Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival

It is rare to come across a film festival so honest in intent that it charges nothing in admission and wants nothing from its audience other than their attention. But Australians are lucky; Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival, now in its 11th year, would rather focus on exhibiting and communicating the stories of a people than just making money. It is ”the only festival in the country that is solely committed to presenting films made by and about Indigenous people and all screenings are free.”

Having visited most of its Australian city destinations already, Message Sticks concludes its 2010 tour at Carlton’s Melbourne Museum with screenings showing this Saturday 4 – Tuesday 7 September. Showcasing mostly shorts, the program are well framed by two feature documentary sessions that offer a contrasting real life and reel life context for the recurring themes within the festival program.

Lani's Story

Lani’s Story: Followed by a Q&A with Lani Brennan, Lani’s Story is a documentary about a woman who suffered an horrific spate of repression and self-loathing due to the persistent combination of substance abuse, small community, extreme domestic violence and a failed justice system. Experimenting with alcohol as early as eleven, Lani was a self-professed “daily drunk” at just thirteen. Having grown up with alcoholism and domestic violence as something that just occurred but wasn’t openly talked about, Lani quickly fell into a destructive pattern that continued to feed on her personal shame. It was only after sobering up and meeting someone else, a man who finally showed her the kindness and support she deserved, that Lani was able to throw off the shackles of her own fear and speak out against her perpetrator.

Nin's Brother

Shorts: From the nine shorts (ranging in duration from between 5 min to 52 min) at the heart of the festival, Message Sticks brings disparate filmmakers (from New Zealand, Canada, the USA and, of course, Australia) and diverse subject matter to create an overarching narrative of untold Indigenous tales. Nin’s Brother sees one young woman search for a connection to and the truth surrounding suspicious events in her family’s past; Big Fella documents one man’s struggle to overcome mental illness and its symptomatic morbid obesity; Nundhirribala’s Dream is a gentle rendering of subconscious spiritual connection; Shimasani is the beautifully shot story of a young woman who wants more from the world; The Cave quite literally shows the proximity between the living world and the spirit world; Barngngrnn Marrangu Story gives a heart wrenching view of the confines of the reserve; Redemption is a sad, prophetic tale about the bleak future for a young, apathetic generation; Daniel’s 21st reveals a desperation that spurs denial; and Boxing for Palm Island is a tale about fight and survival. Each of these shorts do, in the first instance, the same two essential things; 1) they tell an untold story 2) they communicate just how important it is that the untold story gets told.

Reel Injun: “Hollywood has made over 4000 films about Native people; over 100 years of movies defining how Indians are seen by the world.” Whilst a vast majority of film-goers will already know, Hollywood is, to some relative degree, responsible for the construction of what’s often known as “collective memory” or “social memory” and, moreover, that a considerable proportion of it is either undesirable or just plain untrue. Certainly their representations of Indigenous people have always been misrepresentative in their stereotyping as a result of their being driven by greater social/political agendas that in turn continue to perpetuate prejudice.

Reel Injun is the film that takes the time to sift through these representations and talk about them – openly and honestly. Holding nothing back; from the “great American plains” as backdrop, to altered historical accounts turning battle into myth to the ludicrous US summer camps that keep the Hollywood notion of a “noble savage” “alive and well”; this documentary tells it like it is – and how it’s always been. With commentary from the likes of Clint Eastwood and Jim Jarmusch, the taking to task of iconic westerns such as Stagecoach (1939), and with some pretty damn sarcastic comedy, “Chuck Conners as Geronimo – it’s like Adam Sandler as Malcolm X”, Reel Injun is the film of the festival – and if you do only have the time to go see one thing, make sure it’s this – because it’s absolutely brilliant.

Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival takes place at Melbourne Museum in Carlton from Saturday September 4 – Tuesday September 7. Admission to all screenings is FREE.

Written by Tara Judah for Liminal Vision.

