Blue Gold - Water Wars

Fresh water is our most precious resource. The opening minutes of Blue Gold: World Water Wars make this case strongly and succinctly, with narrator Malcolm McDowell describing the symptoms of extreme thirst over footage of a parched landscape. The question isn’t whether we need water — that much is obvious. It’s whether we’re handling our resources properly. And according to this documentary, the answer is a resounding no.

Like most documentaries these days (and particularly those screened as part of local activist group the Arusha Centre’s Action Film series), Blue Gold is less an exploration than a polemic. In 90 minutes, it outlines the basic science behind the current threats to the world’s fresh water, discusses the political and economic situations that make progress difficult and shows some of the more viscerally horrifying consequences of “water wars” — disputes between the companies and governments that own water and the citizens who simply want to survive. According to the film’s array of activists and experts with nary a contrarian in the bunch, these wars are sometimes quite literal, with impoverished citizens taking up arms in order to establish a right to water.

The presentation is brisk, informative and occasionally dramatic. Literal life-and-death struggles are handled with the gravity they deserve, although recurring scenes of a little girl explaining the science of the hydrologic cycle sometimes give the impression that director Sam Bozzo doesn’t entirely trust his audience. The most refreshing thing about Blue Gold, though, is its optimism. Though it depicts a dire situation — one scientist claims that we only have enough drinkable water to last us 50 years — the film is actually more positive than many global disaster documentaries. The film’s last segment features positive developments, success stories and a claim that the Earth is far more resilient than we might think. For once, it feels like this is a problem we can actually do something about, even if it does take a great deal of effort.

Words gone wild -- Pontypool

“Horror has always worked on the idea that what is most familiar can be most frightening,” says director Bruce McDonald. “Like The Birds. It’s like, we all love birds, but what happens when they turn evil? You know what I mean? What happens when words turn evil? Well, then things get weird.”

Weird is an appropriate word to describe Pontypool, McDonald’s latest directorial effort. A mix of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds radio broadcast and modern linguistic theory, the film is structurally simple but ideologically complex. It’s also frightening, funny and probably the best thing McDonald’s ever done.

And that’s saying something. McDonald has been a fixture on the Canadian indie film scene since his 1989 feature, Roadkill, picked up the prize for Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto International Film Festival. He struck gold again with 1996’s Hard Core Logo, a punk rock mockumentary that earned critical accolades and has maintained a cult following ever since. The Tracey Fragments, released in 2007 and starring Juno’s Ellen Page, received mixed reviews, but it was also the director’s most ambitious work. After that film’s split screens and occasionally impressionistic imagery, Pontypool’s rigidly straightforward construction is almost shocking.

“After Tracey, which was an almost baroque visual experiment in fragmentation and memory and imagination, Pontypool was such a great antidote,” McDonald explains. “It’s such a T-bone-steak-and-potato kind of thing. We were very conscious from the start, the [director of photography] and the designer, we thought, ‘let’s just press reset, pretend we’re making a film for the first time.’ We knew very much that the more the attention could be just on the performers, the better it would be. The more invisible the style was in this one, the better it would be.”

Two decades into his directorial career, McDonald is experienced enough to know that invisible doesn’t equal haphazard. Pontypool, his first horror film, is shot with an eye for detail and contains nary a wasted shot. Set almost entirely in a church basement that doubles as a talk-radio station in Pontypool, Ontario, the film makes the most of its minimal surroundings — the radio equipment is appropriately outdated, and the basement setting makes for a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere.

More than that, though, the radio station setting allows the film to focus on the power of language in our society. When bizarre things start happening around the town of Pontypool, the station’s staff must try to piece together scattered reports and under-informed news clips to figure out what’s happening outside their own front door. Based on a novel by Tony Burgess, the film was originally conceived as a radio play, and this origin comes through clearly in the tension the film wrings out of every bit of narration.

“[Burgess and I] just got talking about this idea of Grant Mazzy [the station’s morning DJ, played by Stephen McHattie], a character that sits in this glass booth, this soundproof booth, and experiences the world through his computer,” says McDonald. “He’s got a computer in there, a telephone, microphone, people talking in his ear, right? He’s this character who experiences the world in a virtual way. And that’s interesting, the fact that so many of us now experience that in a big way. We’re at work, or working on the computer, and we talk to our friends or hear about how 500 people got stampeded by cattle in India, and we go, wow, that’s fucked up. Our experience is very virtual, I guess, rather than playing baseball or fucking in the stairwell, or whatever it is that is fun.”

