Film fiesta

>> Perusing the final weekend of the World Film Festival

by MATTHEW HAYS

It's the movies, not the parties, goes the excuse, or rather mantra, of the World Film Fest. Parties, it seems, are the stuff of light-headed superficial types who aren't really interested in the art of cinema.

I hope it's the movies, since this year's opening party, otherwise known as The We-Promise-It'll-Be-Better-Next-Year Soirée, kinda sucked. Luckily, however, this year the fest admin could look to Remstar for inspiration. Their star-studded, sushi-saturated Saturday night bash--featuring appearances by a body guardless Samuel L. Jackson and Bob Rafelson--set a new standard for party throwing at the World. Kudos also go to Alliance-Atlantis-Vivafilm, who held their annual bash at Newtown, whose extensive terrasse provided for an amazing way to say goodbye to the August heat.

In keeping with World tradition, the films themselves are an unusual mélange of everything--the good, the bad, the ugly--from virtually everywhere. I sat down with Maya director Digvijay Singh to discuss his deeply moving and entirely troubling debut feature. The film portrays a middle-class Indian family and the abuse the children suffer from within. In particular, Singh focusses on a ritual occasionally performed on young girls as they come of age: they are raped repeatedly by various men in a temple as the family celebrates outside. Singh says he was horrified to read about the ritual some five years ago in an Indian daily newspaper, and decided it was fodder for a film.

"The response here has been amazing," the director tells me. "And especially at a film festival like this one, where it's really about the movies and not the deals." (Easy for him to say, he's already landed a distributor.) Truth be told, Singh is now more concerned about getting distribution in his native country. "I don't know how India will react to this film. The selection committee, the censor board.... I don't really know. My greatest fear is that it is censored. Then we'll have to appeal to the Supreme Court." What about the bonus glut of publicity, as witnessed by the sucess of Bandit Queen after its banning? "That's not really the kind of publicity you want. People will go for all the wrong reasons and end up really disappointed.

"On another level, I just hope it isn't censored," Singh says. "It's crazy to have five, 10, or 15 people deciding what to see for all the people. We can't call ourselves the world's largest democracy if we're banning things."

Dogme days

It's hard to believe, but since Lars von Trier kicked things off with his Dogme 95 pledge (something he and a bunch of other Scandinavians signed), there have been 20 features made in this style (including everything from The Idiots to The Celebration). The latest is a Belgian entry titled Strass, and it's fairly nasty. The antihero at its centre is Pierre, an acting coach who's teaching his own special brand of performance. Director/writer Vincent Lannoo uses the Dogme approach to its best ends; the film, about a doc film crew making a movie about Pierre and his technique, is a hilarious spoof of acting-school idiosyncrasies, and in particular, the power-tripping wackos who so often seem to run them. Pierre is a sexual predator, groping his students as they recite lines and telling them "you can't play Titus Andronicus without having lived!" Finally, scandal catches up with Pierre after he assaults a woman at an audition when she refuses to strip naked for him and the audition committee. As extreme as it all sounds, Strass is eerily accurate in its depiction of this milieu. Though the screenings of this film are over, Strass landed a distribution deal at the fest and will undoubtedly hit an arthouse near you within coming months.

Every now and then festival-goers are struck by an unexpected delight, a great film never heard of before. Such is the case with Seven and a Match. The story concerns a group of Yale graduates who meet up in a house three years after they lived there while finishing their degrees. Despite the well-trodden, Big Chill-esque territory, first-time filmmaker Derek Simonds manages to sidestep all the clichés and deliver a truly charming ensemble film. Horror buffs will notice one Heather Donahue, who last appeared as the power-tripping doc filmmaker-within-a-film in The Blair Witch Project. She's excellent in the film, as is the entire cast. This is a smart movie, and Simonds is clearly a director to look out for.

Local heroes

On the local horizon, The Biz is a fun-filled 10- minute short in which virtually every celebrity who appeared at last year's World Film Fest is asked, "How do you break into show biz?" A legion of celebs are caught, including Richard Dreyfuss, Gerard Depardieu and Patricia Rozema. But the funniest bits come with shots of the film crew themselves, as they try, gonzo-style, to get interviews, holding up signs that read "NOT PAPARAZZI" and "INDIE FILMMAKERS."

Nicholas Campbell, Brendan Fletcher and Katherine Isabelle offer up solid performances in the Calgary-produced Turning Paige, a tense drama in which a girl named Paige has her life invaded by her estranged brother, who returns home after two years to turn over a new leaf--or so he claims. Director Robert Cuffley adeptly builds up a sense of doom as the film unfolds and as Paige's creepy brother seems to seep into every aspect of her life.

Running out of Worldly headlines

by MATTHEW HAYS

Yep, every year we Mirror types have been handed a unique and virtually impossible challenge. No, not getting out of bed in the morning! Every August we must come up with cutesy, funny, witty, ingenious and/or lively headlines with the word World in them. Here is a sampling of some of our best (and worst) from years past:

What in the World

World beat

The Trouble with the World

Around the World in ten days

Solving the World's problems

How Worldly

World of wonder

A World of possibilities on celluloid

What, me Worldly?

(Actually, I made that last one up just now.)