This is the final installment of a three-part series contrasting the film industries in Canada and South Korea. Part one looked at small-scale private online investment in feature films – so-called “netizen funds.” Part two examined the screen quota laws in place in South Korea, and why there is no comparable system in Canada. This, the conclusion, is concerned with the films themselves – the stories they tell, and why they matter to audiences. It muses on the question that we in Canada ask most often, argue most vehemently about, and have thus far failed to find an answer for: what kind of movies do you make to speak to a domestic audience?
“Two Solitudes.” The phrase originally comes from Rilke, but most Canadians know it as the title of a novel by Hugh MacLennan – and, as a result of that book, a way to describe the divide between French and English Canada: two cultures that exist together, but separate. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the question of how to reconcile our two solitudes – or to break them apart – was at the forefront of the Canadian psyche, obsessing our politicians, shaping our history and locking our national identity in a state of constant tension.
Across the world, at the same time, another country was being divided into two solitudes, in this case much more cruelly defined, tragically alienated, tainted by hatred and subject to the whims of powers beyond their control. In 1945, following the surrender of Japanese forces in WWII, the Korean Peninsula was split through the middle, at the 38th parallel, into North and South – the former under Communist sway, the latter under the thumb of the United States government. To this day in South Korea, there is no issue more urgent, more important or more likely to stir strong emotions than the border cutting across the peninsula like a scar that won’t heal. While the Quebec sovereignty debate has cooled somewhat in recent years (at least outside of Quebec), the possibility of taking steps toward Korean reunification – of repairing families halved by the border, of easing military tension and opening up trade – is as ubiquitous as ever, hovering over a recent summit meeting between the presidents of the North and the South, looming over an upcoming presidential election, and flitting in the margins of US media stories about North Korea’s nuclear potential.
These concerns may seem beyond the reach of cinema. But if we can agree that cinema is an important way – perhaps, now, the most important way – for people to see and connect with the stories that define their countries for better or worse, we can start to look at how, in such situations, films help shape opinion and generate empathy; and, more importantly for filmmakers, how these situations can fuel a national film culture and engage audiences with domestic cinema.
In 2001, when Telefilm decided to focus on making movies they believed English Canadians would want to see – movies that could compete commercially with Hollywood product – they chose, as their first project, a comedy about curling, starring and directed by a man known to most Canadians as an anal retentive Mountie. Men With Brooms was, by Canadian standards, a qualified success commercially, taking in upwards of $1 million in its opening weekend (though it cost nearly $8 million to produce alone). By Hollywood standards, however – the standards to which it aspired, and can therefore fairly be judged – it was insignificant. Furthermore, the aspect in which the film most effectively mimicked Hollywood movies was its quality: most everyone agreed it was utter shit.
Box office trivia (and juvenile potshots) aside, the fundamental problem with Men With Brooms stemmed from its subject matter and story. Lots of Canadians love curling; come early March, the Brier tends to sweep everything else off Canadian sports TV, and there are amateur curling clubs in just about every Canadian city, town or burg. People take curling seriously. A dramatic film about curling that, likewise, took the sport seriously, looking at the dynamics of the sport, the people that play it and the reasons for its appeal, could have been good. It might even have been successful. Men With Brooms, however, insisted on hewing to a kind of cartoonish stereotype, using curling as the source of a supposedly hilarious cultural in-joke: “Curling – how Canadian, eh?” For the bulk of filmgoers in Canada, who reside in urban centres and live decidedly cosmopolitan lives, the kind of stereotypical, bumpkin-esque humour Men With Brooms proffered was nothing less than patronizing.
Crapping on a six year old film that’s already been crapped on aplenty, you might argue, is hardly fair. I only cite Men With Brooms as the most glaring example of a problem with Canadian cinema that aims for wide commercial appeal: it rarely tells stories real Canadians care about, stories that resonate with our wider, shared experiences, with the collective dreams and dissatisfactions of Canadian people – people who read the news every day, and who are keen, even obsessive observers of the national condition.