That everyday virtual experience is a big part of what makes Pontypool so creepy. For the technologically inclined, it’s never been easier to feel plugged into the world around you. From 24-hour cable networks to RSS feeds and compulsive Blackberry usage, it’s possible to receive up-to-the-second information about just about everything, just about everywhere. However, just as Pontypool celebrates the power of the spoken (and written) word, it also shows the limits of that power — when speech is all you have to go on, that sense of connection can be misleading.

“Are we as plugged in as we think we are?” McDonald asks. “Probably not, and it’s not for lack of technology, it’s for lack of the truth in a way. In this case, [Mazzy], for the first big chunk, he thinks this is some kind of big trick. How could this be happening? So he raises his own doubts. And then you think of all the fucking information you get from wherever, who’s to say half of it isn’t just shit? That it isn’t just people making shit up and just having a laugh? So, by being plugged in, I assume that that term means being aware in the world and having a clear relationship with what’s going on. You could just be a super-bright, engaged person, or you could just have YouTube and everything literally plugged in. But I guess it’s the difference between knowing what’s just weirdo ranting and what’s actual semi-true information.”

Without giving away too much of the film’s twist on the zombie genre, Pontypool takes the idea of warped information and warped language to an extreme. Like the best horror, it’s timely and familiar without being forced or preachy. It even touches on Canada’s seemingly eternal language conflicts, tapping into our national identity in a sly, infectious way. It’s that rarest of rare things — a Canadian film that demands to be seen, strictly on its own merits. McDonald is clearly pleased with the film’s reception so far, and he’s far from finished with the source material. Two sequels are already planned (or at least “pretty much written,”) and, assuming folks come to see the first one, McDonald knows exactly what to do.

“The first one is ‘what the fuck’s going on,’” he says of the potential trilogy. “The second one is, ‘this is what’s going on.’ And the third one is the aftermath.”

Tuya's Marriage

Tuya’s Marriage isn’t the sort of film that cares about winning over its audience. The story of a woman who divorces her crippled husband to find a man who can support the both of them (and their children), it would be harsh even without its unforgiving Inner Mongolian setting. Add in a harsh climate, a parched landscape and the constant encroachment of the modern world on a traditional shepherding lifestyle, and you have a decidedly bleak picture.

Nan Yo plays Tuya, a woman worn down by every front of her life. Her husband injured himself trying to dig a well — he only made it far enough to dig a reservoir, which still needs to be filled from a well 15 km away. Her neighbour is a (somewhat) lovable loser whose wife repeatedly leaves him, and who has a knack for getting into roadside accidents. And her labour-intensive lifestyle has taken its toll as well — a doctor tells her that any more strenuous work would leave her as incapacitated as her husband. Hence the divorce, and the search for a new husband.

Though it’s not exactly played for laughs, the search for a suitor is one of the film’s few lighthearted segments. Strong and determined because of her harsh life and pretty despite it, Tuya is desired by folks from far and wide, and they beat a path straight to her door, asking each other for directions along the way. None of them are willing to put up with Tuya’s apparently emasculating demand that her new husband must take care of her ex, though, until the appearance of a middle-school friend who’s struck it rich in the oil industry.

Although Tuya is the one searching for a caretaker, it’s clear that the men around her need her far more than she needs them. Yo’s performance captures Tuya’s frustration and inner strength perfectly — she never appears beaten, but is often hovering in the space between hope and defeat. It’s a remarkably naturalistic performance, matched by the non-professionals who take on the rest of the roles. These amateurs can be awkward, but it’s entirely in keeping with their characters, and only heightens Yo’s presence.

Though it has elements of romance, Tuya’s Marriage is more a tale of perseverance. Tuya’s husband, suitors and lifestyle are all hopeless — it’s as if every element has been specifically constructed to provide the greatest struggle possible. And while it never builds to a Hollywood triumph, it doesn’t really need to. In the face of that kind of world, avoiding defeat can be a triumph in itself.