The Other Film Festival

The question of ethics and the way in which we understand “the Other” through visual media, and more specifically through film, is something that is often touched upon (though not always in as much depth as I’d like) in the writing here at Liminal Vision. The idea that when we sit down to view a film we enter into an unspoken “contract” whereby we agree to substitute reality for spectacle for the duration of the film is a fundamental in spectatorship theory and a kind of “given” that possibly isn’t contested as often as it ought to be. There is one text I’d like to mention in which earlier models of spectatorship theory are brought into question through a theoretical discourse concerned with ethics, as expressed through both the content of any given film and also through the ethics that inform the act of viewing any given film: Michele Aaron’s Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On. The most significant phraseology, for me, to come from Aaron’s writing is “responsive responsibility”.

Although Aaron’s writing is applicable to and engages with all modes of visual media, it bears particular relevance to two films I wish to discuss here and that are featured in the upcoming program for The Other Film Festival; a festival of “New cinema by, with and about people with a disability.” What It’s Like To Be My Mother (2007) and Blind Loves (2008), both focus – though in remarkably different ways – on the question of assuming responsibility, in equal measure, for the content of that which we do and do not see.

What It’s Like To Be My Mother: More than just raising an awareness surrounding what it is like to live with disability, What It’s Like To Be My Mother actually asks the viewer to think about what it is like to live being seen by Others as disabled. Featuring a film within a film, What It’s Like is knowing in its express implication of the viewers’ role in constructing a notion of “otherness”.

When  Julia’s film about her disabled mother Monika qualifies for a Warsaw festival of “disability and art” she soon learns that the ownership of the film is not entirely her own; the subject, her mother, claiming equal if not primary concern for its exhibition, tells her daughter that exhibiting the film is not her decision to own “because you’re not disabled.” Being made to feel “naked” as viewers look on but importantly do not experience her disability it becomes clear that whilst Monika attributes the ownership of film as object to her daughter, “It’s her masterpiece, not mine”, she is painfully aware even before Julia verbalises the sentiment, that the film only exists in lieu of Monika’s indomitable spirit, “But you’re the masterpiece.”

Often using humour to distract attention from herself as a “disabled woman” in the first instance, Monika opens up to her daughter and, vicariously to us. Through her honestly we might begin to understand the complexity and contradiction within the limitations of what we see, “I would be happier if people didn’t notice me…You see when you look, but you don’t look.” Through Monika filmmaker Norah McGettigan successfully conveys the complex ethical implications involved in seeing an Other, specifically as it pertains to the way in which they are conveyed or shown on film; Monika’s honest answer to the question, “Did losing your legs change your life?” being that it is “a feeling”, and moreover, “one you won’t capture on your camera.”

Blind Loves: Broken up into four vignettes each focussing on an interpretation of love and “blindness” (both as a physical and metaphorical affliction), Blind Loves interpolates the space between screen and viewer, providing an acute awareness of the act of watching individuals who themselves cannot see.

Peter is a music teacher who is blind to obstacle and whose love for music allows him to create his own liminal space between fantasy and reality. Miro is passionately in love with Monika but he is blind to her parents’ concerns for their interracial relationship in a small village where people talk. Elena is blind to the power of how much love she is capable of giving to the life she has created, questioning her own ability to mother and afraid her newborn will be taken away from her. Zuzana loves being a regular teenage girl but her kindness is a form of naiveté and she is blind to the prejudice of Others.

In simultaneously highlighting “sameness” and “otherness” as it exists in individuals with disability, these films ask something significant of their audience, something far more piercing than “acceptance” or “awareness”. What these films are asking is The Ethical Question. Not just our responsibility to the Other, but also in viewing, our responsive responsibility to the images we have just seen.

“An ethics of spectatorship requires us to think about how we are positioned, and interpellated, with regard to the morality, immorality and amorality of film. It does not just acknowledge how we consent to our submission to the spectacle, but asks us to consider how we are rendered accountable or not to what we have consented to, and part of the contract of spectatorship, of course, is that we do not renege on the deal.” – Michele Aaron, Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On (2007)

The Other Film Festival runs Wednesday August 25 to Sunday August 29 at the Melbourne Museum. The festival is in association with Arts Access Victoria and as such all films screened during the festival will be captioned or subtitled and audio described and all public areas are wheelchair accessible.