What kinds of stories, then, are of interest to audiences? If the answer is elusive, we can at least find some clues in the major successes to emerge from South Korea’s recent cinema boom. Since 1999, the year Kang Je-gyu’s Shiri was released, Korean cinema has seen a string of high profile films break a succession of box office attendance records, with almost every year yielding a blockbuster to trump the previous high set by its predecessor. Shiri begat JSA (Park Chan-wook, 2000), which begat Friend (Kwak Kyung-taek, 2001), which begat Silmido (Kang Woo-suk, 2003), which begat Taegukgi (Kang Je-gyu, 2004), which begat The King and the Clown (Lee Jun-ik, 2005), which begat The Host (Bong Joon-ho, 2006). These films are vastly different in style, scale and genre – but they all share the distinction of dealing thematically with topics that matter, fundamentally, to greater Korean society.
At least three – JSA, Silmido and the Speilbergian bloodbath, Taegugki – are explicitly powered by the issue of a divided Korea. Park’s film examines the relationship between soldiers working at Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone (in fact, a heavily militarized area straddling the border between North and South). Silmido tells the story of a secret military unit assigned to assassinate Korean leader Kim Il Sung. Taegukgi is a Korean take on the war epic, telling the story of two brothers who find themselves fighting on opposite sides during the Korean War.
The others choose different contemporary concerns as their themes. Kwak’s Friend is semi-autobiographical, telling a story of violence in an expertly recreated 1970s Busan. The film is noteworthy for its complete portrait of the city, taking into account the accents, landscapes and cultural specificities that distinguish Korea’s second-largest city from its more famous, bigger sibling. The King and the Clown, while set in ancient Joseon-era Korea, addresses the issue of homosexuality, which is still a strong taboo in current-day, conservative Korean society. The Host, meanwhile, suggests a shift of focus from one national duality to another, giving us the American military presence in South Korea as a raging, mutant river monster bent on laying waste to Seoul.
There’s no real telling what it was about these films that brought people to theatres in droves – high production values, shameless nationalism, curiosity, peer pressure, what have you. The common element, however, among these behemoths is clear: stories situated, either through plot or thematic elements, square in the jugular vein of Korean culture and society, awash in the most vital of stuff. I hesitate to use the word “relevant,” given its degeneration into an empty marketing buzzword, but in this case, it fits.
The reverse Russian doll effect waned this year, with the film industry landing in a financial rut and no film emerging to strip The Host of its box office title. In fact, the most successful Korean film of 2007 so far has been D-War, a cheesy fantasy/monster film set in America with Hollywood actors. However, even that film gives us a compelling, contemporary Korean story, in the ill advised but fascinating epilogue tacked on by director Shim Hyung-rae, which tells of the former comedian’s heroic six-year struggle to win respect and make the picture he always wanted. Besides, the runner up, which sold over 7 million tickets across Korea, outperforming the latest installments of the Spiderman, Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter franchises, is as culturally resonant as it comes: May 18 is a drama about the events surrounding the 1980 Gwangju massacre, a precursor to Tiananmen Square, in which protestors (many of them students) were gunned down by paratroopers answering to authoritarian military leader General Chun Doo-hwan – a move that many believe was endorsed by the US government. It’s no drooling river ghoul, but the point is made, especially in a year when a controversial free-trade agreement with the US prompted widespread protests in South Korea – which in turn led to some questionable arrests by the unpopular Roh Moo-hyun government.
No one can, or should, tell artists what stories to tell: the very notion of mandated content – in the creative stage, not the distributive one – is threatening to artistic freedom. It would seem, in Canada, that we prefer to make films about the small, marginal, hidden or depraved, films focused on the individual rather than the collective. Our filmmaking community’s preference for apolitical, historically inert films probably has a lot to do with Hollywood, where blunt nationalism is a given in every film with a square-jawed hero and a dusting of gunpowder around its flared nostrils.
Yet when we speak about the commercial potential of domestic films – when we talk, as we do so often, about getting more people to want to see English Canadian movies – we can complain as much as we want about low budgets, marketing and distribution; but we must remember that if there is to be a popular audience, there must also be a popular cinema, one that cannot rest solely on the shoulders of tepid romantic comedies. There are people who actually seem to believe that, were some of Canada’s more obtuse filmmakers to have their films beamed into the living rooms of the nation nightly, everyone would instantly abandon Hockey Night in Canada in favour of stories about alienated strippers, fevered orgies in surreal Annex apartments and alcoholic aliens who moonlight as Christian rock singers.
