Culture Watch, Page Two

Simon
2003, Netherlands, 102 min., subtitles
Director: Eddie Terstall

Recognitions: Best Actor and nominated for Best Narrative Feature, Tribeca, 2005; Golden Calf for Best Director, Actor and Film, plus the Audience Award at the Nederlands Film Festival, 2004, where it was the opening film.

As a shy young dental student, Camiel is nearly run over by the flamboyant Simon on the streets of Amsterdam. Although very different people, they bond in the hospital emergency room and leave firm friends.  Simon owns a café, deals drugs a little on the side and makes ends meet as a movie stuntman. His free-spirited friends and sexually hyperactive lifestyle are a revelation to Camiel. But after a while their lives are too different and they loose touch. 

As the movie opens, they bump into each other on the street, after a fourteen-year gap.  Simon now has two Thai children, adopted while he was doing stunts for a movie set in Thailand, and Camiel is a successful dentist. Camiel, now openly gay, lives with Bram, his long-time partner, while Simon turns out to be dying from a terminal brain tumour.

Why It Matters: Explores the ground when the focus of life shifts from joyous discovery to the terror of death.The director skillfully interweaves the deep issues of parenthood, gay marriage and voluntary euthanasia in a relaxed, light- hearted way that, while denying convention, shows that beneath surface differences, it’s others who make life, however brief, worth living. A really warm and wonderful film.

Aristide and The Endless Revolution
2004, USA/Switzerland, 82 min., documentary
Director: Nicolas Rossier

"Informative and very moving. An excellent film about the sad recent political history of Haiti…."
Richard Peña, Program Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center

An intelligent examination of Haiti’s 2004 coup d’état. The film investigates the systemic violence and human rights violations that erupted under the country’s interim government — and was mostly suppressed in the mainstream press.

Why It Matters: The film highlights a complex historical incident and spotlights Haiti’s deteriorating condition since twice democratically elected president Jean-Baptiste Aristide’s exile at the hands of the western powers. It's not Artistide and his supporters who emerge looking like thugs, but international interests concerned with suppressing popular democracy and ending the reforms the popular Aristide seemed capable of making, despite embargoes and the need to service a debt for loans Haiti never received. The director’s even-handed approach allows the facts to speak for themselves, and has produced an informative and moving film.

Kings of The Sky
USA, 2004, 68 min., English, Uighur and Mandarin, some subtitles, documentary
Director: Deborah Stratman

Writer's Note: We found this film at last year’s Seattle International Film Festival, where it was featured in the New Pioneers, Women in Cinema section, and we’re thrilled to have discovered that it’s now available on DVD.

The story of Adil Hoxur, a Uighur tightrope walker, who comes from a family of performers who have upheld the tradition of Dawaz (tightrope balancing) in an unbroken lineage for over 500 years. He and his troupe tour the borders of Chinese Turkestan’s Taklamakan (the second largest shifting sand desert in the world whose name literally means: “you go in but you don’t come out”), performing nightly in tiny oasis villages.

In 1997, he broke the Guinness World Record for tightrope walking — a feat which led to his becoming a national hero among his people, the Turkic Muslim Uighurs. Apparently, Adil bears an uncanny resemblance to the Dawaz hero of an old Uighur myth who freed his countrymen from an oppressive reign of invading ghosts — an apt metaphor for the ongoing tension between the Uighurs and the Han Chinese.

Why It Matters: The filmmaker spent four months focusing on small, everyday truths, to create an unforgettable film about balance. In her own words: “Kings of the Sky is a film about seeking balance: balance between minority separatist yearnings and Han Chinese rule ... balance between ancient cultural traditions and modern technologies … balance between an American filmmaker and a remote Muslim community ... and balance between our flightless bodies and the eternal laws of gravity."

Availability: Only from the producers at
www.peripheralproduce.com/catalog.php
The DVD runs 140 min and includes two other Deborah Stratman films: In Order Not To Be Here, 2003, USA, 30 min., winner, Best Experimental Film, Humboldt Short Film Festival, Arcata, CA, 2003; and From Hetty To Nancy, 1997, USA, 44 min. Look for Peripheral Produce No. 13 entitled Something Like Flying, and be sure to select the “personal use” option and not the more expensive “academic use”.

Last Mogul: The Life and Times of Lew Wasserman
2005, Canada/USA, 110 min., documentary
Not based on Connie Bruck’s book When Hollywood Had a King
Director: Barry Avrich

Canadian Barry Avrich’s investigation of Lew Wasserman, a sharp street-smart go-getter from the American 1930s underworld, who rose to become the most powerful man in Hollywood. A protégé of MCA talent agency founder, Jules Stein, he became the agency’s man in Hollywood, where Ronald Regan was one of his first clients. When MCA bought Universal Studios, Lew became the very model of a Hollywood mogul. An absorbing story for anyone who wants to rub shoulders with fame … discretely; Wasserman was famous for his paper-free desk and a preference for secrecy in both his private life and his business dealings.

A Canterbury Tale
1944, UK, 124 min., B/W, 2 disc Criterion ed.
Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

One of the “lost” Powell/Pressburger classics, this film is a World War II version of that most British of stories, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
It tells the tale of two soldiers, one British, one American, and an English “Land Girl”, and how they came to be modern-day pilgrims to Canterbury Cathedral.

Why It Matters: An analog for Chaucer’s stories, set against the backdrop of war, the film features characters who are all searching for something, and whose answers can all be found at Canterbury. The cinematography beautifully conveys the glories of an England which was fast disappearing even at the time war broke out. Wandering on the downs or watching the locals’ quiet unity in the face of wartime, shortages, etc., we feel a strong pull of nostalgia for the personal and communal life those times evoked. Dismissed by critics and rejected by the British public at the time of its release, this film is now considered a masterpiece.

Sybil
1976, USA, 198 min.
Director: Daniel Petrie (Cocoon, Wild Iris)

Recognitions: Emmy for practically everything including Outstanding Special, Outstanding Lead Actress (Sally Field), writing and music,
1977; Nominated for Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Made for TV, 1977
Based on the book of the same name by Flora Rheta Schreiber

A TV psychodrama that became a hit, this film is based on the true story of Sybil Dorsett (protective fictitious name) who was one of the first medically identified cases of multiple personality disorder.

Sybil (an astonishing performance by Sally Field) seems to have begun creating alternative personalities as a defence against her sadistic, schizophrenic mother. As a desperate young adult, she met psychiatrist Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, (Joanne Woodward) who took her on and persevered through as many as 16 different 'personalities' to help her patient integrate her various selves into one coherent whole.

Why It Matters: It’s now thirty years since Sybil was committed to celluloid, but the film will still hold your attention. Interestingly, Dr. Wilbur comes to see Sybil's many personalities as protectors, pieces of her self that broke off to surround her with a self-made ring of love and protection from her traumatic childhood. As an adult, Sybil depends on them to jump in and assist her in moments of stress. The doctor’s solution is to introduce Sybil to each of her alter egos and to then attempt to integrate them back into a whole. A difficult watch, but highly recommended.

Return to Page One of Angela Pressburger's August DVD Reviews<<

---

Angela Pressburger grew up in the film industry (father Emeric Pressburger made The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and Stairway to Heaven). She has been been an international program consultant at the Vancouver International Film Festival for the past ten years, and has spoken about film and sat on festival juries in both Europe and North America.  She has recently written Show It in Public! — a grassroots guide to showing film in public (www.showamovie.ca) and keeps busy writing reviews for her home video for discerning viewers website, MapToMovies.com

Culture Watch Archives