Tag: Canadian

Goddess of the Fireflies (La Déesse des Mouches)

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On the day Catherine (Kelly Depeault) turns 16, a family feud ends with her father deliberately ramming her mother’s car against the street gate. While her parents immersed in divorce procedure full of vitriol and finger-pointing, she seeks support from the school’s rebel group, including Marie-Eve (Éléonore Loiselle), Keven (Robin L’Houmeau), Mélanie (Marine Johnson) and Pascal (Antoine DesRochers ). She finds a way into the group by getting involved with Pascal, an initiation of her own sex life and escapism in the form of hard drugs.

The director Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette opts for a lyrical approach, despite the hardcore topics. The film is adapted from Geneviève Pettersen’s book by screenwriter Catherine Léger. In collaboration with cinematographer Jonathan Decoste, she populates the scenes with extreme close-ups, emphasising hands, tattoos and clothes – elements that grab the attention of teenagers.

The protagonist finds shelter in drugs. Her world is highly sensory. Dreamlike sequences portray how the characters process their anxieties internally, and they serve as a counterpoint to the harsh reality of these young people. They work largely because of the work of sound designer Paul Lucien Col and the song selection from the 1990s. It was women defined the rock zeitgeist: an important scene is features by The Breeders and another revolves around the band Hole.

Barbeau-Lavalette is very passionate about her subjects and source material. The topic, however, isn’t entirely new. Christiane F. is a reference point. Our protagonist received the book as a birthday present, reinforcing a comparison that isn’t entirely fletteing.

has for its source material is clear, there isn’t a lot to set the production apart from others made along the same lines. “Cristiane F.”, for example, is a big reference point – and the fact that Catherine wins the book on which the German drama is based as a birthday present reinforces a comparison that is not exactly flattering. It proves that teenage angst and the appeal of drug abuse have become timeless themes.

The film fares better when it shows the lives of young people in Québec’s countryside before the internet changed the way they meet and relate. A real time capsule. This Canadian feature, even with a fairly recognisable plot, makes the most out of its impeccable setting. The story feels current, despite its nostalgic appeal.

Goddess of the Fireflies premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year. Stay tuned for likely UK screenings, once life is back to normal!

The Twentieth Century

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One seldom gets to know how footwear and cacti influence a country’s government, but Matthew Rankin’s The Twentieth Century is the rare film which accomplishes just that. This debut feature, premiering in Europe as part of the daring Forum section of this year’s Berlinale, is a highly idiosyncratic fever dream with the right amount of kitsch to make it a hit with the midnight movie crowd.

The film follows Mackenzie King (Dan Beirne) in his quest for becoming Prime Minister of Canada, trying desperately to prove himself to his peers and to a archetypal formidable mother (Louis Negin). However, this personal journey is shown in such a stylised and over-the-top fashion, it might as well be an alternate universe.

Here, Toronto is rendered in colourful yet austere architecture, Winnipeg appears as a cesspool of depravity and Quebec looks like a Utopian commune. Dany Boivin’s brilliant art direction channels German expressionism and Soviet agitprop in order to create an imaginary country – one that simply could not exist, yet feels tangible. The mise-en-scene, combined with Rankin’s editing, creates the effect of complete sensory overload.

Freed from the constraints of reality, the script, also handled by Rankin, tackles a lot of themes. Some of these will hit harder if the viewer has some background of Canadian political history: the country’s relationship to England, its role in the Second Boer War, the Quebec independence movement and the elusive character of King himself play considerable parts in the plot.

More overt, however, is the filmmaker’s intent of painting this fantasy Canada in decidedly queer tones. The casting is full of interesting gender-switches, adding to the surreal nature of the film. The games in which the contestants for Prime Minister partake are hilarious partly because they reinforce the notion of masculinity – as well as politics – as performance.

For King and his desire to ascend to his country’s upper political echelon, this also means that he has to look the part: being tough, get a trophy wife and control his sexual urges towards shoes. The film revels in unusual sexuality, with most characters indulging in some sort of kink.

Ironically, no matter how wildly allegorical The Twentieth Century gets, echoes of reality always creep into the narrative: the scheming of the aristocracy, the way politicians are groomed for public appearances, the divisive ideological struggles. In those moments, Rankin’s visual feast of a film morphs into one hyperreal canvas – cacti and footwear notwithstanding.

The Twentieth Century premieres at the 70th Berlinale, which takes place between February 20th and March 1st.

Our dirty questions to Thirza Cuthand

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Born in Regina and raised in Saskatoon, in the South-Central Canadian province of Saskatchewan, Thirza isn’t your average Indigenous filmmaker. This Cree artist has been making audacious and experimental short movies since 1995 delving into the topics of LGBT sexuality and identify, while also questioning and toying with the boundaries sanity. Her work fits in very well with our dirty movie concept.