Given the inertia of Hollywood dominance, there’s no guarantee that Canadians could be made to pay attention to Canadian films, no matter what the subject matter. However, it’s hard to ignore the case of Bon Cop, Bad Cop. In 2006, that film became the first (inflation aside) to top the 25-year-old box office record for Canadian film set by Porky’s in 1981. It could me mere coincidence that the film centres – like JSA, Taegukgi, and Silmido in South Korea – around an incident occurring at a border between two solitudes. But it’s more likely that audiences saw in the film – which is not even particularly good, and which still relies heavily on stupid hoser stereotypes – a story that showed some awareness of contemporary Canadian problems, wherein they could recognize Canada not as a backwoods nation overrun by moose in lumberjack coats, or an eldritch world populated with wound fuckers and lonely wanderers in the snow, but as a nation whose history and culture contains the seeds of compelling narrative drama.
So it is at least worth considering, for filmmakers and screenwriters, the kind of raw material yet to be mined and refined into things potentially precious to contemporary Canadian audiences – to imagine, given Bon Cop, Bad Cop’s success, what a good relevant film might do. Where, for instance, in this age suffocated by rhetoric about terrorism, is our contemporary retelling of the October Crisis, to provide context and perspective to the debate? Where is our big screen – no miniseries, please – biopic about our most important and intriguing politician, Pierre Trudeau? Where are our portraits of Calgary’s new rich, of lives frozen by the ice storm, of leaders facing the spectre of Quebec sovereignty on the eve of a referendum? Where is the film that looks, honestly and with insight, at our relationship with the United States? These are the subjects that have haunted our conversations, harangued our reporters, held our attention. They should also be the stories we can relive, from different perspectives, on our movie screens.
Given Canada’s regionalism – even outside of Quebec, where the film industry is excepted from many of the claims and arguments made above, because it already has a popular audience – it may not be possible to make films that appeal to everyone across the country. Then again, it’s possible that such films could help to alleviate some of the animosity different provinces and cultures in Canada feel toward each other, generating empathy and encouraging, through the frame of shared experience, a feeling of national unity.
The Canadian film industry currently exists in the shadow of a neighbour that it cannot help but react to and be defined by. As such, Canada may always be a place where people prefer to make small films, subtle, human antidotes to the giant plastic monsters gurgling out of the Hollywood machine. That’s fine – but it necessitates that we stop pretending that a mass audience for domestic films is around the corner. If, however, bigger audiences for Canadian films are something filmmakers, industry professionals, critics, and so on, really want – if we want an industry like South Korea’s, which produces films that can stand up to Hollywood’s lumbering CG army, and win – we need a cinema that mirrors our biggest dreams, tragedies and triumphs, that can show us who we are, and why we matter in the world.
BUSAN — The lineups were our fault. The Pusan International Film Festival has the most convenient advanced ticketing system imaginable: for two weeks before the festival, all you have to do is pop into one of thousands of GS25 chain convenience stores located across South Korea and select your tickets via an electronic terminal. It’s as simple as taking money from a bank machine. My girlfriend and I, however, had tried only halfheartedly to get our act together and select our films beforehand; after all, we figured, with 30 percent of the tickets for each film being made available on the day of the screening, chances were good we’d get to see everything we wanted. This was Pusan – how busy could it be?
And so we found ourselves, on day two of the festival, standing in a lineup hundreds of people long, munching soggy toast sandwiches and eyeing the schedule board with dismay as our picks kept falling victim to the strike of the red marker. Lesson learned: this is Pusan. It’s going to be busy.
In a way, it was refreshing to stand in the lines, waiting with throngs of fellow film fans eager to explore the festival’s impressive programme. Many film festivals love claiming to be “about the films,” but too often the heavy hitters – those festivals that attract worldwide press attention and promise the heady perfumes of celebrity and high-gloss fashion along with their cinema– end up feeling like one long cocktail party, where films that don’t come bearing Oscar potential are mere ornaments to the frenzied ball of glamour and gab gathered around the canapé table.
Let there be no mistake: PIFF has its share of glitz. The heart of the festival is located among the high-end hotels clustered around Haeundae Beach, one of Korea’s most popular vacation spots. It attracts both international and domestic stars; this year’s A-list included Jeon Do-yeon, winner of the best actress prize at Cannes for her performance in Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine, and Michelle Yeoh of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame. It screens pictures by buzz-inducing world filmmakers such as Carlos Reygadas and Cristian Mungiu.