The Burning Hell -- Baby (Weewerk)

Matthias Korn, mastermind of The Burning Hell, has always been clever, and his music perfectly capable of catchiness, too. Even so, Baby is a surprise. Korn’s previous album, Happy Birthday, drowned its potential in one too many mournful ballads — fans of the ukulele maestro’s live show were confused to discover how little of his energy carried through onto the recordings.

There’s no such problem here. Bouncy opener “Old World” is the rule, not the exception — a nostalgic ode to the prenatal home none of us can return to. From there, Korn goes on to chronicle morbid tales (“Grave Situation Part 3,” featuring a guest spot by Canada’s weirdest one-man-band, Wax Mannequin), historical conferences (“The Berlin Conference”) and bizarre relationship metaphors (“The Things that People Make, Part 2”). That last one is a particular standout — how could you not love lyrics like “You’ll be the last giant panda bear, I’ll be the last giant panda bear sperm”?

The hidden track works both as a conclusion and a punchline — a seven-minute back-and-forth between Korn and The Barmitzvah Brothers’ Jenny Mitchell, it mocks both The Burning Hell’s more maudlin tendencies and Mitchell’s perpetual whimsy. A little bit of self-awareness goes a long way.

Solomon Nagler interview

The phrase “low-budget experimental film” is enough to send shivers down even the most dedicated cinephile’s spine. It conjures visions of baffling Dadaism and interpretive dance — an incomprehensible language accessible only to those who spend a lifetime studying its subtleties. The fact is, though, there are no prerequisites — understanding experimental film is child’s play.

“Experimental film starts from a point of naiveté,” says filmmaker Solomon Nagler. “What we’re interested in is pure emotion with no preconditions as to a specific lexicon of filmmaking. What we’re interested in is the same sort of thing that a child is interested in when they see different tones of green for the first time — just this pure, guttural impression.”

Nagler is an acclaimed filmmaker whose work has been screened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Lincoln Center in New York, as well as at festivals and cinematheques across North America. He’s also a professor of film production at the NSCAD University in Halifax — in other words, he might seem overqualified to make such a statement. After all, since emerging from the Winnipeg film scene, Nagler has spent a lifetime grappling with the intricacies of experimental film. His resumé doesn’t change his point, though, and Nagler isn’t the only one who sees super-independent cinema as a childlike — if not necessarily childish — affair.

“There’s an experimental film festival in Paris where part of their programming mandate is to show these experimental films to children,” he says. “It’s because children have this idea that there’s nothing stopping them from being able to see film as pure experience, and not necessarily coming to it with preconditioned needs to understand a film in a certain way.

“I want people to feel my films more than understand them,” he continues. “What I’m hoping for is that people who come to the screening don’t have a history of experimental film and don’t have an understanding of certain underground filmmaking techniques, because I want them to experience things freshly, without any preconceptions.”

That’s exactly how Nagler was introduced to the medium. Originally a philosophy student with an interest in music and photography, he stumbled into film almost by accident. It was only through trial and error that he found his voice in film and gained an appreciation for all of the influences that go into a single strip of celluloid.

“When I first was introduced to the filmmaking process, [what interested me] was that it was this medium which embraced almost every single art form and just sort of synthesized it into one medium,” he explains. “If you have an interest in music, the rhythm and the structure in music is really related to film structure — in fact, it’s probably one of the art forms that is closest to it. If you’re interested in theatre or poetry, writing, everything really is integrated into film.”

On Thursday, March 5, Calgary audiences will have a chance to put Nagler’s beliefs to the test. The Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers is presenting a retrospective of Nagler’s work, dubbed Prairie Mysticism after one of his more narrative works, at the $100 Film Festival. Like fellow Winnipegger Guy Maddin (who will coincidentally be at the Alberta College of Art and Design on Thursday, screening his My Winnipeg), Nagler’s films run the gamut from inscrutable images to highly stylized narratives, mixing documentary and fantasy elements. Even if you can’t piece together what’s going on, the films have a dramatic, unsettling resonance — they stick with you in ways that mainstream films can’t. And that’s exactly the purpose of the $100 Film Festival.

“It’s an incredibly sophisticated festival, and I think people will be really rewarded if they go and are open to explore something which is really particular to this city,” Nagler says. “It’s something that is really reaching world-renowned status. It’s intimate cinema — it’s not about amplifying everything. Intimate cinema is another form of cinema that’s more about [communicating] person to person than person to 10 million people, and people will be very rewarded and very inspired to experience these films.”