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Customs cruelty >> Local filmmaker Karim Hussain struggles to get border officials to return his videotapes by MATTHEW HAYS
But Hussain, who also works as a programmer for the local Fant-Asia film fest, found out the hard way that once material is taken out of the country, when re-entering it's automatically considered foreign. Videotapes of trailers for and a rough cut of his raunchy feature Subconscious Cruelty were confiscated by Customs officials, and Hussain still hasn't learned of the videotapes' ultimate fate. The trouble for Hussain began March 5. He and other Fant-Asia representatives were returning from a business trip to Los Angeles and New York, when their bus was routinely stopped at the Canadian border. "The customs people hate fucking bus people. If you're on a bus, you're a bad fucking person as far as they're concerned. It was also at a time when there was some new tension in the Gulf, and I was the only one who looked even remotely Middle Eastern. Then they saw that my name was Hussain and they didn't like that much. "They started going through all my stuff and eventually found the copy of my press kit. There's photos of a messed-up Christ in there and photos of people whose orifices are being penetrated, so they were extremely upset by that. They found the trailers and went back to some room to watch them and then came back white as fucking ghosts." Customs officials, whoM Hussain describes as "impressionable white trash," then arrested Hussain on suspicion of harbouring obscene materials. "I told them that it was a Canadian film, that the negative was in Canada and that we'd even applied to the Canadian government for money. They said that even if your film has been brought out of the country for even five minutes, it's a foreign product. So if you're going into Canada, they consider you a big, bad, stinkin'-ass evil American coming in with your own product." Then Hussain says he was placed in a cell that made him particularly anxious. "They put me in the cell where they do the penetration exams. It's not just bend down, we'll shove a finger up a your ass, as you'd think it might be. They actually have furniture built for this very situation. It's this weird sort of Ikea-like bench with two different levels. I had been on the bus all day and I had a very special surprise to give them if they insisted on doing it. Luckily they didn't." Hussain was let go, but his tapes were taken. Luckily, the videos were just copies and nothing crucial was lost, but Hussain says he'd still like the videos returned to him, on principle. For Hussain, the confiscation is the latest in a long line of problems in writing and directing Subconscious Cruelty. An episodic, surreal film in the same vein as David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Luis Buñuel, Cruelty is full of excessive scenes of gore and twisted sexual situations (local artist C.J. Goldman, who also worked on the currently-playing Species 2, created many of the horrifying effects). Hussain says he and producer Mitch Davis (who is also a Fant-Asia programmer) have endured theft of film stock and crew mutinies, among many other roadblocks, in the four years since they launched the project. "It's also been a tough shoot because we've been asking people to do things they never would have dreamed of doing normally in their lives. Some actors had to be coated in blood for over 14 hours straight. There were sequences where Christ was being raped with a tree. These scenes are a bit rough on the actors. You have to draw the actors into a certain Mansonesque cult for a certain amount of time. "There was this one story where we were filming six people naked in the mud. They're actually fucking the ground, screwing the trees and everything. It was extremely cold outside, and people were getting a bit dodgy about taking their clothes off and covering themselves in mud. Eventually I screamed at them that anything I asked them to do I'd be willing to do myself. So me and my assistant director threw our clothes off and we began attacking the ground, screaming like madmen for an hour. It was pitch black and after feeling the grass rubbing against our balls and eating the dirt, we suddenly realized we had no idea where our clothes were. We eventually had to go back to the production house completely naked. We couldn't find any clothes so we had to make do with some rags and I didn't have any shoes, so I had to wrap paper towels around my feet. After the sun rose we found our clothes, which were covered in frost." Hussain says making the movie strange is the whole point. "Films that look you in the eye, that spray diarrhea in the eye, and the diarrhea is full of intelligence and beauty. Not just maggots and pestilence--you can learn from maggots and pestilence too, though. "We want riots in the cinema. We want people to be screaming and wanting to kill the filmmakers after. There are so few ballsy films out there." Subconscious Cruelty is now in post-production
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When local director Karim Hussain returned from a business trip to the U.S. last March, the last thing he was expecting was trouble from Canada customs officials for videos of his feature directorial debut. The film in question was home-grown--how could officials confiscate foreign material that wasn't even foreign?