With just three days to the end of the 28th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, Mr. Know-It-All and ‘Showbiz’ Shayne are hard at it, catching as many of the remaining VIFF films as is humanly possible. Your dynamic duo managed to screen five great VIFF documentaries over the course of a very long Tuesday, and have plans to see many, many more of the well-received VIFF fiction films before the Festival wraps late Friday evening.
The first non-fiction film on tap on a chilly, overcast Tuesday morning …

Vancouver International Film Centre, Seymour north of Davie Street

The Inheritors (Grade: A-): The ‘story’ of child labour — focusing on the child labourers themselves — situated in every region of Mexico, and the particularly hardscrabble life these very young children lead, Eugenio Polgovsky’s The Inheritors explores young lives defined by hard work and integrity of purpose. The film’s almost wordless narrative focuses on the three-to-seven year old children as they harvest beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, and any number of other vegetable and fruit crops, as they carry a third of their weight in overladen 6 – 8 kilogram pails to the produce transport truck. In addition, we see the children producing and laying earthen bricks, cutting sugar cane, ox-plowing fields and planting by hand. Made for only $35,000, The Inheritors is, throughout, magical and involving, hopeful and, in its own way, transporting. Most assuredly, The Inheritors is one of VanRamblings favourite VIFF films in 2009.
Next, VanRamblings sauntered up to Pacific Cinémathèque to see …
Crude (Grade: B): Part of the VIFF’s ‘Way of Nature‘ environmental series, producer-director Joe Berlinger is better known for award-winning non-fiction dramas like Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, but this time around Berlinger has chosen to go the ‘issue-oriented‘ route, with varying degrees of success. Overall the film does possess its gripping moments — when Berlinger, or a member of his crew, interview a family member whose life has been devastated by Chevron’s mistreatment of the natural environment — but too often the film’s approach is desultory, as it records the struggle of the Ecuadorean people to have the catastrophically impacted jungles of the Amazon remediated. Focusing on Ecuadorian activist lawyer Pablo Fajardo’s David and Goliath court battle with multi-national oil conglomerate Chevron, Crude relays its message through ‘talking heads’, giving the narrative an adverse static feel. As praiseworthy as Berlinger’s non-fiction telling of this little known story may be, he does not entirely succeed in his laudable mission.
Following a quick break for lunch at Starbucks, VanRamblings was off to see …
American Casino (Grade: A): Positing that the predatory home mortgage lenders, and Wall Street, targeted inner-city African American neighbourhoods, and individuals who were in no position to pay a mortgage, even at a sub-prime rate, producer-director Leslie Cockburn’s tremendous Tribeca Film Festival award-winning documentary involves from beginning to end, as it examines the subprime mortgage meltdown and its devastating impact, most particularly, on poor African-Americans across the U.S., all the way through to the equally devastating impact the financial crisis has had on wealthy Californians with swimming pools, whose previously secure lives have now been all but destroyed.
VanRamblings carried on with our VIFF duties by lining up for, and seeing …
Sweetgrass (Grade: B+): Beautiful and evocative, with humour and grace documentary filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor (who addressed the audience before the 7 p.m. screening at the VanCity Theatre, and took questions afterward), and partner / co-director Ilisa Barbash, offer an extraordinary piece of visual anthropology as they track the last sheep drive, in 2003, up Montana’s vertiginous Beartooth Mountains to summer pasture. Unhurried and unadorned, and empathetic to the weather-worn cowboys on the trail who, while on the trail, live in teepees made of branches and canvas, cook from stoves that have been used for generations, and ride on worn saddles across Montana’s gorgeous blue sky country, there’s both a zen peacefulness, and a reassuring ‘old western’ feel, to Sweetgrass that impresses mightily, and at every moment.
And for our final VIFF film on a rainy, overcast Festival Tuesday, Day 13 …
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector (Grade: A-): British director Vikram Jayanti captures Mr. Wall-of-Sound himself, the ever weird — but phenomenally talented, if broken — Phil Spector, responsible for a groundbreaking set of 1960s hits, ranging from The Ronettes’ Be My Baby to Ike & Tina Turner’s River Deep – Mountain High, not to mention his role as producer of the Beatles’ last album, Let It Be, in a series of candid, revealing interviews, recorded in 2007 during his first trial for the murder of 40-year-old actress Lana Clarkson. As cultural anthropology, Jayanti’s film can’t be beat. Offering a fascinating insight into a brilliant, if troubled mind, The Agony was fun to watch (no mean feat), if a bit disturbing at times.