Written by Tara Judah for Liminal Vision

AICE Israeli Film Festival 2010

Now in its 7th year, the AICE Israeli Film Festival returns to Melbourne and Sydney to showcase a selection of the country’s past year’s achievements in filmmaking and, from what I’ve seen, it’s definitely worth clearing the time in your schedule to attend. For a country such as Israel, with such complexity and controversy informing its political climate, the anxiety over inheriting the burden of its past and assuming responsibility for its future is not only grave material for a generation of filmmakers but an impending reality for a generation. Both Phobidilia (2009) and The Loners (2009) show how pressures of this enormity can push individuals beyond breaking point.

Phobidilia: The question surrounding what it is we as individuals need from life can take more than a lifetime allows to determine. And yet, the young man telling his story in Phobidilia seems to think he already had it all; food, sex and twenty-four hour televisual entertainment; a selection of consumables he could “enjoy” without even leaving the house; “I had everything a person needs to be happy.” But moving from soap opera to internet porn is only so fulfilling. When the vivacious young Daniela appears at his door one afternoon, it slowly becomes apparent that the value of connecting with another human being has not entirely escaped him. There are however two problems that threaten to destroy his newfound happiness and connection with Daniela: 1) “Grumps”, an old man acting on behalf of his landlord and who thinks he is doing our protagonist a service in attempting to coerce and then in forcibly evicting him from the confines of his home, and 2) his own inability to know what is “real” anymore.

1) “Grumps” is a Holocaust Survivor but instead of standing in as a reminder of the horrors of the past, his role in the film is to act as the beacon for the horrors to come. “Get out before it gets worse” he tells the young man, his survival teaching him that a situation can always worsen and a statement that reinforces the contention that opting out and waiting in hiding is no way  to resolve a situation, no matter how grave it may be.

2) “When you’re alone for too long, nothing seems real.” Our protagonist has locked himself away from the “real” world, preferencing a mediated experience of it, shut off for such a time that he can no longer distinguish between the two. Answering “Bill Cosby” when asked who raised him and reeling off popular film dialogue when confronted with his phobia, our protagonist actively annihilates the Other through his passive unwillingness to acknowledge that “they” too “exist”; “I can see you on my screen but it doesn’t mean you’re real.”

But his great revelation comes: “It’s not what I saw, it’s what I didn’t see.” A generation turning their backs on the responsibilities they are to inherit – no matter how understandable – is not the appropriate course of action because in not seeing what is really there, ignoring so crucial a problem is in itself a form of political attack.

The Loners: When young naive soldier Sasha Blokhim loses his rifle under embarrassing circumstances he becomes too scared to tell the truth at his military “hearing”. Failing to admit to the crimes of foolishness and improper conduct he finds himself, along with the friend who “helped” him out of the whole mess, placed in a Northern Israeli military prison, sentenced to four years incarceration, for the somewhat more heinous crime of selling arms to Hamas. Unable to persuade officials to give them a re-trial, or even to convince their own welfare officer of their innocence, the two young men are repeatedly beaten and persecuted for their alleged betrayal. Unable to accept the shame he is now burdened with, Sasha becomes so desperate that he allows his friend Glori to once again take “control” of the situation in what is yet another foolish attempt to have themselves absolved of their treasonous crime and released from the emotional oppression they experience at the hands of their own militia, “They keep calling you traitor, you’ll start believing it.”

There is something of an inevitability to the siege they stage, and when the elder generation do intervene with force and conviction it feels truly fatalistic: as if it really couldn’t have played out any other way. Persecuted for being imperfect soldiers despite their commitment to and blind faith in the system they were defending, it is only after it is too late that the two come to realise their anomalous presence in a compulsory military service that will never truly change, “That’s the problem. It’ll always be the way you people see it.”

