Working the World

Highlights of the WFF’s final weekend

ELEPHANT KID: Ganesh, Boy Wonder

By MATTHEW HAYS

The countdown is on. There’s but a few days before the city’s biggest celebration of celluloid threads its final projector. Here are some of the films that look most promising.

From Spain comes Bullying, Josecho San Mateo’s feature about a teenaged boy who arrives in Barcelona only to be marked as the favourite target of a local bully. After being severely brutalized, the lad learns how to make strategic allies and how to fight back, on his own terms. From Australia comes the brutal period film Van Diemen’s Land, Jonathan auf der Heide’s look at the devastating escape plan of several inmates from a 19th-century penal colony in Tasmania. The Russian film Odna Voyna (One War), from director Vera Glagoleva, shows us the plight of five German women who, in 1945, are told of the German surrender. They hope their Soviet captors will allow them to go free now that the war is over, but a different fate awaits them.

Director Akhan Satayev’s Kazak feature sounds like something spawned from The Twilight Zone. In Strayed, a man and his wife and child are forced to sleep overnight in their car by the highway. He awakens to find that they have disappeared. He treks to a nearby house, hoping that they have wandered to refuge there, only to find more mystery. More family upheaval arrives with the U.S. entry Children of Invention, writer-director Tze Chun’s realistic look at a family coping with the fallout of being evicted from their home. They squat in an unfinished flat, with mom scrambling to work several part-time jobs and the children finding unusual ways to keep themselves occupied.

Srinivas Krishna, the Toronto-based director behind the awesome ’91 feature Masala, returns with Ganesh, Boy Wonder. A couple dreams of having a son, so they pray to the god Ganesh to grant their wish. Careful what you wish for: the couple end up with a son who looks just like the elephant-headed god. And in Last Viewing, a woman juggles her work in a crematory with her obligations as the mother of an autistic daughter. Filipino filmmaker Ronaldo Bertubin takes his latest feature in unexpected directions, defying audience expectations.

THE WORLD FILM FEST IS NOW
SCREENING AND WRAPS ON
MONDAY, SEPT. 7. INFO:
WWW.FFM-MONTREAL.ORG