She graduated in Film in the Emily Carr University of Art and Design of Vancouver in 2005. She has since exhibited her work in numerous galleries, festivals and events in various countries and on both sides of the Atlantic. She currently resides in Toronto. She’s now in London for the 13th Native Spirit Festival in order to showcase a selection of her work carefully picked exclusively for you.

Thirza Cuthand presents her retrospective of 10 short films at the Horse Hospital in London at 14:00 on Sunday, October 13th. The screenings will be followed by a talk. Click here for our review of the superb retrospective, and here in order to book your tickets now.

Victor Fraga – How did you first become involved in film? Were you the first Cree filmmaker ever, or was there a tradition beforehand?

Thirza Cuthand – There were other Cree filmmakers, I’m thinking like Loretta Todd, my Uncle Doug Cuthand makes films, there’s been a number of Cree filmmakers I can’t even think of them all. I find Cree women filmmakers were very encouraging when I was an emerging filmmaker. Actually many other Indigenous women filmmakers were very nurturing of my skills. My friend Dana Claxton was really great to connect with when I was starting out, she is a Lakota filmmaker based in Vancouver. I first became involved in film through a Queer film festival in Saskatoon called Virtuous Reality. It only ever happened once in 1995. Since then Saskatoon got obsessed with But I’m A Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit, 2001) and I swear that’s the only Queer film they wanna watch.

I made a short film called Lessons In Baby Dyke Theory (1995, see it below) about feeling like the only lesbian at my high school. I was 16 when I made it, with a cheap hi-8 camcorder. And a lot of pipe cleaner dollies. It became really successful on the Queer film fest circuit because there was not a lot of work being made about being a teenage Queer. Mostly when people talked about Queer Youth at the time they were picturing university students. But now of course there’s like, Queer kindergarteners so things have really shifted.

VF – How have the indigenous communities embraced Indigiqueer identity? Did you have to overcome tradition, or barriers of any type?

TC – It’s been varied. I grew up in urban communities which I found were way more open minded than if I had grown up on a reserve. But then also all the reserves have different climates. Some are more Christian and Christian-influenced than others. I was fortunate in that my mother was very Queer-positive so there wasn’t a lot of hardships at home, and my high school didn’t even know what to do with me. I do know that one of the barriers has been funding. I do get funding but usually it comes from the regular funding stream and not the stream for Indigenous people at the arts councils.

There’s also some difficulties in that people want to protect Indigenous culture so I feel like there’s a fine line between protecting ourselves and censoring artists. I know the queer work I make is not always appreciated by some of those juries, especially the more sexually suggestive work. I think repression of Indigenous sexuality in all its forms, including heterosexual sexuality, has been a big issue for us as media makers. And when it’s Queer on top of that, it gets really tough. The effects of Residential School has left a huge vein of homophobia and transphobia in its wake. I have a hard time with it, because I do understand people who have been abused by same sex perpetrators sort of view Queer society through that lens, but at the same time child sexual abuse is not Queer culture and it’s hard to explain that to some survivors of those crimes.

VF – How do you transpose oral storytelling onto cinema? Is it any difference from written literature? What are the biggest challenges, and the most beautiful and unique aspects?

TC – My videos are often told in a similar manner to the way my grandfather would tell stories his parents and grandparents would tell him, like a monologue with a sort of larger meaning attached. Cree stories can be very funny, and some can be very sexually explicit too (although I never heard those ones from my grandpa but there is a well known story about a rolling disembodied head that keeps trying to offer sexual favours as it follows this person). I think the difference from written literature is that oral stories grow and change with time, they are living texts. It’s harder to do that with videos, but I also do performance art and that can work the same way. I think the biggest challenges are that I can’t see how people react to a story until the film is finished and I’m watching with an audience. While an oral story you might be able to read the room and like, drop parts that don’t work for that audience. Like maybe there are people like your family in the room who you don’t want to tell that part about a disembodied head offering blowjobs in front of!

The beautiful and unique aspects are that a story could be passed down from generations and generations previously. I heard a story from my grandfather about the first time Crees saw white people, and I am still struck by how remarkable it is to know what happened. I also recently made a film based on another story he told my auntie Beth about a 2 Spirit person (2 Spirit is a term for Queer/Trans Indigenous people used by some Queer/Trans Indigenous people) who was a travelling storyteller, and it was really wonderful to not only be able to make that story more widely known as a film, but also to sort of have proof that 2 Spirit people were accepted and welcomed before colonisation. Oral stories give us a history that has been used to stand up in court cases here in Canada.

VF – You said that “humour is a political tool”. Can you please give us an example of how you used comedy in order to make a statement, raise awareness of an issue, or something else?