Phobidilia and The Loners are both highly engaging dramas that each represent an aspect of the greater contemporary political angst existing amongst a new generation of Israeli filmmakers. A far cry from the apathetic Gen X & Gen Ys of the western world, these films speak to the very real problems facing the future of a conflicted nation.

The AICE Israeli Film Festival takes place in Melbourne 17-22 August at Palace Cinemas Como & Brighton Bay, and in Sydney August 31-5 September at the Palace Verona Cinema.

Tara Judah who can recall her past MIFF experience…

This will be my final post on what was a joyous two weeks of MIFF related mania. A few frustrating projection issues aside (I never once saw a film at the Forum where the masking was properly set) and after a near full recovery from entertaining if not embarrassing closing night exploits, it has to be said that the festival as a whole was rip-roaring success.

Operations:

After one or two hiccups over the opening weekend, sessions almost always ran as scheduled and with little exception (The Ghost Writer) accurately reflected the advertised run times. Again, although it took a couple of days, details of director Q&As and other festival guests scheduled were eventually added to the website so that punters would know in advance if the session was likely to overrun. The box office staff and especially the volunteers were commendably always pleasant and helpful, my only real gripe was having to pay another additional booking fee on top of the alteration fee when changing a session over the phone or online (as I live a long way from the city I couldn’t always manage to do it in person at the Box Office.) The daily e-mailout of Widescreen was a welcome effort for both informative last-minute updates and also for the opportunity to win tickets to additional screenings (thanks to which I was able to fill a festival gap with the incredibly entertaining Innerspace.)

Atmosphere:

I must give a shout out to the two poor bastards who spent the festival running around town dressed as the oversized and overzealous Choc Top and Popcorn mascots from the festival promo vid, “It’s a Matter of Taste”. I particularly enjoyed the mockumentary short played at closing night ahead of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll and sincerely hold out hope for it being a legitimate documentary in next year’s official program. The contemplation of which brings me to the advertisements – I do wish we could either have the ads play when the doors are opened for admittance (after thirty odd sessions they become a little tiresome) or perhaps MIFF could run a competition for filmmakers’ 30 second shorts ads on festival sponsors?

Finally, to the festival lounge. I can’t stress enough how incredibly useful it was having the Macs set up in the lounge when faced with excess time between screenings, the only issue being the actual opening & closing hours of the venue itself: almost always closed before the final sessions ended during the week and sometimes closed off for invitation only events, preventing festival goers from catching up over a cold beer between screenings. Speaking of beer, Coopers were the official festival sponsors this year, a beer that doesn’t phase me either way, I’ll happily admit that I’m hardly picky when it comes to beer and so long as there’s a lager or a pilsner of some variety in the mix I’m a happy camper, and the Coopers 62 sufficed.

Program:

Obviously I didn’t see even anywhere near half of the films shown in the festival so clearly whatever I write here has to be taken with a proportionate viewing pinch of salt. That said, I thought the program was successfully diverse and catered to a healthy balance of mainstream and art house cinema. I would however have liked to have seen more experimental works showcased beyond the one screening there was. And in lieu of that one screening, perhaps the programming staff might consider not scheduling the sole festival screening of experimental film for exactly the same time as the sole retrospective session of Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar? It seems likely to me that fans of a mode of short cinema often theorised and popularly thought of as ‘art’ might also be fans of the mode of feature cinema that is also theorised and popularly thought of as ‘art’. My other complaint is one that I don’t imagine will ever be resolved due to the understandable economic implications for festival organisers, BUT, I would like to put in a request for lengthy sessions – namely The Movie Orgy (280 mins duration) - being scheduled a little earlier in the evening so that one isn’t expected to stay awake till four thirty in the morning mid-festival. Of course, I do understand that this would mean the film would take up more than one slot during the regular programming thus meaning the festival would lose money having one instead of two or three sessions’ admission fees. In my defense though, they managed to do it for World on a Wire and a lot more people turned up to that in comparison to the too late screening of once in a lifetime opportunity screening The Movie Orgy.

