in 2001. What they didn’t realize as they shot at Kits Beach, Bonsar Community Centre, and various outdoor courts was that they were capturing the beginnings of one of the greatest street basketball crews outside of NYC. Their legendary “mixtape” video would go “viral” (back then, by snail mail, but continuing today via the interweb). Now, in one of the most engrossing and enjoyable docs at this year’s fest, the pair of directors go back to revisit the former crew’s members. Aside from off-the-hook b-ball action, each one of the hoopster’s stories are emotionally compelling in their own ways. Most are first- and second-generation immigrants of colour, faced with racism that drives them to form a community of their own. The film becomes a story about a less flattering side of Vancouver, a city that’s sometimes too smug about its inclusivity. Even more absorbing is what happens to these guys after their 15 minutes of fame as teens; for some, the loss of connection leads to addiction, for others, a decades-long journey to reach their hoop dreams. Handle With Care goes far beyond a sports doc—a hyper-energized, surprisingly moving look at a piece of Vancouver history that deserves wider celebration. JS
Japan in the Second World War in Wife of a Spy
Wife of a Spy
Japan
October 3 at 12:45 pm and October 10 at 6:15 pm at the Hollywood Theatre, and online via VIFF Connect to October 11
The newest from Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a relatively sober but gripping World War II drama about espionage among friends and lovers. Business man Yūsaku wants to smuggle information to the US about Japanese war crimes; old friend Taiji investigates for the military; Satoko is the wife of the title, triggering complex loyalties from both. It’s plotted like any well-made thriller (it was originally made for TV) and has a point to make about the perils faced by whistleblowers in our own dangerous times, but the film’s digital sheen and small exaggerations of design suggest something else. Fresh faced Taiji in particular is dwarfed inside his own uniform, generating the impression that we’re watching children at play as they become overwhelmed by history. AM
Barbarian Invasion
Malaysia/Hong Kong/Philippines
October 7 at 6:30 pm at The Cinematheque and October 11 at 11 am at Vancity Theatre
In the midst of a career lull and struggling to parent a bratty kid, actress Lee Yoon Moon (played by writer-director Chui Mui Tan) is offered a role in a low-budget rehash of The Bourne Identity—but she has to learn kung-fu and perform her own stunts, and she had to act opposite her despised ex-partner. The first half of Barbarian Invasion is charming enough, especially once Moon’s martial arts training begins and the tiny-framed actor wins us over with her unlikely grit. The film goes haywire around the time we’re introduced to a character wearing a T-shirt with ‘Philip K. Dick’ plastered across the chest, your cue that reality has become very unstable. But enough said about that, or the delights in store; I just wish Barbarian Invasion committed a little bit more to its wild-side, meaning we’ll just have to agree to disagree about that ending. AM
Kendra (right) gets to know the mother who gave her up for adoption in Daughter of a Lost Bird.
Daughter of a Lost Bird
U.S.
October 8 at 6:30 pm and October 10 at 1:15 pm at SFU Woodward’s, and online via VIFF Connect until October 11
Shot over seven years, director Brooke Pepion Swaney’s sensitively crafted documentary is a remarkable achievement—a nuanced, deeply personal portrait of what it means for an Indigenous person to be adopted out and cut off from their culture. The story follows Kendra, a woman raised in a white American family, as she takes years to track down and reconnect with her Lummi Nation. But it’s also very much about her birth mother April, herself adopted out to a white family, and her own painful history of abuse and addiction. Swaney captures the complexity of multigenerational trauma, capturing Kendra’s brutal honesty about her struggle to reconnect—her anger at herself for passing as white for most of her young life, and her questioning whether she can truly feel at home or fit in with the Lummi Nation that opens its arms to her. JS
Him
Norway
October 2 at 6:30 pm at the Rio Theatre and October 9 at 3:45 pm at the Kay Meek Centre, and online via VIFF Connect to October 11
The declining relevance of the average white guy is a topic that nobody wants to talk about but everyone wants to talk about—an ambivalence that’s written right into this Norwegian film, in which two men and one school-aged boy wrestle very badly with their, uh, mounting social impotence. Young Harald is the troubled product of a broken home and a too-strong mother. Unemployed 30-year-old Erik simmers over all of life’s inequities, including the heartless female bureaucrat who kills his benefits. Both are headed for dangerous behaviour. It’s hard to know if the film is doling out condemnation or apologies, but it’s probably significant that Him recalls Force Majeure in the wincing delight it takes in humiliating its saddest character, Petter—a too-proud, late middle-aged filmmaker. Anyway, not that anyone should care, but I liked it. AM
An American plants a flag and appoints himself royalty in The King of North Sudan.
