Work on the Downtown Eastside beckoned in the early part of the day, causing us to miss the three films we had scheduled in the morning and afternoon, but we did make it to the evening screenings we’d chosen …
Lights at the End of the Tunnel (Grade: A): A quartet of short films — two from Malaysia and two from Taiwan, the work of filmmakers Ho Yuhang (the touching, hallucinatory dreamscape, As I Lay Dying), Charlotte Lim (the lively, funny, melancholy, Escape), Ho Wi Ding (the mystery thriller road movie, Summer Afternoon), and Chang Rong-ji (the exquisitely poignant, genre-bending boy-meets-girl story, The End of the Tunnel, with an amazingly affecting, tour-de-force performance by newcomer Sandrine Pinna (Yong Zhang) — will surely emerge as two of our favourite hours within a darkened theatre this year. Playing again at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 26th, at Pacific Cinémathèque, no matter what you do, catch this series, even if it means skipping work, or adjusting your life. A must-see!
Be Like Others (Grade: B+): Iranian-American filmmaker Tanaz Eshaghian turns her camera on Iran, and the story of three ‘maybe‘ transsexuals, and their journey to and from sex change operations that transform their lives. In a country where homosexuality is punishable by death, but where sex-
change operations are perfectly legal within an Iranian theocracy that all but forces these operations on gay men, Be Like Others takes the viewer inside a bustling, modern day Tehran, exposing the humanity and travails of a group of its citizens, while exposing the victimizing hypocrisy of the state.