There seemed to be a fair few films that I thought would have worked really well as shorts rather than features; Air Doll, Rubber and Catfish spring to mind and even more that were “good” but not “great”; The Killer Inside Me, Paju, The Tree, Uninhabited, Splice… that one truly outstanding film in the festival seemed to evade me this year (it was from what I hear either I Love you Philip Morris, Lebanon, Nostalgia for the Light or Winter’s Bone.) But, overall and my final impression of the festival was positive and inspirational nonetheless. Instead of heading to the GU to see Scott Pilgrim vs the World, I headed for one last stint at the Forum where Apichatpong Weerasethakul commandeered my senses with his latest in stunning slow cinema: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives:

“My past lives as an animal and other beings rise up above me.” A tethered bull sheds his ties and wanders off into the forest only to be re-called by a human being. Such is the nature of our lives as we are all recalled by Others, our individual subjectivity second to our connectedness to all other “life” on earth.

“Aren’t you afraid of illegal immigrants?” We often fear that which is Other when really we ought to accept and embrace difference as being a minority player in the concept of our existence as a whole.

“Heaven is overrated.” Instead of searching for a life beyond this one we ought to make connections and act sincerely now as the way in which we go on living is through the memory, affect and effect we have on Others during our lifetimes.

“I was born in a life I can’t recall.” We move easily between one life and another and forget at whim the events of what has come before. We are intrinsically linked to our histories and are responsible for the actions of all humans.

There is a great deal of provocative ethical questioning in Uncle Boonmee and Weerasethakul is on top form in creating a beautiful and contemplative reflection upon the way in which we conduct ourselves individually within a greater, philosophical understanding of “life”. There is a complex ease with which we move between worlds and cultures that he is interrogating in the latest of his masterful and meditative feature films. An instant classic amongst his oeuvre, Weerasethakul once again asserts himself as one of the most poignant and insightful filmmakers of our time.

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

Whilst probably not the most exciting film of the year (and, in this respect at least, a slightly odd choice for the festival’s ‘closing night’ which was actually the festival’s penultimate night), Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (2010) is an entertaining, if curious, biopic of front man Ian Dury (Andy Serkis) from Ian Dury and the Blockheads. Fast-paced punk and new wave angst aside, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll also paints a dramatic portrait of Dury’s personal life, focusing for the most part on his roles and relationships as both father and son.

Due to the somewhat schizophrenic subject matter, the film’s formal set up attempts to follow suit rebounding between cartoon-like cut and paste collage, populist slo-mo, the occasional bit of experimental editing, and then 180s all the way back to straight-up “mainstream drama” cinematography. Although the change of pace seems to accurately reflect Dury’s own unpredictable nature and unwieldy approach to balancing his personal and professional lives, it is also wildly distracting.

The strength of the film comes solely from Serkis’ performance, which is, absolutely faultless. The supporting cast is ‘good’ but unfortunately constantly pale in comparison to Serkis’ lead, making most of the other characters in the film feel a little underwhelming at best. But despite being decidedly messy as an end product, the era appropriate art direction and the music content are both excellent, contributing to the vibrant (if inconsistent) mise-en-scenes. One to see – but then move on from - Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll offers the rollicking good time its title would suggest.

Enter the Void

I have agreed elsewhere with James Quandt’s assertion that much of the New French Extremism which has come along in recent decades has replaced the politically challenging and artistically complex films that came before with “an aggressiveness that is really a grandiose form of passivity.” After seeing Gasper Noé’s latest, Enter the Void (2009) I stand by what I said.

Noé is truly a modern-day enfant terrible if ever there was one: his films more an annoying exercise in challenging traditional modes of viewing than engaging or entertaining viewing in and of themselves. Though personally not averse to such a premise (heck, I love experimental cinema probably even a little more than the next person) there is an arrogance that goes along with Noé’s version of experimenta that ventures beyond slight abrasion and arrives at raw irritation. But personal feelings aside, Enter the Void is indeed an interesting film (albeit at least an hour overlong) for what it says about the way in which we are accustomed to receiving cinematic visuals.