TC – My film series 2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99 (2015) and 2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com (2017) are very comedic films, but also use the tropes of late night TV commercial formats to critique things like domestic violence in lesbian relationships, isolation in remote communities as a Queer person, capitalist values based on how big your communities are and if you are worth having media targeted towards your demographics. A lot of other things too. But mostly they come across as very light fun films. You don’t think about the heavy stuff even though it’s all in there. I think humour helps people be more open to ideas that they might shut down otherwise.

VF – Has the Canadian government been supportive of indigenous film and performance art? Who has supported you in your endeavours?

TC – I’ve gotten funding from almost all levels of government, federal, provincial, municipal. I have been fortunate. I’ve seen other people really struggle but I’ve managed to carve out enough of a career for myself that I’ve been able to be a full time artist. I’ve also made a documentary for CBC Gem, which is a national tv streaming platform, and for the NFB which is a national documentary and animation film studio. But it took a long time of making self-funded videos with my camcorder and myself to get to that point. I think the fact I was so willing to fund so much of my early work really helped my career. I still self-fund the work I think might be too controversial for a funder to touch. There have been some controversies over the years about where taxpayer money goes, so any really sexual work I’ve tried to do on my own.

VF – You describe yourself as “gender non-conforming, Indigenous, Queer, disabled, fat”. Is being non-normative an empowering and liberating experience? How do you reconcile these varied identities?

TC – I think when you rack up a couple of non-normative identities it just makes sense to add more! Ha ha! I think because my identities and interests are outside of the mainstream, it’s made my work more interesting. It can be empowering, there’s been at least a couple times I’ve been trying to find the subcultures I belong to and that is an interesting experience. When I was a teen I had to find the Queer community, and in a small prairie city too, before the internet was a thing and before I was old enough for the bar. So it didn’t take a long time, but I did have to go out looking for it.

And then when I was 18, again without the the internet, I realised I was into kink and that was another search. I think my first contact was getting a subscription to a local kink newsletter, but it stopped distributing as soon as I got the first issue! But it really does make you more independent in a way when you need to work hard at finding your communities, queer and kinky communities. My Indigenous communities were always around because I grew up with my Indigenous family members. But even reconciling Queer and kink identities even just with Indigenous identity is not so hard. There were always Queer Indigenous people, and some ceremonies involved cutting or piercing the flesh, so doing similar things in a kink context is not so wild really. And same with trans/gender-non-conforming identities, there were lots of Indigenous people historically who were gender non-conforming or trans. I think what I like about all these identities is that I can talk honestly from a first person perspective about a lot of issues.

VF – You were once invited to Bruce LaBruce’s Tiff party. He’s one of our favourite “dirty” filmmakers. Did you meet and talk to him? How did that go? What did he think of Indigiqueer film?

TC – I actually didn’t go! I ended up finishing my film about a gas mask fetish I later called Less Lethal Fetishes instead. But I did meet him once at his screening in Regina for LA Zombie (2010), which I loved. Fucking dead people back to life? Amazing! I did talk to him, he seems very nice. We didn’t talk long enough to talk about Indigiqueer film tho!

VF – Is this your first time in Europe? Do Europeans react differently to your work?

TC – I’ve been to Berlin a lot showing my work. I think because Europeans don’t have the full understanding of Indigenous culture and context like people in North America, it’s a little bit different showing work here. There are I am sure preconceived ideas of what Indigenous lives are like, I’ve never talked to Europeans about that though and I think mostly they don’t want to say anything offensive to me about what they might think. I do know I explained payments that were made to Residential School survivors were called “Common Experience Payments” to an audience in Berlin that was pretty queer and open-minded and they sort of recoiled which I think is the best reaction, Common Experience Payments is a terrible name. My grandmother was in Residential School and she said once “They weren’t common experiences! Everyone’s experience was different!”

VF – What are your plans for the future?

TC – I’m working on a feature film about a woman with the power of pyrokinesis [the ability to create and control fire with the mind] who seeks vengeance after her lover and mother go missing, so that’s been exciting. I have wanted to make a feature for a long time. I still really love experimental shorts though, and you can make those so fast with so much less influence from producers and editors and so on that I will probably keep doing that as well. I have a performance coming up in Vancouver called The Future Is So Bright which is going to be audio of me reading love letters to various women trying to convince them to be with me and start a family, while footage of climate change catastrophes like forest fires and glaciers melting and hurricanes and tsunami’s play behind me. And I’ll be licking and sticking hard candies to my nude body trying to sweeten the deal. I’m super interested in the feelings of the world ending that so many have right now. I want to be hopeful, but I am also aware we have an incredible responsibility to the future of humanity and the world right now and we could blow it!