But with its focus leaning strongly toward Asian cinema, PIFF lacks the bloat and false importance of North American celebrity culture. No one is waiting at the door of the Novotel to catch a glimpse of Brad Pitt sneaking a gulp of soju. Instead, people camp out in line at the SfunZ Megabox, one of the festival’s crucial hubs of activity, to wait for the morning box office to open and the frenzy of ticket buying to begin. There’s not much allure to the place – it’s basically a mall, and not a very pretty one at that (the giant all-encompassing entertainment complex on the upper floors, where you can go fishing, bowl a few games or sing karaoke, is its most redeeming feature). Which means the overnighters are there for one reason: they really, really want to see some good movies.
This year, the schedule boasted 275 films from 65 countries, including four Canadian films: Denys Arcand’s L’âge des ténèbres; Bernard Émond’s Contre toute espérance (screening under the English title Summit Circle); Carl Bessai’s Normal; and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s Le Ring. Of the Canadian selections, Bessai’s was an international premiere, Barbeau-Lavalette’s a world premiere, and Arcand and Émond’s both Asian premieres. There were also noteworthy films from Gus Van Sant, Peter Greenaway and Volker Schlörndorff.
What is fascinating and beautiful about PIFF, though, is that few people in line seemed to care much about these films, which lingered on the schedule board longer than most. The hottest tickets were all local: films by Lee Myung-Se (Duelist, 2005), Kim Ki-duk (Time, 2006), Im Sang-soo (The President’s Last Bang, 2005) and Im Kwon-taek (just about everything else) attracted lots of anticipation and large, excited audiences.
The mood among Korean film observers has been gloomy of late, with investment and ticket sales falling in 2007, and only a few domestic titles standing up commercially to the tidal wave of Hollywood product being pumped into the market. According to Darcy Paquet, who runs the invaluable koreanfilm.org, festival attendance across the country has been low, due to a growing number of smaller festivals eating into audience share. Yet, at 198,603 (according to the Seoul Times), total admissions for Pusan were the highest ever.
Furthermore, the mood at Pusan certainly didn’t feel blasé. I can concede that romance played a certain role in my impression of the festival. It was my first year, and exploring a new event in an unfamiliar city is always more exciting than revisiting one you’ve been through many times before. There were plenty of whispers that this year’s version of PIFF – the 12th, if you’re counting – was beset by organizational hiccups (including one hospitality gaffe involving legendary composer Ennio Morricone), that the programme was weaker than in past years, that fewer stars were coming, that the weather sucked. I’m sure some were true, and that the festival wasn’t perfect; I’d lay bets that many of the films were bad, because finding close to 300 good films to screen at once is a nearly impossible task for any film festival.
Small things, though, can go a long way to making an event seem welcoming. Take, for instance, the shuttle bus running from the Megabox to the nearby Primus Cinema. Take the aforementioned ticket system, which was introduced this year, and which made the ticketing process easy, inclusive and even inviting to casual Korean films fans willing to take the train trip to Busan for a weekend, even a day. Take PIFF Village and PIFF Square, two areas around the main venues open to the public, where a festive atmosphere was created without the aid of outrageously priced designer boutiques. Take the festival’s website, which is clean, simple and free of irritating stylistic flourishes. Take the press bag I was given, which isn’t all that bad looking, and which included a full film catalogue free of charge.
PIFF has firmly established itself as the most important film festival
in Asia. It has earned the right to some pretentiousness, some boasting.
(And it has indulged: the best bit of PIFF’s final report – available online – is
its proud claim to breaking the attendance record, “despite typhoon.”)
Yet it feels like a festival where substance, in the form of films and
filmgoers, still trumps the festival brand. As Asia continues to become
more important in global affairs, PIFF will continue to build its status
as a go-to festival for film professionals interested in the state of
international cinema. Let’s hope that, no matter how big it gets,
it can retain its air of salty good-naturedness, and its commitment to
bringing films to people who want to see them.
PIFF HIGHLIGHTS
CANADA
Contre toute espÉrance (Bernard Émond)
Émond’s story of a blue-collar couple trying to make a life in
Montreal is weighty and miserable, but executed with clarity, sympathy and
a keen sense of the class and culture divisions at work in Quebec society.
Guylaine Tremblay gives an excellent performance as a woman trying to balance
love and frustration. Korean audiences exiting the film looked appropriately
bummed.
Le Ring (Anaïs
Barbeau-Lavalette)
More poverty in Quebec – but this time, with wrestling! Screened
in the newly introduced Flash Forward programme, which aims to explore
the works of emerging and adventurous filmmakers, Le Ring tells
the story of Jessy, a twelve-year-old boy who finds solace from his difficult
life in wrestling matches held every Friday night in his local church
basement. Saint Ralph, meet The Foul King.
