INTERNATIONAL
FILM FESTIVAL 2004
–
a festival diary
by Sándor Lau
A few hundred years ago, White people decided to colonise the Southern Hemisphere and try to destroy the cultures of all the people who were there first. In doing so, they would have done well to consider not only the moral implications, but the fact they were setting themselves up for a very long winter with no fun holidays to break it up. Fortunately in Aotearoa, we have the New Zealand International Film Festival not only to break up the slate of gray scheduled every year from June through August, but also to give us some food for thought about what kind of future we're setting ourselves up for in the next few hundred years.
It's opening night in Auckland at the Civic, and having been somewhat neglectful in planning for the future myself, I have to hustle strangers for a spare ticket as the screening is sold out. Inside, I realise I'm going to be sharing this experience with 2000 other viewers, making it the biggest group activity I've taken part in for a long while, and the closest thing I'll get to Christmas all winter.
The Motorcycle Diaries (2003)
Walter Salles | USA/Argentina/Chile/Peru | 128 min | Featuring: Gael García Bernal, Rodrigo de la Serna, Mía Maestro.
TWO RICH young men from Buenos Aires jump on a dilapidated motorcycle on a mission to travel the length of South America. Based on the journals of twenty-three-year-old Ernesto Guevara and his friend Alberto Ganado, it's a story of personal and political awakening in the man later known as El Ché.
Normally, I hate based-on-a-true-story movies because they stick so slavishly to what really happened, regardless of whether it really fits in the story. But with this film, director Walter Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera have done an excellent job at deciding what to take OUT, and what's left is a kind of fairy tale that's both intimate and epic.
The story follows the road a lot closer than any plot structure, and there's something very refreshing about the way so many scenes are left unresolved. The boys meet a man growing a terrible cancer, can't do a thing to help him, and move on. Ernesto gets a letter from his girlfriend, cries and never says anything else about her again.
Probably the strongest theme is the plight of the dispossessed: indigenous farmers kicked off their lands, itinerant labourers at the mercy of greedy bosses, and lepers quarantined on an island away from those supposed to care for them. The film is deeply political but never preaches – just presents an experience and is far more convincing in its position than if it had jumped on a soapbox.
But I can't help thinking that if he came back from the grave, Ché would liked the film only a little more than he would those pictures of his face printed on shirts made in Chinese sweatshops. It's certainly not revolutionary, and if anything, it's a bit candy-coated and bleeding-heart, romanticizing poverty and disenfranchisement.
But after sharing the experience of the film with 2000 other people, I can't help myself but join their applause, wondering how many of them, like me, are thinking of finding a motorcycle and taking a trip.
The Yes Men (2003)
Chris Smith, Dan Ollman, Sarah Price | USA | 80 min | Featuring: Andreas Bichlbauer, Mike Bonnano.
'HANK Hardy Unruh' frontman for the Yes Men, poses as a member of the WTO at a 'textilian' conference in Tampere Finland. He declares that ending slavery was unnecessary because it would have eventually been replaced with current practices of globalisation anyway. Today, corporations need not bear the cost of feeding and clothing their 'remotely located workers,' yet still get to work them like slaves. The Yes Man then removes his clothes to reveal a gold lamé jumpsuit with a three-foot phallus, which he announces will be used in the future to remotely detect the activities of workers via microchips implanted in their bodies.
Hank, a.k.a. Granwyth Halutberi, aka Andy Bichlbaum, receives glowing applause, and The Yes Men gets it all on tape. Rarely in human history have social responsibility and mischief been brought together so seamlessly.
This documentary, by the team who made American Movie, chronicles the pranks of the Yes-Men's Andy and Mike as they go about their mission of exposing more clearly the ideology and effects of the World Trade Organization to people who mistake the Yes Men's website, www.gatt.org for the WTO's.
In the course of things they unveil McDonalds' plans to recycle 'post-consumer waste' into fresh burgers for the third world, and eventually announce the dissolution of the WTO itself. Even the Canadian parliament debates the effects of the shutdown.
The world has no shortage of leftist political documentaries, but rarely is there one so fun to watch that even Republicans will get a laugh out of it – Jackass for the middle class. As a piece of filmmaking, it's not much to look at, just point and shoot, no lighting, no composition, but as a piece of storytelling, it's a gem. And I'm getting a Motorcycle Diaries déjà vu feeling here and thinking about where I can get a gold lamé body suit.
(I met Andy Bichlbaum when he came to New Zealand last year. You can read my article, The Man Who Shut Down the WTO on him at: www.scoop.co.nz)
A Nation Without Women (2003)
Manish Jha | India/France | 98 min | Featuring: Tulip Joshi, Sudhir Pandey, Piyush Mishra, Pankaj Jha.
THIS dark farce from twenty-five-year-old first time writer/director Manish Jha takes Indian female infanticide to its logical conclusion. In the Bihar countryside the situation is exactly as the title describes when a father and his five sons discover a girl secretly raised as a boy and purchase her for an exorbitant price.
Following a lead from the Indian epic, the Mahabharat, they all share her as a wife, but we know how well men share, and by the end of the film we are approaching a civil war in the district.
It's a daring move that this film was even made and congratulations to them for taking it. But I fear the effect is the opposite of what was intended. Walking out of the theater I talk to some Indians who say how ashamed they are of their country after seeing this film, and I think, 'Ah, this is what we need, another film made mostly for Western audiences, depicting brown people like thugs and savages'.
And of course the practice of infanticide is savage, but no one who has ever done it is going to see this movie. While A Nation Without Women depicts the brutality the situation, it doesn't suggest anything in the way of change. The men are all animals and treat the only woman as an animal as well. She gets almost no characterisation, no dialogue, and her depiction in the film feels like just another brutalisation. If you really wanted to change the situation, you would tell the story from the point of view of a strong woman fighting back.
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