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The madcap collection of films coming to the Festival international du cinéma et des nouveaux médias is impossible to categorize. The best way to approach the festival is, well, not so scientifically--picking off titles that appeal and directors who sound familiar and targeting entries from a nation with a good track record.
"I actually wrote the song years ago, during a bad cramp day," explains Noonan, on the phone from Mayne Island near Vancouver. "She-B-She are a group of about seven friends who sing everything from gospel to opera. When I brought in The Menopause Song, they really got into the lyrics. I conducted it with a tampon." It took Noonan five months to complete the film, using digitized photos and an ancient computer. Recording the song was another technical feat: they powered the mixing board and the DAT off a car battery, reading the lyrics by candle-light. "Menopause is a tremendous conversation starter," says Noonan. "Women of all ages come up and start in with their stories. It's like pulling a cork out of something that was taboo." Can menopause, as the song's lyrics state, not come quickly enough for Noonan? "The short-term memory loss sounds distressing, but... " Just as cheeky as The Menopause Song but with a bitter edge is Robert Attanasio's Counterfeit Music Video #1Snow Job. This three-minute video "re-mix" of the Ace of Base song "Beautiful Life" shows one image: a homeless man lying on the sidewalk by a pile of garbage, barely moving except to take a swig from his flask. A little on the weird side is Everybody Loves Nothing, an 11-minute experimental piece using home-video footage and stock shots to create an unsettling mood. In one scene, director Steve Reinke shows a boy receiving testosterone injections and uses the voiceover we've heard in old films from health class saying, "Now he's on his way to becoming a normal man." Reinke is full of irony and his best scene in this department is archival footage of pilots learning morse code for "history teaches us that everyone is dead stop." Another creepy anecdote in the film is a story told by a bride about her honeymoon. She imagines that her husband is being sodomized by a handsome Italian on their hotel's balcony. Reinke shows black-and-white tourist shots of Italy. Her voice tells us that in later years, whenever her husband is in the presence of an attractive Italian guy, she smiles and understands the meaning of the phrase "rich inner life." Lost Book Found, more on the conventional side, feels like a Paul Auster book-turned-film. Like Smoke, to be exact. It's an urban narrative about someone grinding to a halt to examine the cityscape that nobody bothers to see in Manhattan. A push-cart vendor/narrator finds a notebook that's filled with lists, addresses, headings, dates and observations about the city. The text haunts the narrator, who becomes obsessed with noticing what's not important: faded signs over stores, stencilled lettering faded on old factory walls, words scratched into telephone booths and such. Lost Book Found, with its documentary eye, is good visual poetry with a rhythm all its own. Director Jem Cohen, from the United States, hasn't gotten lost in the images and remembers to tell a story that rivals the New York cityscape. --Joanne Latimer For those of you who weren't utterly and completely exhausted (or bummed out) by Gregg Araki's last film The Doom Generation, Nowhere, the final piece of his nihilism trilogy, is here to fully drain you. Araki cast regular James Duval is back as a mixed-up lad (he's getting a bit long in the tooth to play a teenager these days) whose sexual confusion matches his general alienation. Mix alien abduction into the plotline and you've got some serious style-over-substance filmmaking from the director who's so damn cool he doesn't even register on the alterna-cred spectrum. If nothing else, terribly sexy to look at. A documentary about minority identity and marginalization sounds like the description of a movie to avoid, but local filmmaker Joe Balass's subjects, his 92-year-old grandmother and 73-year-old gay acquaintance, are the kind of fascinating, funny characters doc filmmakers dream of. Adopting the first-person approach in Nana, George and Me, Balass asks the duo to open up about their sexuality and their sense of identity. Revealing and intriguing--and undoubtedly one of the strangest, most wondrous films at the fest. --Matthew Hays From Montreal's Pascal Blais studio comes the animated La Vieille dame et les Pigeons, in which a somewhat unsavoury Parisian gendarme takes advantage of an old lady's excessive generosity toward pigeons, only to discover to his horror that things are not what they seem. La Vieille dame has been taking animation festivals by storm, culminating in their win of the Grand Prize at Pasadena's World Animation Celebration in March. It's not difficult to see why: the 20-minute film's narrative has only the barest dialogue but is nonetheless hilarious and the birdlike gendarme is wonderfully expressive. Mention anime (Japanese animation) and many think of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, an ultraviolent tale of government experimentation into psychic phenomena gone horribly wrong. Anime aficionados will cheerfully tell you that this is only half the story: anime and Otomo certainly have more variety than many are aware. Memories, a compilation of three anime films with Otomo involved alternately as producer, writer and director, encapsulates some of this diversity. Magnetic Rose is a science-fiction thriller set in deep space, Stink Bomb is a bit more whimsical, featuring a man who takes the wrong drug and starts leaking a poisonous gas from his body and Cannon Fodder is the more sombre of the three, with its cynical look at national aggression and its effect on the populace. --Emru Townsend The Festival international du cinéma et des nouveaux médias opens this Thursday, June 5 and runs until June 15. 288-9007 |
Nouveau picks from the crop of the Festival international du cinéma et des nouveaux médias
That's one way to come across unexpected gems like The Menopause Song. What a title. And Director Gail Noonan sounds familiar. That's because she did Your Name in Cellulite in 1995--an animated film poking fun at the race to stay slim. The Menopause Song is a four-minute animated video accompanied by the She-B-She choir, who sing a hilarious rant about getting your period.