Thirza Cuthand Retrospective

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Thirza Jean Cuthand was born in Saskatchewan and grew up in Saskatoon, and she is of Cree origin. Starting in 1995, Cuthand began exploring short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, youth, love, and race, using national, sexual and Indigenous experiences to showcase in unfiltered raw exteriors.

Make no mistake, there is purity at play here. Collecting the confines, conditions and contractions of Cuthand’s milieu, the varied works slip together into one continuous narrative written years, even decades, apart. More to the point, the essays cross genres from the pointedly visual into the realms of performance arts.

In a life’s work, we are testimonies to a great becoming of life, love and failings, fearlessly guiding the wills and witnesses of expectations over a twenty four year story. The feelings, frailities and failures are true of all our lives, but Cuthand has the courage and power to be real about them. In a peerless recall of honesty, the collected works speak so mournfully with a communal power absent even in Richard Linklater’s extraordinary Boyhood (2014). Though they could be easily overlooked, the works radically question the everyday division between the artful and the mundane. In an art form traditionally more recondite than visual, Cuthand’s work sprawls through ages, genres and documentaries.

Early clips use archive footage of films and puppetry, playfully positing the questions of truthfulness from the companionship Disney princesses traditionally have provided women. Detailed in black and white, Helpless Maiden Makes an ‘I’ Statement (1999) finds a subject discussing the frustrations of a bottom position. Bravely opening the chartered path of self discovery, the narrative continues in the striking Just Dandy (2013), an essay of entrapment read through a diary. Performances play with ease, ebullient in energised ease as the author describes her innermost thoughts at a talk more potently lit in colour.

Then there’s 2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com (2017), opening and centred on the butch director in the flirtatious pose which too often stamps itself on pornographic websites. From the confines of these video-confessionals, the films progress narratively and thematically in evolving the woman’s body from the shaded to the candid. In its own way, it’s a riff on the inhibitions a person feels in their comfort’s both in their naked thoughts and naked bodies. In their way, the audience grows in confidence with the naked exteriors with the subjects. Reclamation (2018, pictured at the top), the fieriest entry, imagines a dystopic future in Canada after massive climate change, wars, pollution, and the palpable consequences of the large scale colonial project which has now destroyed the land. Visually inventive, the majority of the short films focus mostly on the experiences which the audience members find themselves longing to hear.

Topics and themes also explore the sadomasochistic lesboerotic subtexts in children’s entertainments, the temporal horrors migraine blindness inflicts and the dismal loneliness a young lesbian must endure in a Canadian school. Added to that the realities of an everyday struggle, the essays explore the different worlds an Indigenous person must walk. It’s not so different, yet completely different, to the worlds everyone else inhabits. A revelation of a series.

In addition to the short films listed above, the Thirza Cuthand Retrospective also includes the following pieces: Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory (1995), Sight (2012), 2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99 (2015), Thirza Cuthand is an Indian Within the Meaning of the Indian Act (2017) and the more recent Less Lethal Fetishes (2019). The event takes place on October 13th at the Horse Hospital as part of the 13th Native Spirit Festival. Just click here for more information, and in order to get your tickets now!

Ghost Town Anthology (Répertoire des villes disparues)

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Adapted from Laurence Olivier’s eponymous 2015 novel, this unusual ghost story takes place in the wintry Irénée-les-Neiges, a fictional town with a population of just 215. It all starts when 21-year-old Simon Dubé dies in a car accident. His family and locals suspect that he took his own life due to depression, and the inability to break away from his dull routine. As the family and the locals grapple to come to terms with the tragic death, strange events begin to take place.

The government wants to help the small community to overcme the tragic loss. They recruit a social worker from Montreal in order to support the mourning locals, but the formidable mayoress Simone Smallwood (played by veteran Diane Lavallée) emphatically turns the offer down, instead sending the envoy away. She claims that the tiny hamlet is emotionally self-sufficient and they can handle their problems on their own, as they always have. It’s as if Irénée-les-Neiges wanted to be detached from the rest of the world.

Suddenly, paranormal entities begin to appear. Children wearing masks wander the snowy fields and streets. Silhouettes pop out of people’s windows. Spectres show up inside the houses, triggering hapless locals to run scared. The late Simon appears inside his father Romouald’s (Jean-Michel Anctil) car. He also visits his older brother Jimmy (Robert Naylor) and their mother Gisele (Josée Deschênes), separately and on different occasions. The silent apparitions (the dead don’t talk) continue to escalate, seemingly outnumbering the living. Soon the streets are dotted with quiet and spooky figures. We learn that some of these people died decades earlier.

