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>> A look at what’s going on at this
year’s World Film Festival

by JASON BOGDANERIS,
MALCOLM FRASER,
JEFFREY MALECKI
and MARK SLUTSKY

Another year, another World Film Festival, and with the event’s funding now fully restored, and the New Film Festival fiasco a couple of years behind us, it’s looking more likely that the WFF is here to stay, for better or worse. Still, there’s always something worth seeing in the festival’s extensive programming, with 215 feature films and 194 shorts this year alone. The new Midnight Slam program, which focuses on horror and genre filmmaking, looks like an admirable attempt to inject a little fun into the fest, and there’ll also be tributes to Jon Voight, Bruno Ganz and Kiyoshi Atsumi, as well as free daily screenings of local films outdoors at Place des Arts, starting at 2 p.m. What follows is a sampling of what the fest has on offer this year.

Confessions of an Innocent Man

Canadian-British citizen William Sampson was one of many foreign workers making a prosperous living in Saudi Arabia when he was arrested in 2000 on suspicion of his involvement with a car bombing. For almost three years he would remain in solitary confinement in a Saudi prison, enduring torture, rape, deprivation and a death sentence, while the Canadian and British governments refused to intervene in any meaningful way, until he was finally released as part of a prisoner exchange.

Consisting almost entirely of talking-head interviews, dramatizations and news footage, Confessions of an Innocent Man is a riveting, terrifying documentary. The very candid Sampson is a fascinating character, a man whose admitted prickliness makes him no less sympathetic, and whose lingering anger, directed at Canadian authorities, seems entirely justified. (MS)

Lady Chatterley

TWENTIES TRYST: Lady Chatterly

Director Pascale Ferran brings us a French adaptation of an English classic that caused a scandal with its frank sexuality in 1928. Maria Hands, who you might remember from Les Invasions barbares or this year’s Ne le dis à personne, plays the titular Lady, whose wheelchair-bound husband leaves her carnal needs unfulfilled until she fatally hooks up with a manly servant (Jean-Luis Coullo’ch). Like many stories from bygone eras when propriety prevented the expression of emotions, a lot of action takes place in the characters’ inner lives, a situation much more suited to a novel than to a film. Aside from the matter-of-fact (and often fully clothed) sex scenes, not much goes on here aside from the odd spectacle of French actors trying to incarnate English uptightness. (MF)

Dying in Athens

Part Alfie, part Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (which if you haven’t seen, do), this entry from Greek novelist- turned-director, Nikos Panayotopoulos, takes an oddball approach to storytelling. Andreas, an art professor who’s three-timing his wife, finds out he has the proverbial three months to live. Faced with this crushing news, he vows to come clean and unravel the web of lies he’s enmeshed himself in. But then, somewhere along the way, this often beautiful meditation on mortality becomes a musical. What begins as an arresting little conceit that allows the film to take flight, eventually descends into farce as the sublime becomes the ridiculous. Still, for those with a tolerance for the film’s soaring asides, there are some rewards. (JB)

Killing Zelda Sparks

Zelda Sparks (Sarah Carter) is a small-town femme fatale in this dark-ish comedy adapted from the play Barstool Words (the film’s original title) directed by co-writer Jeff Glickman. Having beguiled a pair of buddies (Vincent Kartheiser and Geoffrey Arend) to distraction, she’s apparently in need of a comeuppance, though when the pair’s revenge scheme goes wrong they find themselves facing some serious trouble.

Glickman makes an obvious attempt to give the stagey story a stylish, cinematic spin, and he succeeds to a point, but Killing Zelda Sparks takes too long to establish its setup (and all the time-shifting jumps don’t do much more than confuse) that once the plan is in action, it feels too little, too late. Some good moments and a few strong images, though. (MS)

The Dogwalker

This NFB documentary profiles Michael Borowski, a middle-aged man in the small Alberta town of Strathcona who walks his neighbours’ dogs for a living. Brain-damaged in a childhood accident, he’s a functioning member of society but is hampered by slowed mental functions, which sometimes cloud his judgment. Writer-director Rosie Dransfeld focuses the whole film on Borowski, letting out the details of his life bit by bit and forcing his personality to carry the film single-handedly. His story is poignant and occasionally inspiring, but the unrelenting intimacy of the film sometimes feels uncomfortable. Dransfeld’s no-budget aesthetic and occasional reliance on hokey sentimentality are eventually saved by her subject’s charm and sincerity, but you have to be in the mood for an intense character study to appreciate this one. (MF)

The Lesser Evil

Directed by Spaniard Antonio Hernandez, Carmen Maura stars in this dramedy, which begins as an Almodovar-esque comedy but then gradually darkens to reveal a self-righteous anger at its centre. Set in an idyllic country estate over an event-filled weekend, a rising star politician must deal with the chick he’s been balling behind his wife’s back. As it turns out, despite the charming entreaties he makes to his much younger girlfriend and worshiping older sister, he’s actually kind of a creep. When his jilted lover Vanessa threatens him with blackmail, he shows his true colours and the film does a masterful job of shifting audience sympathies in a way that is both thrilling and utterly plausible. Definitely worth a look. (JB)

Buried at Sea

After WWII, Allied forces had a lot of weapons to dispose with, and, as this revealing documentary shows, a heck of a lot of them ended up dumped off the shores of North America and Europe. As if that wasn’t bad enough, a good amount of this unexploded ordinance consisted of unused chemical weapons—mustard gas and the like—and the remaining stuff can, and does, still maim and kill people who stumble on it to this day.

Buried at Sea is a methodical, beautifully-shot doc that tells the story of both the dumped weaponry and Canada’s less-than-noble history of producing WMDs. While its somewhat dry, made-for-TV provenance is obvious, the story is compelling enough to make the film worth seeing. (MS)

River

DECENT DEBUT: River

While the themes are worn, River is a fine debut from Canadian filmmaker Mark Wihak. Postindustrial Regina, from the wasted to the shiny (garbage dumps, abandoned buildings, strip malls and suburbs), provides the backdrop for the film, though the setting is never indicated; a sense of anywhere is implied. The urban emptiness offers a fairly obvious, though striking, set of images for the hesitant and fumbling relationship between two lost twentysomethings, Stan and Roz. He’s a young emotionally-arrested novelist and she’s a wide-eyed and uncertain young stoner with no direction. Their interaction is highly realistic—as most of the dialogue is improvised—and unfolds a little too awkwardly at first. But, as the film develops, the problematics of interpersonal relationships are nicely realized. (JM)

The World Film Festival runs Aug 23-Sept. 3;
for more info and showtimes, see
www.ffm-montreal.org

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