KOREA
WRITTEN (Kim
Byung-woo)
Kim uses the old wake-up-in-the-bath-with-no-kidneys story
as a jumping off point for an exploration of character, narrative and
the filmmaking process that has echoes of the inferior Will Farrell vehicle, Stranger
Than Fiction. The protagonist’s name is ‘A’, a
man who realizes he is a character in an unfinished film that he then
attempts to wrap up. Filmed in HD, WRITTEN is heavily stylized
and so meta it hurts.
Secret Sunshine (Lee
Chang-dong)
Cannes favourite featuring an award-winning performance by
Jeon Do-yeon. The film, which tells the story of a woman who travels
to a small town with her son, displays the same mix of creative storytelling
and concern for the ordinary moment that animated Lee’s excellent
2000 film, Peppermint Candy.
EXT. STREETS OF BUJUMBURA – DAY.
A crew of young, aspiring filmmakers gathers in one of the poorest and most dangerous quarters of Bujumbura, Burundi. The nation’s civil war finally ended a year ago, but the scars from 40 years of fighting are worn on every face and building in sight. Armed with a barebones set of lights, sound equipment and video cameras, the students are attempting to shoot a short dramatic film with the help of a few (glaringly white) Canadian mentors. The first problem turns up immediately – the local power supply isn’t working. The second problem then arrives at the speed of (no) light, as hundreds of men, women, and especially children, swarm the impromptu set eager to catch every second of the apparent spectacle. Overwhelmed by the attention, the fledgling film students begin to second guess themselves and lose focus of the details. The perfect sunrise is lost and the delays keep piling up before the camera ever gets a chance to roll. Like an ill-prepared army forced to fight for survival, the time has come: production for the Burundi Film Center’s first short film has begun.
The above isn’t actually a script, but a page taken out of my recent experience starting a film school in the tiny East African nation of Burundi. After graduating from Carleton University in 2006, I worked on a media development project called the Rwanda Initiative, training print journalists in Kigali. Fate and shameless networking introduced me to a Rwandan CNN freelance videographer named Raymond Kalisa, and together we collaborated on a project to train the youth in Rwanda’s neighbouring country of Burundi to make their own films. The pilot-project for the Burundi Film Center was launched during June and July of 2007, culminating in a traveling film festival to showcase the five dramatic shorts we produced. No funding was provided of any kind, so two Canadian filmmaker friends of mine (Bridget Farr and Sabrina Guerrieri) came to help with more equipment to make everything possible.
We held a script writing competition to choose the eventual 36 students, aged 18-35, who would participate in the inaugural BFC training called “Level One: Introduction to Film Theory, Pre-production and Production”. The stories ranged in theme and genre, but a large portion dealt with sexual abuse and AIDS, while only a few dealt with the contentious issue of ethnicity. Over a third of our students were young women, and the degree of their experience was varied; some had never held a camera, a few make wedding videos as a full-time job. Our goal was to arm them with some temporary equipment and permanent skills to tell their own stories. Our slogan tried to capture our objective in three easy steps “Inspire. Educate. Entertain.” I’m proud to say we accomplished exactly what we set out to do and are now touring the films in festivals around the world to continue the project in the future. The following are some excerpts from my records of our experiences abroad.
King Kong Isn’t Real – June 26, 2007
I broke a heart today. Like a parent finally telling his kids the truth
about Santa Claus, I unveiled to some of the students the truth about
movie magic. The following will undoubtedly sound incredibly naïve
to everyone, so please keep the above analogy in mind before judging too
harshly.
It takes a lot of courage to ask questions you are afraid will make you look stupid. I was taken aback by just how much some of the students obviously have to learn about filmmaking, but I’m still very encouraged.
After class, a crowd of students huddled around the Canon XL1 camera we brought to record some of our teaching during the day. Our hands-on training doesn’t begin until next week, but the sight of our camera absolutely hypnotized them. When they think of filming a movie, they think of the basics – get action in front of the camera, and film it. Explain the rule of the 180 degree line of axis, for example, (which we did earlier in the week), and eyes start to glaze, imaginations become stifled and illusions are shattered. But the sight of a camera completely re-energized them, and probably just in time. I would hate for beauty to actually kill the beast.