Despite the paranormal topic, this not a horror movie. Denis Cote is not a genre director, but instead a recognised auteur. This is not the type of film that will keep you in the edge of your seat, even if some of the images are quite creepy. The cinematography (shot on 16mm stock) is mostly grainy, with a touch of grey and gloom, evoking photographs from yore. The dead are never covered in blood. There are no gaping wounds and contorted faces. They just look sad and passive. This is not George Romero. Instead, this a subtle art movie, a commentary on small-town insularity, where life is so trite and banal that the dead are more liberated than the living. Young people feel particularly trapped. The desire to move away is pervasive.

A young woman called Adele (Larissa Corriveau, pictured at the top of this review), with apparent learning difficulties, is very scared of the apparitions. Corriveau is magnificent, her big bulgy eyes conveying a palpable sense of vulnerability. But she has a surprise in store for everyone. She finds a very peculiar way of rising above both the living and the dead in the end of the movie. A very unorthodox redemption. Those who have seem Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) will know exactly what I mean.

All in all, this is an elegant and moving ghost story, even if a little lethargic at times. The images of the equally dismal dead and living inhabitants of Irénée-les-Neiges will stay with you for some time.

Ghost Town Anthology premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in October 2019, when this piece was originally written. It’s on Mubi in April and May!

Binders full of men???

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One year after the #MeToo movement swept the world, the Academy finds itself in the notable situation that none of the best director nominees were female. Lynne Ramsey’s You Were Never Really Here offered an esoteric perspective on violence, Mimi Leder’s On The Basis Of Sex a thorough look through the legal field, Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? a mercurial montage of deception and conceit, while the boldly impressionistic The Rider demonstrated Chloe Zao’s formidable talents. None of these brilliant female filmmakers were recognised.

Yet the Academy did recognise one female director among the Best Short Film nominees, for the riveting Marguerite ( an elderly woman curtailing her suppressed feelings for another woman). The Quebeqois actress Marianne Farley switched to directing, helming on a generational study masked by illness and love. She spoke to our dirty Eoghan Lyng about her about receiving an Oscar nomination, generational themes, gender representation and much more!

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Eoghan Lyng – Congratulations on your Oscar nomination. How do you stand on the knowledge being the only female director nominee?

Marianne Farley – Thank you. I have mixed feelings, I’m very proud to be the one, but there should be more than me. There should be at least half. I think it will change over the years, I’m really hopeful. I cannot believe Lynne Ramsey didn’t get in, as a director, every shot was perfect. She really is a role model to me [her film You Were Never Really Here is pictured below]. We tend to think of women who direct, like my film, to make very feminine and sensitive films. What she did, she made such a violent film., but with such humanity.

EL – There are generational themes at play. How did you comprehend voicing a generation separate to your own?

MF – The whole premise is based on what I went through and what my grandmother did. She was very religious, got married and had kids. It’s what she wanted to do, but very different to the reality I grew up in, women from my grandmother’s generation didn’t really have choices, unlike mine, we have more choice. So, I was investigating the reasons, just trying to shed light between those experiences and moments.

EL – Where did your experiences as an actor aid you in your experience as a director?

MF – Obviously how vulnerable you are in front of the camera, how you’re trying to find the character on the first day. On a short film, you’ve got three, four days. I knew how the actresses would feel, they’d feel vulnerable. I really wanted the crew to respect the bubble I wanted to create. As an actress, actors have to be bold and vulnerable, trying to shield yourself and staying open at the same time. It’s a strange one, because I understand what it’s like to be in front of the camera.

As a writer, I wanted Marguerite (Béatrice Picard; pictured above) not to be conscious of the memories suppressed, of the life she once had, while [her nurse] Rachel (Sandrine Bisson) had her daily job, she’d do that and go home. I wanted the characters to have an arc, so the payoff at the end worked. I’m very character oriented as a writer, so that was always on my mind.

EL – The film stars two steely leads. Where did you come across them?

MF – The nurse is a really good friend of mine, usually cast as ballsy, comedic outgoing characters, both of them do, I like taking them somewhere else. I wanted to prove to Sandrine that she could do it, because she told me that she could only do this and that. I wanted to see how far she could go, she’s a sensitive, compassionate woman, a vulnerable woman, everything she does, I told her, is really interesting, which she didn’t know she could do. The other, Béatrice, usually does comedic, theatre stuff. Still,she was very, very open, courageous as an actress. She was really happy to go along with it and see where she could go.

EL – What type of story lends itself to the form of a short film?

Has to be concise, a moment in someone’s life, had I made the arc larger it would have been a feature.A short film is like a moment, the character arc is super important, there had to be a transformation. In the first draft, Marguerite was totally closed off , before changing her personality over time, which I couldn’t do in fifteen, twenty minutes. It would have been too much of a change of pace, so that needed re-drafting A short story should be a snapshot, a snapshot of people or this case the elderly in the LGBT communities, which is something nobody ever talks about.

EL – How would you encourage a greater diversity of gender representation and proportion?