Starting with the most incredible title sequence I’ve ever seen, Enter the Void is high-octane at the outset but, as its protagonists descend into a drug-fuelled liminality between life and death, so too is the viewer induced into a trance like state, receiving a lengthy and repetitive succession of seedy images that straddle a strange space between stimulating and sedating. Without any access to the usual outlets of spectatorial identification and devoid of the type of affect that encourages an active engagement in a narrative, Enter the Void never asks its audience to disavow and constantly reminds them that they are at the mercy of a (somewhat sadistic) filmmaker (for two long hours and thirty-four even longer minutes, I might add.) This does however produce a poignant line of questioning, particularly as it pertains to the idea of feature-length film within the realm of counter-cinema (most experimental film is short in duration, one of the many usual ways in which it counters the mainstream cinema it is necessarily situated against.)

But even after being coerced by Noé into contemplating the merits of identification and considering the artifice of cinema as highlighted through cinematic excess (see Kristen Thompson’s “The Concept of Cinematic Excess” and then Jeffrey Sconce’s “Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style”), I couldn’t help but feel as though he were sat right behind me, laughing at my gullibility whilst counting his bulging pay packet. I’d like to say that Enter the Void deserves the appreciation and attention it will undoubtedly get, but in reality all I really hope for is to see an editor take a pair of scissors to it like a dog in heat.

Beeswax

Despite how popular the genre is, it’s actually pretty rare these days to see an “American Indie” flick that is actually indie. But Andrew Bujalski is one actor/writer/director/editor who is still championing and making independent cinema for audiences who are able to recall what it is that actually means. Bujalski’s latest feature, Beeswax (2009) is the type of film that is probably only going to appeal to its already present audience as it is essentially an exercise in the continuation of existent discursive practice rather than the pioneering of any kind of new generic content.

Attributed to the “mumblecore” movement (though I personally prefer the term “Slackavetes”), Beeswax is less the story of white middle-class twins meandering their way through modern life and relationships than it is a filmic contribution to the still prevalent existence of a Linklater-esque “Gen X”. Just because it’s not new doesn’t make it untrue. In this way, Beeswax offers a snapshot of the apathetic hangover that the 2000s have inherited. We may well have reached the 21st century, but that doesn’t mean that the sensibilities of young adults has necessarily changed along with the times.

Interesting in and of itself rather than for its “story” in the first instance, Beeswax is a highly enjoyable film about an awkward, intelligent, “real” set of individuals who are ruled and conflicted by their own ignominy. Simple and brilliant.

Life During Wartime

Coming from just about anyone else the idea of a sequel more than ten years on with not one single member of the original cast would probably seem absurd. But, with Solondz, it is merely par for the course. And so we have Life During Wartime (2009), a follow-up feature about the altered lives of the veritable smorgasbord of freaks and pervs that constitute characters from his earlier cult-hit black comedy Happiness (1998).

One of the more coveted films for me in this year’s festival line-up, Life During Wartime has been a long time coming and, moreover, after the disappointment that went with both Storytelling (2001) and Palindromes (2004), was hopefully going to be something of a saving grace for Solondz in his otherwise enjoyably nihilistic, yet increasingly overlooked, oeuvre. Despite a large proportion of the popular response post-screening being negative (many disappointed when the same dizzying heights of Happiness didn’t ensue), Life During Wartime is actually a very good sequel and still indulgently dark humoured fare.

Told from the outset that “sometimes it’s better not to understand” one could be forgiven for thinking that Solondz was excusing his last feature release, Palindromes, a film which many found confusing and irreverent.

The stark, biting dialogue that Solondz is known for is ever-present as he showcases the hysteria of traditional “family values” and an innate human inability to communicate and connect on any truly meaningful or remotely honest level. The use of colour (and the mise-en-scene more generally) is bold and telling; each shot perfectly framed, each character’s flaws further explicated through their harsh surroundings. The stereotypes are well overdrawn and the replacement cast perform brilliantly, Ally Sheedy deserving a special mention for absolutely nailing Lara Flynn Boyle’s already fantastic version of Joy Jordan.

