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>>The Montreal Underground Film Festival
presents an array of brain-bending pleasures

GENDER-BENDER: Jerking

by MALCOLM FRASER

Aside from having the best acronym of any festival in town (MUFF!), the Montreal Underground Film Festival boasts a number of treats that may bring pain or pleasure to your brain, depending on your tastes. The spirited festival’s third edition, taking place in a variety of locations, showcases 80 films from around the world and from the deepest recesses of filmmakers’ twisted minds.

A person’s mind might wander to the question: just what is the definition of “underground,” as opposed to the equally nebulous terms “independent,” “avant-garde” or the ever-popular “extreme”? At a first glance at the MUFF’s programming, the most obvious answer might be “films including hand-painting on the stock and/or creepy puppets.”

A number of the selections seem to fall into this category, including Belgian director Thomas Bogaert’s Cage and Aviary Birds, a sort of cut-and-paste fluorescent-paint collage mixed with porn and scored with intense psychedelic noise-rock, Swiss artists Olivier Kowalczyk and Grégoire Morel’s head-spinning puppet nightmare Juddha—1970AC, and Canadian Mike Maryniuk’s Mahaha the Tickler, which combines claymation, pseudo-silent cinema tropes, and a memorable Hungry Hungry Hippos game set to extreme metal.

The fest also spotlights an alternate, old-school definition of underground—the kind of thing you might imagine projected on a sheet in a New York loft in the early ’60s, the Kenneth Anger/Andy Warhol/John Waters school of films portraying marginal or daring people having a grand old time engaging in perverse activities. Ali Cotterill’s Toi et moi, a video for Olympia-based electro duo Scream Club, begins as an unintentionally tragic glance at people who never got the memo about the death of electroclash, but turns into a pretty damn enjoyable Thriller-style group dance piece.

Montreal’s Val Desjardins offers up Jerking, a short and sweet piece of gender-bending posturing. Vancouver’s Sacha Fink directs SuPORNNatural, the romantic tale of two adventurous and heavily body-painted individuals. And French-born, Montreal-based artist Lamathilde brings us the very memorable Bildo, the initially cutesy adventures of a little Fisher-Price toy man who eventually gets extremely intimate with the courageous star’s anatomy.

A number of the films presented aren’t as confrontational, but add to the fest’s creative diversity. Local filmmaker Yan Breuleux’s Histoires sans fin is a clever, minimal digital animation; Clarissa Campolina’s Trecho, from Brazil, is a poetic documentary about a long-ago road trip, and Canadian animator Sam Scott’s The Merry Sea-Gentleman and the Cod-Fisher’s Voyage Below is a whimsical, old-school stop-motion fairy tale which would be at home in an NFB kids’ program if not for a dark twist.

The festival is also featuring a number of documentaries, including Owen Eric Wood’s Lost, an alternately titillating and melancholy look at gay online sex chat forums, Mélanie Saumure’s Underdog, a portrait of a young woman boxer shot on glitchy, grainy video, and Miss Melissa’s Shake Rattle & Roll, a look at B.C.’s rockabilly community. Finally, the closing film of the fest is Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness, a doc on the urban exploring phenomenon from Minneapolis-based veteran filmmaker Melody Gilbert, presented by a panel of urban explorers themselves.

The Montreal Underground Film
Festival screens at The Main
Hall (5390 St-Laurent) and Friperie
Potetr (6029 Parc) from May 17–19;
www.muff514.com

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