MF – That’s a tough question. Men have been making films for more than 100 years, we need to make space for women, we have stories to get out there. I don’t see it as a competition. We need to open the door for women, more finances, big budget films are traditionally given to men. It’s a complex question that we have to address, rather than we gave it to her because she is a woman. I don’t want people to think I’m there at the awards because I’m a woman. I want to be there for the film.

Canada is working towards achieving parity, the quality’s getting better and better from Canada and Quebec, there’s more about racism and LGBT. I might be naive, but I feel films really can change the world. It’s going really well here in Canada. True, films like Batman and Spiderman are grossing like millions of dollars, but hopefully the niche will grow to show stories about human beings, which is important to show. I think that’s what stories should be about.

What Keeps You Alive

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How much do you truly know about the person you love? One way of finding out more is by taking a trip to a remote location together. You could learn new things you never knew before, but this approach carries with it an inherent risk. What if those secrets were never meant to be exposed?

This is the premise of What Keeps You Alive, an elegant Canadian thriller-mystery centring around a couple spending a romantic weekend in a remote, picturesque location in the woods. They are Jules (Brittany Allen) and Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson) and they’ve come up here to celebrate their one year anniversary. At first everything seems to be going well, with both women commenting on how beautiful the location is, joking about how they could stay there forever, and getting ready to spend a romantic, sexy evening together. Then a knock on the door changes everything. It’s Sarah (Martha MacIsaac) from across the lake, an old childhood friend of Jackie’s. At first it seems that this might be a past lover, but the secret Sarah hides is far darker than that, and threatens to destroy both women.

What Keeps You Alive is one of those films that anything after the first third counts as a spoiler, its first twist changing the dynamic of the movie completely. Let’s just say that it isn’t outside threats that either girl needs to be afraid of, with the thriller, Hitchcock-like, centred around the bonds of their love. It asks a key question of the viewer: Why has Jackie taken Jules here in the first place if it is such a source of sadness for her? This mystery powers the stripped-back narrative, leading us to its inevitable, deadly conclusion.

An enigmatic wide-angle is used for filming, allowing the vast mountain scenery and bucolic lake surroundings to do a lot of the emotional heavy lifting. Veering between an old-school psychological drama and a cat-and-mouse chase thriller, What Keeps You Alive boasts strong performances by the two leads, who sell both the romantic and survivalist sides of their personalities. (Martha MacIsaac and Joey Klein, who plays Sarah’s husband, don’t fare as well — perhaps the movie would’ve been tighter if their underwritten roles were cut.) These performances are complemented by a diverse soundtrack, ranging from classic rock to some choice Beethoven cuts — yet most importantly, the film knows when to go deathly quiet, allowing the action to speak for itself.

Sadly, What Keeps You Alive runs out of steam by the end, forcing situations for the sake of spectacle instead of letting the plot play out naturally. While building up a great sense of foreboding in the beginning of the movie — using a mixture of chilling anecdotes and gorgeous scenery to create an uneasy yet enticing vibe — the final stages falter significantly, circling back to the same tired tropes instead of saying anything new. It could’ve done much better to milk that feeling of uncertainty for longer, really allowing us to delve deeper into the distorted psychology of its protagonists.

Nevertheless, managing and subverting genre expectations can be a tricky tightrope to walk. Too much subversion and it’s hard to find a rhythm, too much deliverance and a film can end up being too predictable. Credit has to go to writer-director Colin Minihan for taking what looked like a traditional cabin in the woods horror story and finding a different, smarter way to tell it. Here’s hoping next time he manages to stick the landing.

What Keeps You Alive is out in cinemas and also available on VoD on Friday, August 24th (US). UK viewers can catch it at FrightFest on August 25th. The director Colin Minihan is one half of The Vicious Brothers, known for their cult horror films.

Never Steady, Never Still

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Judging by the title, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this a a hectic and disturbing film, with a disjointed and uncontrollable pace. But it’s not quite. Quite the opposite. This is a warm and delicate movie, full of peace and kindness, despite the predicament of its main characters. It’s a remarkable achievement for first-time Canadian scribe and helmer Kathleen Hepburn.

The film opens up with a voice-over from the protagonist Judy (Scottish actress Shirley Henderson, best remembered for playing Gail in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting in 1996) as she describes the grief and pain of losing a child (she gave birth to a stillborn baby years earlier). She also reflects on the meaning of life and death. This meditative monologue sets the tone for the movie, a profound existential piece about overcoming the big obstacles of life however unsurmountable they may seem.