Cut Down the Tall Trees – July 5, 2007
The code Hutu extremists used over the radio to start the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was “It’s time to cut down the tall trees.” The not-so-subtle propagation had some literal implications, as machetes were the weapon of choice to slaughter their taller, fairer skinned country men, women and children labeled Tutsi. A hundred days later, more than 800,000 people were murdered at a rate of one every 10-12 seconds (primarily by hand). Many people, including myself, heard relatively little about this until a decade later, when Hollywood made a film called Hotel Rwanda that explored just one of the million stories during that affair.
I’m going into all this detail for a number of reasons. First, today we took half our class (those with the means and availability) on a field trip to a feature film being shot in Rwanda about the genocide. The film is called Opération Turquoise; it’s about a French refugee camp/militarized “safe zone” set-up with an awkward, ambiguous mission to help Rwandans almost three months after the genocide began.
Raymond, my co-founding partner, has a speaking role playing a field commander of the RPF (the “rebel” army that stopped the genocide). The film is in the final two days of shooting and almost 300 extras were needed for today’s scene, including 200 demobilized Rwanda soldiers, French soldiers, and some 50 children. At one point, Raymond’s character pulls the mayor of a Rwandan town highly suspected of perpetrating the genocide out of a truck and personally executes him on the spot.
This is what was scheduled, but a rather pesky real tree that wouldn’t co-operate in being cut down – actually blown up by explosives – made the crew run way over schedule. When the tree did fall to create a roadblock, of course the cameras weren’t rolling. The class helped hoist it back up the hill, only to have it fall unceremoniously again to the laughter of all the spectators. It was actually re-assuring to show that things never go as planned even on a film with a multi-million dollar budget.
Nomadic Cinema / Screen Tests and Close-Ups – July 26-28, 2007
The traveling film festival, after much delay, finally got rolling on Wednesday. Our first two stops were scheduled for the outskirts of the city of Bujumbura in communities called Kinama and Kimenge. Then, by some odd coincidence, I came across this on the Burundi section of the Foreign Affairs Canada website: “Rebel attacks on civilians are still occurring in these regions, including in the suburbs of Kinama and Kamenge.” Don’t be fooled by the hat, I’m not actually trying to be a cowboy, here, but we did press on as scheduled. I just thought I should wait until we were done to write about it.
The advertisers come each night to put up banners, make sure their commercials actually get played and that we get a large enough audience. All this happens as we race against an unforgiving sunset rush to satisfy all the local authorities and rope in local amenities. We’ve learned to change locations in a hurry if we don’t have at least 30-40 people crowd around us during set-up, a last minute decision we’ve already made twice (which is like hitting the reset button for all the work we had done up to that point). Even if the advertisers weren’t there breathing down our neck, it would still be a shame to not have large audiences. Hearing people of all ages cheer and gasp during the films is the renewable energy that powers the whole operation.
Watching nearly a thousand people pack around our screen each night is incredibly rewarding. From the moment we arrive, a buzz spreads and people start to swarm. I had hoped to deliver flyers to explain what we’re doing and draw a crowd, but with most people being illiterate anyway, we’ve learned the novelty of what we’re doing is more than sufficient. Local music videos precede our films as the sun sets, and then our DJ gets everyone riled up explaining what they are about to see. The Burundi Film Center logo comes on the screen and it’s our turn to sit back. Our eyes on them; their eyes on the screen.
The premiere on Friday was the big test to see how well the films played to a Burundian audience. The response was fantastic, and everyone was pretty forgiving of some glaring sound errors and production goofs. The street audience tends to just have their emotions played like a yo-yo, cheering at both appropriate and inappropriate times, but always glued to the films in their own language, about their own people, shot in recognizable locations. At one point Raymond turned to me laughing and said “these guys don’t even know they’re being educated, they’re just enjoying images.” Seems like a pretty good start to me.
Christopher Redmond is the co-founder of the Burundi Film Center and an Ottawa-based filmmaker.
*Portions of this article have appeared in other publications.