The King of North Sudan
U.S.
October 5 at 6 pm at Vancity Theatare and October 7 at 3:45 pm at the Cinematheque, and online via VIFF Connect until October 11
Maybe you heard about the guy from West Virginia who found a little parcel of disputed territory on the border between Egypt and Sudan, planted a flag there, and called himself King (and made his daughter a Princess). The story made some waves in 2014; Danny Abel’s doc shows us what happened since, and it’s fucked. Inspired by visions of that utopian paradise Dubai, former military engineer and open-faced American Dreamer Jeremiah Heaton set about looking for partners to develop his 500k acres of sand into—well, anything, so long as he can remain king and take a nice monthly stipend, reaching out to potential partners in China and elsewhere, all of whom have entirely ridiculous notions about the value of life on Earth, none of whom should be in charge of the office pencils let alone anything that might impact human beings. Heaton seems like a nice enough chap, if thoroughly conditioned to believe in all the wrong things, but you want to slap him when he starts talking about policing the border of his fake country with special ops berserkers or collaborating with a vampiric Pentagon “African specialist” who obviously should have been sectioned before he finished high school. AM
The Six
China
October 4 at 6 pm at Vancity Theatre and October 8 at 3:30 pm at the Vancouver Playhouse, and online via VIFF Connect until October 11
Arthur Jones’s rigorous documentary investigates the six Chinese men who lived through the sinking of the Titanic, but sometimes bogs down in its own meticulous, dry historic research. At its heart, though, the story is fascinating, not only for the way that the men survived, but the fact they’re so little known—especially since the feat of one of them directly inspired a scene in the blockbuster Titanic by James Cameron (who also appears here). Shanghai-based lead researcher Steven Schwankert and his team uncover ship manifests, old news clippings, and surviving family members that lead to clues—and to a damning look at the treatment of Chinese labourers a century ago. Why are the men’s stories so hard to illuminate? Suffice it to say the racism was so bad in the early 20th century that these survivors had to sink their experience to avoid public humiliation. JS
Portraits From a Fire
Canada
October 3 at 8:30 pm at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, October 9 at 1 pm at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, and online via VIFF Connects to October 11.
Portraits From a Fire’s 16-year-old Tyler (William Magnus Lulua) is absolutely endearing as an aspiring filmmaker making lo-fi flicks on his home reservation. Here’s how he describes his latest to a neighbour: “It’s got everything! It’s got a mix between tragedy, drama, horror, comedy, and stuff like that. And it’s in space!” There’s much warmth and humour in Tsilhqot'in director Trevor Mack’s new feature, written by Manny Mahal. But the film (or, rather, “fillum”) also haunts as Tyler learns heartbreaking truths about his family.
Filmed on the Tl’etinqox Reserve where Mack grew up, Portraits From a Fire was made in collaboration with his community. A story of sorrow, bravery, trauma, survival, and the meaning of family, it beautifully weaves in Indigenous language and cultural practices such as fishing and Tsilhqot'in drumming. The soundtrack is killer, with tracks by the likes of Wolf Parade, Mogwai, and Perfume Genius and original score by Andrew Dixon and Conan Jurek Karpinski. Each and every cast member shines. Nathaniel Arcand gives Gord, Tyler’s grieving, emotionally distanced father, strength and vulnerability; and Sammy Stump (Sammy) is just plain lovable as Tyler’s grandfather and pillar of support. Lulua nails Tyler, with all his ideas, questions, hurt, and hope. GJ
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