Judy suffers from early onset and advanced Parkinson’s Disease. She shudders uncontrollably most of the time, and even the most trivial tasks such unscrewing a lid and removing a ring become arduous. Her voice is as frail and as child-like as it gets. Her panting and squeaking with pain and frustration are heart-rending. Yet she’s not victimised by the filmmaker. There’s no time for self-pity, despite the horrific and irreversible condition, which can only be partially mitigated. Life must go on. She insists in driving and carrying on with other mundane chores, sometimes without even taking her medicine.

Henderson delivers an impeccable performance, brilliantly reconciling vulnerability and self-determination. She’s beyond convincing, and you might find yourself wondering whether they recruited a real Parkinson-sufferer for the role. Even her physique is appropriate for the role. Her scrawny figure, with every single vertebra visible, is symptomatic of Parkinson’s. Patients lose weight because they can’t feed themselves properly. I lost my aunt Ivonete to Parkinson’s just a few weeks ago, and so Judy rang many familiar bells in my head.

Suddenly Judy’s husband Ed passes away at sea to a heart attack. Judy is the first to come across his lifeless body on the beach, right next to his fishing boat. She attempts to pull him from the sea. This is the most dramatic sequence of the film, as Judy is faced with her physical limitations and the tragic death of the most important person in her life, both at once. Their son Jamie (Theodore Pellerin) is the other central pillar of the story. He’s 20 years old, shy, introverted and grappling with his apparent bisexuality. Now mother and son are left to comfort and support each other, but at first it’s unclear whether they’ll pull through.

Gradually, the coy youngster and the quivering mother complement each other. In an awkward way, her frailty dovetails with his insecurities, while the landscape offers soothing and healing. The vastness of rural and remote British Columbia, all tinted with pastel hues and a lingering twilight, provide mother and son with a certain quietness. They remain stoical towards the tragedies that have befallen them. It’s as if their emotions dissipated into the landscape.

The director’s firm grip and acute sensitivity are conspicuous throughout the movie. There’s even a little dash of humour. And copious amounts of maladroit yet sincere kindness. Ultimately, Judy and Jamie must find mitigation in their family bonds and attempt to forge new relationships, however closely-knit and remote their community may be.

Never Steady, Never Still is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, April 20th, and then on VoD the following week.

Pyewacket

Posted on by victorfraga

Slow-burn suspense-horror Pyewacket is most aptly described as a cautionary tale of the dangers of impulsive feelings, the failure of familial communication and the isolating and fractious nature of grief. Shrouded within an eerie suspense that delights one’s salivating hunger for that tense and nerve-shredding experience, it echoes the dual inclination of storytelling as both entertainment and parable.

Following the death of her father, teenager Leah (Nicole Munoz) is forced by her mother (Laurie Holden) to up sticks and move to a house in the woods somewhere in rural Canada. Obstinately facing the reality of having to leave her school and friends behind, in anger she turns to black magic and naively performs an occult ritual that summons the otherworldly Pyewacket to kill her mother. Upon realising her error, she desperately attempts to reverse the spell, but in order to undo the original spell, she must repeat it.

By way of the fractious internal and external family dynamic of a grieving mother and daughter, the story pulses with the telltale heart of emotional authenticity. Thematically this struggle to mourn amidst the transformation of the family following the death of the patriarch emerges with a strong resonance, symbolised by the relocation of the family and the spatial contrast of the woods to the urban. More significantly, it reveals the innate conflict within the collective bonds of friendship and family, offset by our individual needs and sense of belonging. Yet the internal angst of the film’s protagonist coupled with the emotional authenticity of the personal drama, highlights the skill of MacDonald the storyteller to tap into that which lies beneath the story, the characters and its audience.

Pyewacket’s nature to take on many forms casts this supernatural entity as a reimagining of Christianity’s great deceiver, who similarly to the devil, its true identity is unknown. Hence the evil Leah awakens is the purest form of terror, that which is unseen, existing only as a spiritual entity without a permanence of physical form. In as much as cinema is a visual medium, what is unseen is of paramount importance. MacDonald understands the power of inference, using our imagination as a tool to create anticipatory fear, rather than exhausting the onscreen space and actions. He evokes our imagination, using our negative associations of black magic and spells, of the afterlife, and memories of creaking floorboards, as well as the disquieting feelings of being watched or followed to create suspense that is borne out through our feelings.

Here the camera movement and sound are a means of manipulating our emotional or sensory reactions. This practice asserts the filmmaker’s understanding that a film lives inside the minds of his audience, the onscreen a gateway to the real stage upon which fear manifests. It is not an external but an internal one, echoing Leah’s internal angst, who in turn draws us into her web whilst MacDonald looks to that which lies beneath with a deft hand.

The appeal of Pyewacket and its very simple plot could – with all due respect – be labelled an effective Friday night horror film. Yet look a little closer and there is something appealing about its simplicity. Unlike The Orphanage (J.A. Bayona, 2007) and more recently The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), which also dealt with themes of grief, painted with a richness of detail and colour, Pyewacket is a black-and-white rough sketch. It lacks the finesse touches yet retains a raw thematic and narrative simplicity that the others forego.