Another Canadian fall comes and goes, officially launching film festival season with its most high profile event in Toronto (September 6-15), and closing only a month and a half later after screening films for audiences at overlapping fêtes in Halifax (Sept 13-22), Sudbury (Sept 15-23), Calgary (Sept 21-30), Vancouver (Sept 27-Oct. 12), and twice in Montreal – the slowly dissolving World Film Festival (August 23-Sept. 3) and surely rising Nouveau Cinema (October 10-21). In Toronto alone, complete film festival saturation has occurred in the past few years, where currently on offer are Russian (Kino), Latin, and Native (imagineNATIVE) film festivals, alongside After Dark (horror/fantasy) and DNA (digital) – all within roughly the same time span! Not to mention alternative screenings from experimental and video co-ops (Pleasure Dome, CFMDC, LIFT), Nuit Blanche’s all night visual extravaganza, and a recent spate of solid programming at the re-inspired Royal, including an evening of live commentary with Allan Moyle (New Waterford Girl, Pump Up the Volume), and Nicolas Roeg’s Puffball.
Yet despite overwhelming choices during this time of the year, Canadians on the whole find themselves in the same position annually as the fall fades into winter, when domestic film options all but disappear into the snow, with no strong outcry from the public – or any significant concentrated effort by producers, distributors, exhibitors or even filmmakers and actors – to insist on an alternative. (For starters, how about mandating the CBC to fund and air a Canadian feature film in 52 prime time slots per year, as well as online?) With the National Screen Institute’s Winnipeg festival – which included incredible outdoor screenings on ice screens! – closing this year, and despite Whistler’s weekend (November 29-December 2) party and TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten screenings in January, the forecast calls for another Winter of hibernation from anything resembling domestic cinema exhibition outside the major urban centres, and sparsely within. Don’t hold your breath for spring or summer events that change this situation significantly, either (and if you’re thinking that starting a film festival in this season is therefore a good idea – please, just don’t). Aside from the multiple genre (Fantasia! in Montreal; Rue Morgue in Toronto; etc.) and international language themed film festivals in these seasons, international fare is also sorely lacking in non-metropolis land – so much for global warming.
To be fair, it’s not as desperate or downright strange a situation as perhaps it is in Bhutan, or other underdeveloped nations, but it is really starting to get tiring thinking about the status remaining quo. The lack of drive to change the situation is a real killer. How can a Canadian filmmaker be expected to make a feature film for a domestic audience if he has no clue what that audience wants – because the plethora of viewers in the country have never had the opportunity (let alone impetus) to see and respond to a contemporary Canadian film?
Given the heightened significance of a festival screening, it’s no strange notion that the larger festivals dictate what ultimately gets seen and, by extension, beget new trends in Canadian cinema. Programmers are generally a smart bunch whose hands are often tied by a combination of pressure, as part of a government-sponsored event, to support government funded productions, and to please established “name” artists even if their new film is generally acknowledged to be a dud. Pleasing audiences, especially at festivals on the scale of TIFF or the self-proclaimed “international” level any new festival claims to work at, increasingly means adding glamour (stars for Q&As) rather than substance. After all that paperwork is weeded through, there’s the opportunity to discover, at most, 10-15 films worth screening from the countless submissions.
Given the incestuous feedback funding loop in the country – government funds film, festival, and then gives artist more money for screening at the festival – it’s no surprise that three distinct classes of Canadian filmmakers (and films) can be superficially designated: the professionals, middle-class, and amateurs. Translated economically, which clearly has the largest impact on exhibition potential, professional films are those made with an actual budget by established filmmakers (this year, McDonald, Virgo, Arcand, Girard, Podeswa and Moyle). Industrial efforts such as these, including the highest studio scale pictures by established artists like Cronenberg, are typically shot on film (or some form of Super Expensive HD), have a specific bland sheen to their overall production design and art direction, and for a variety of reasons also tend to be the most conventional in their approach to narrative or formal experimentation – and, finally, to winning an audience. (McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments, a technical achievement winner at the Berlinale for its experimentation with multi-frame storytelling, is this year’s exception.) Interestingly, in critical circles – which is to say, outside the realm of mere puff pieces, which they all elicit – these are also the films that are most overlooked; probably because, far from igniting contemporary trends of representation and being truly cinematic adventures, they’re the country’s Tragically Hip of movies, offering solid if uninspired instrumentation occasionally mixed with flashes of poetic insight, given the right context – but ultimately no longer capable of changing (or striving to change?) your life.