Up late again, but on the bus and downtown in enough time to catch …
The Exploding Girl (Grade: A-): Essentially, the story of Ivy (Zoe Kazan), a young vulnerable woman, with epilepsy, who travels home on a break from college to upstate New York to visit her mother. Not so much mumblecore in presentation, but rather more naturalistic and heartfelt, director Bradley Rust Gray (Salt), in focusing on Ivy’s every day life, and her relationship with her terminally indecisive friend, Al (Mark Rendall, in an outstanding performance) presents a more honest portrait of what it means for a twenty-something to live with the restrictions imposed by adult epilepsy than any you’d ever find on a disease-of-the-week TV show. For very good reason, Zoe Kazan won the Best Actress award at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year. The Exploding Girl has finished its 2009 VIFF run.
Now, we could tell you that we didn’t get downtown in time to pick up our ticket for Police, Adjective, and that we prevailed on a ‘too busy for words’ Pierre LeFebvre (pictured below) to take VanRamblings’ pass to give to ‘way-too-busy-for-words’ Exhibitions Manager, Bob Albanese, to give to Mr. Shayne, so Mr. Shayne could pick up a ticket for the evening screening, because VanRamblings had a Thanksgiving dinner to attend, and wouldn’t be available to stand in line at 4:30 p.m. to pick up … well, we could tell you that tale of sadness and woe, and of how we imposed on Mr. LeFebvre and Mr. Albanese, and tears would flow, and readers would be aghast, but …

VIFF’s Pierre LeFebvre, 2009 Concierge and Guest Relations Manager

Instead, we’ll eviscerate …
Police, Adjective (Grade: D-): The story of a Romanian police detective experiencing a crisis of conscience, surrounding the surveillance of three young people who are doing no more than smoking a little dope. That this teenage activity is not looked favourably upon by the authorities, and more particularly his boss, turns into a long, boring, pointless philosophical discussion about morality, and the role of the state to uphold social mores. Patrons walked out in droves. VanRamblings didn’t. We should have.

Weekends are always tough for cinephiles, at the annual Vancouver International Film Festival. On weekends, VIFF draws novitiates to the Festival, and almost inevitably they ‘talk’. The weekenders play with their iPhones or Blackberries or Samsung smartphones, the blue glow of the phone in the darkened theatre a disconcerting distraction from the more real-life drama on the screen. Better to attend matinée screenings on a weekday, as many of the filmgoers who love films are choosing to do, than risk having one’s experience of the Festival tainted by a texter, or a talker.
But enough of that. On this day, as we celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving …
We are, on this Sunday, in the waning days of the 28th annual Vancouver International Film Festival so, perhaps, the time has come to acknowledge the very fine work of the staff and volunteers who create this Festival-by-the sea for all of us grateful patrons, each and every year.
First off, note should be made of the following: with 640 screenings of 377 films, thus far in the days of our annual Festival everything has gone off with uncommon aplomb. There have been no technical glitches, no one has reported seeing a DVD version of a film because the 35mm print failed to arrive, films start (mostly) on time, Festival staff and volunteers are invariably helpful and pleasant (which goes a long way to making the Festival an overall better experience for filmgoers) and, once again this year, from programmers Alan Franey, PoChu Au Yeung, Mark Peranson, Terry McEvoy and so many, many others, to the hard-working theatre managers, staff have created a first-rate filmgoing experience for the appreciative throng who attend screenings throughout each and every day.

VIFF Programme Manager PoChu Au Yeung, and ‘A Prophet’ star Reda Kateb

We caught only one film on Saturday evening, the Cannes’ stunner …
A Prophet (Grade: B+): With a ‘been there, done that’ quality about it, given the surfeit of prison dramas we see on TV and film on this side of the pond, this Cannes 2009 Grand Jury / Palme d’Or winner, offers a French prison set drama that is as hard-edged as you might expect it to be, as it tells the story of 19-year-old petty criminal Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), who’s been sentenced to six years in prison, amidst competing ‘tribes‘. Director Jacques Audiard traces Malik’s development from cowering inmate to prison yard kingpin, and beyond, in a surprisingly humane manner, considering the amount of blood and gore onscreen. From beginning to end, it is Malik’s maturational process, and our awareness of his keen, innate intelligence, that makes A Prophet compellingly watchable film fare.