Here is a film that will be dismissed by those with a desire for a more intellectual realisation of its themes, yet it is misguided to dismiss MacDonald’s methodical slow-burn execution, offsetting emotional family drama with an unsettling, and in moments oppressively suspenseful and disquieting atmosphere. The extremes of entertainment and intellectual exploration of the themes aside, Pyewacket is a modern parable, haunted by the spectre of this tradition, in just as much as its lead protagonist enters into a Faustian dance with her own supernatural antagonist. Therein, the simplicity is justified, serving the two masters of cautionary tale with an entertaining and suspenseful horror.

Pyewacket is released on HD VoD on April and DVD on 23rd April 2018 from Signature Entertainment.

Sebastian

Posted on by victorfraga

Despite its title and LGBT topic, this Canadian film is neither a tribute nor a remake of Derek Jarman’s 1976 classic Sebastiane. In fact, this is where the similarities stop. Unlike the British movie, Sebastian is a rather commonplace gay romance, devoid of audacity and lyrical freedoms. It’s a film made for a very specialised audience: young gay males looking for uncompromising and lighthearted fun.

The films opens with a “so, is this it?”, suggesting that this is going to be about a short and intense love story with a sad ending. The film follows Alex (played by the director James Fanizza), a young gay man in Toronto who has an unfulfilling relationship with his partner Nelson (Guifré Bantjes-Rafols). He immediately becomes infatuated with Sebastian (Alex House), Nelson’s cousin visiting from Argentina. The cast also includes the drag queen Katya Zamolodchikova, known as Xenia in movie, who delivers a little stage performance – she’s best known for competing at RuPaul’s Drag Race.

This is a love story relatable and credible enough for any young gay man vaguely familiar with the gay scene and gay culture. There’s talk of Mariah Carey, Joni Mitchell, plenty of good-looking boys, night clubs, drawings of muscular men, a little bit of Camp, and a soundtrack with cheesy guitar riffs and indie music. But it also feels a little stale and cliched, and the drama is petty. The ending is mostly predictable.

The film does delve into some interesting topics, such as the troubled artist insecure about his skills and grappling with a troublesome family. But the script lacks the depth required, and there are some awkward bits (for example, Sebastian does not know the difference between the English pronouns “he” and “she”, but otherwise he has perfect command of Shakespeare’s language, and no Argentinean accent). In a nutshell, this is an LGBT pan-American romance with a message of “follow your heart, love prevails”. The difference from most other LGBT movies is that the enemy here isn’t homophobia, but your very own family allegiances.

Sebastian was launched worldwide on VoD on February 6th. You can watch it by clicking here.

1:54

Posted on by victorfraga

A few seconds – even the fractions of seconds – can make all difference the world. This complex, jarring and thought-provoking LGBT bullying drama will exploit the pressures of time in very different situations: 8s to down a funnel full of beer, 1:54 to run 800m in a sports competition or 13s for… well, I can’t reveal the shocking twist at the end of this French Canadian movie.

Sixteen-year-old Tim (Antoine Olivier Pilon) is a shy and introspective teenager struggling with a gang of bullies headed by Jeff (Lou-Pascal Tremblay) in school. Tim and his nemesis are both vying for a slot in the national 800m competition, which makes their rivalry even more pronounced. Tim’s best friend Francis (Robert Naylor) is also a victim of bullying. The gang is adamant that the boys have an affair, and this will drive both students to very extreme and different measures in order to deal with the situation.

We eventually find out that Tim used to be a star runner, but he stopped a couple of years earlier when his mother passed away. Now he sees the opportunity to turn the tables and get even with the arrogant and manipulative Jeff, but an expected event suddenly gets on this way, posing a major dilemma. The narrative gradually evolves into what seems to be a race between homophobia and tolerance, then it suddenly veers into something far more sinister and harrowing.

With convincing acting and conventional photography, 1:54 delves into the horrific ramifications of bullying, thereby exposing the twisted and inconsequential sadism of human beings at a very young age. The Internet and smart phones play a central role in deconstructing personalities and and humiliating Tim and Francis. Every possibility of love and romance has been eclipsed by sheer barbarity, and both Tim and Francis have been robbed of their inherent right to love. The cruelty of the students will leave you jaw-dropped, but sadly the reality portrayed is not far-fetched. New technologies have provided young people with a very dangerous and potentially lethal weapon.

1:54 is showed as part of the BFI Flare London LGBT Film Festival in March 2017, when this piece was originally written. It is available for online viewing as part of the MyFrenchFilmFestival between January 19th and February 19th (2018)