The drop-off between a theatrical run for the professionals and the next group is the steepest cliff. In spite of a budgets over $200,000, middle-class projects – All Hat, Young People Fucking, This Beautiful City, Citizen Duane, Who Loves The Sun – vanish in theatres within a week or two, at best, and then have only a fleeting chance of catching your eye while you flip channels and fall asleep on the couch way too late at night. Most Canadian Film Centre productions also fall into this category, though they rarely screen at film festivals (further evidence of programmer’s good taste winning out), consistently managing a quiet plunge into theatrical bomb territory, leaving the director to flee the crash site for the safe, “plugged-in” paycheques of average episodic television.
To have raised $200K+ budgets (or as high as $3-4 million in the saddest examples of funding gone wrong), these middle-class filmmakers have typically gone through the cable and Telefilm development and production funds, and have therefore already secured a broadcaster, with hopes of a theatrical release stemming from festival buzz. Along with the amateurs – our third group – they have the most to gain out of the Canadian festival season, competing for awards and acclaim, and then attempting to parlay such goodwill into further festival exposure, perhaps even a one-week theatrical release, and at worst a TV or DVD sale.
In the amateur group, we can include first time directors (featured in programs like TIFF’s Canada First) working on no-budget scales; documentaries like 2006’s Radiant City and Manufactured Landscapes; and the best art films out of Quebec. While the budget for ML (similar to Peter Mettler’s successful 2002 doc/art fusion Gambling, Gods, & LSD) makes it stand out from this pack, despite the popular myth perpetuated by festivals like Hot Docs regarding the commercial success of documentary features, unless you’re Michael Moore, an anthropomorphized penguin, or a pseudo-reality, single idea, tragically inept filmmaker (see Supersize Me or Wordplay), you’re likely to be overlooked by the masses. For example: Radiant City, a far smarter and more engaging effort than the bourgeois non-statement that is Manufactured Landscapes, is a documentary that never received a push into the local theatres where it may have been most successful, perhaps even through – gasp! – word of mouth.
A handful of the few remaining festival slots are decided based on regional connections. Vancouver, for example, this year screened The Green Chain, a feature collection of seven monologues on the logging industry; the Atlantic (without a McIvor or Fitzgerald to turn to this year) included Stuck, the Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea-starring UK/Canada co-pro shot in St. John; and Nouveau Cinema screened Longing For Your Eyes, the debut feature starring and directed by Charlotte Laurier. None of these films screened at other Canadian festivals during this same season.
While the top two tiers often find slots in festivals across the country, and documentaries and regional representation fill out most remaining spaces, there is a tiny sliver of hope for independent cinema in the country. The odd independent success story, the amauteur filmmaker who took a chance by suffusing a film with enough energy to squeeze a message across despite its technical and budget limitations, realistically only has 3-5 spots to strive for. Once the festival season is over, and despite successful previous and future screenings at festivals around the world, most of these films are essentially shelved. Having exhausted their budget on production, such art film-flavoured projects as Denis Côté’s Les états nordiques and Nos Vies privées; Reg Harkema’s Monkey Warfare; Rafaël Ouellet’s Le cèdre penché; and esoterically engaging films by the wizard of Winnipeg, Guy Maddin (Brand Upon The Brain!, 2006) simply don’t have the promotional budget to overcome the obstacles of domestic exhibition within an American controlled system.
Ages ago, it seems, The Toronto and Vancouver New Waves (if they even occurred with great significance – questionable, given the sheer lack of films to write on in our cinematic history and the need to mythologize something) at least presented a group of artists who were keen on challenging conventions of Canadian cinema under some kind of group dynamic. Perhaps that’s only an observation possible in hindsight (especially for Vancouver, where the wave spans 20-30 years). But right now those days are long gone. Now the majority of artists from those movements struggle to make projects with bloated budgets that inevitably distance them from the realities of contemporary urban and rural culture; or, like the disease that commonly renders comatose the most promising new directors, they’re unable to navigate the artistic and financial distance between feature projects (up to five years or more), often taking work in television or commercials, and sapping any momentum that might lead to significant observations (and impact) on the cultural landscape. Where Korean and Mexican cinema recently thrived in acquiring domestic audiences – for both art-house and commercial fare – we stubbornly remain a country unable to even screen our films for Canadians. The Fall Festival season is therefore as much the place to catch the most contemporary of works by people who live and experience “here,” as it is a sad reminder of the need to expand into larger domestic (and international, sure) audiences – if only for the sake of exposure and feedback. Curatorial efforts aside, there’s simply too much Canadian film being made for Canadians not to be offered greater access to see, judge, and respond to more of it.