Thematically contemplative about the ability of individuals to “forgive and forget”, the film thinks through the characters lives as comparable to enduring wartime: the constant ethical questioning of moral judgements. There is a strong suggestion from the film that we ought to “just keep pretending” as ultimately “nothing works, it just goes on forever.” And if to “forgive and forget” is like to “freedom and democracy” then indeed it is a justified suggestion of Solondz’ that we do, and ought to continue, to pretend. Intelligent, thoughtful, dark and depressing, Life During Wartime isn’t Happiness but it is a damn good film.

Catfish

Everyone said it was best not to know anything about Catfish (2010) before seeing it. So, trusting in at least some of the illusive collective, I refrained from reading the write-up, was sure not to watch the trailer and wouldn’t allow any of my fellow MIFFophiles to speak of its content in my company. Attending its second screening at the festival, I found the film to be highly enjoyable but not so incredibly shocking or perhaps even surprising as I had been led to believe it might be. In lieu of my own post-viewing assessment, be warned, the words that follow do talk about what actually happens in the film.

Documenting filmmaker Ariel Schulman’s brother Nev, a twenty-four year old photographer, and his incredibly funny yet incredibly sad experience of taking a Facebook “friend” to the next level, Catfish is about the fundamental desire we have to connect with other human beings. Now, the idea of finding interesting people via social networking sites and later meeting them in real life isn’t exactly foreign to me (hi to the many friendly twitter folk I’ve met during MIFF), however, Nev’s “connections” happen in a very different – and far more intense – manner than most of us (I at least speak for myself here) are familiar with.

Connecting first with an eight-year-old girl named Abby who is a talented painter, followed by correspondence with her mother Angela and finally “friending” Abby’s beautiful, older, dancer/singer-songwriter sister Megan, Nev has found himself a “Facebook family.” A seemingly great connection with an interesting and artistic family, Nev is happy to call, email and Facebook the entire family and their friends - until Megan records and posts a song that sounds suspiciously similar to a professional post on YouTube – suddenly it becomes clear that at least one of member of the family isn’t all she says she is…

Exposing a sad individual for the pathological liar she is comes across as a fault that resides ultimately with both parties; Nev’s involvement being implicit despite his naiveté to the contrary, “They didn’t fool me, they just told me things I didn’t care to question.” Handling the apparent situation with more than the appropriate level of tact and kindness it warrants, Catfish is a film that hopes to warn the gullible and lecture the weak. Entertaining if inconsequential viewing.

Green Days

The youngest daughter of acclaimed Iranian new wave director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Hana Makhmalbaf, proves to any non-believers that talented filmmaking really does run in the family with her outstanding second feature film, Green Days (2009). By inter-cutting mobile phone and other amateur digital footage of shocking police brutality following the protests against rigged results re-electing the oppressive Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran’s 2009 election with a series of hopeful pre-election footage, young Makhmalbaf offers a compelling and horrific vision of the extremity of a nation full of hope descending into a nation defiled and defeated. A far cry from ‘entertaining’ or ‘enjoyable’, Green Days is an appropriately and overwhelmingly distressing viewing experience.

The film focuses predominantly on the lead up to the election in the country’s capital city, Tehran. A place that is home to some 17 million people and has been fighting for its freedom for 100 years, Tehran is described as “A city full of tears.” A continuous cycle of hope and deflation is subsequently expressed as both clinically depressing and infinite as, “Every four years we all get our hopes up…[then[ we lose everything.” Much of the documentary is informed by a young woman’s (Ava) disillusioned perspective through her search for medical help to ” Please stop this nightmare.” In a country where women can’t become president and where Ava’s work as a theatre director is politically banned, she is left to feel both politically and emotionally deflated. Proclaiming “Happiness is forbidden here”, Ava continues to work on her theatre pieces regardless, strongly reiterating the crime against humanity that is an endless cycle of hope (rehearsing) without victory (performance).

Essential but not easy viewing, Green Days is a brave piece of filmmaking that everyone who considers themselves remotely humanist really ought to see.