The Guelph International Film Festival
The Art of Resistance
Directed by Alexandra Guite
This will stand as the first movie to ever be protested against at GIFF; before you react first hear what the movie is about because there really isn’t much to get aggrieved about. The film is about the way artistic expression helped cultivate resistance to the dictatorial structure of Argentina. On the streets of Buenos Aires, actors start their own theatre companies to get themselves work; a book store owner turns himself into an independent book publisher with some judicious photocopying and cardboard binding and a mental hospital uses the arts to prepare patients for life outside again. A truly inspirational journey that makes you realize the power of art as a force for change and the power it also has to sustain. Guite’s camera gets some great shots and some insightful interviews with the artists themselves and their patrons as they talk about how deeply the art affects them and why it’s culturally important. And the protest? One of the artists depicted uses religious iconography as a protest against the Church for their complicity in the whims of Argentina’s beloved tyrants. But I guess there’s no pleasing some people.
Change Now For the Future
Directed by Scott McGovern
Scott McGovern’s insightful, heart wrenching, and occasionally funny look inside the life of street kids in Guelph was a wonderful homegrown addition to the Festival. In the film, McGovern gets some rather candid reactions from the youth that frequent the Change Now drop-in centre in Guelph’s downtown core. More than that he lets some of the kids go out with their own cameras and tell their own stories. The drop-in centre is host to a great many characters and I use that term not as a disparagement but as a way of collectively describing how deeply invested I was in these kids and their stories. The simple message of the film comes through load and clear: when you engage youth and give them the means and the encouragement they need, then with the right attitude from them there’s no reason they can’t achieve their goals. These aren’t kids bucking to get rich or famous; they just want to work, be independent, and not be looked upon as a pox on the community but rather a thriving part of it.
The Punks Are Alright
Directed by Douglas Cawford
Not so much a film about punk as it is a film about how punk changes lives; at least that’s how it is according to the trio of worldwide punk rockers featured in this film. We meet the Forgotten Rebels who have been making music out of Hamilton for the better part of 30 years; their best known song is “Surfin’ On Heroin”. Feelin’ them all the way in Sao Paolo Brazil is the Blind Pigs who in turn influence the music of Superman Is Dead based all the way in Indonesia. Cawford does a magnificent job interplaying the three bands and illustrating how punk defies borders and languages. The fact that the movie has great music doesn’t hurt either, but it’s the message of the film that lingers. There’s a hopeful ambition at the heart of the film that says that the future of music and music technology is the way it will inspire others worlds apart but with one spirit.
The Refugee All Stars
Directed by Zach Niles & Banker White
Another film with great music...and although it’s more spiritual than the music of the Blind Pigs, it is no less impactful. Arising from the refugee camps in Eastern Africa where the people of Sierra Leone fled during the brutal war there, a sextet of musicians gain fame amongst the camps for giving harmony and music to their stories. Many of the band members are amputees playing their instruments one handed. All of then have suffered tremendously under the brutalities of war, and their songs capture that sorrow with great lyrical skill, turning it into something uplifting. This is one of those tales that reminds you that even in the most unforgiving kind of ugliness, there’s still tremendous beauty that can be found
Wal-Town
Directed by Sergeo Kirby
This documentary only serves to prove that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. The cameras of filmmaker Sergeo Kirby follow a group of clean cut youngsters who take a cross-country journey to the Wal-Marts of the nation in a grassroots effort to highlight the horrendous record of the corporation on employee wages, human rights in its factories, and the struggle of some stores to unionize. But this isn’t a plebiscite like Robert Greenwald’s Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Prices; the goal of these activists is purely to raise awareness and ask the question, “If Wal-Mart is the richest company in the world, aren’t they then obligated to spread the wealth?” Kirby blinds the viewer with science, like the fact that Wal-Mart is the 22nd largest economy in the world . . . and that includes actual countries. He also does an exceptional job of making the film accessible with a sense of humour and a rational mind. With a movie like this, it’s easy to think the filmmakers are just preaching to the choir, but this is not that movie
The World According to Sesame Street
Directed by Linda Goldstein Knowlton & Linda Hawkins Costigan
For almost forty years Sesame Street has been a pre-school prep course for millions of kids. It was the place I learned my ABCs and how to count to 12, not to mention many a moral and life lesson. This is something I have in common with hundreds of millions of kids around the world, and as the directors of The World According to Sesame Street demonstrate an ever-increasing amount of the world’s children are getting the Sesame Street experience.
The filmmakers mostly follow how the show’s production company, the Sesame Workshop, goes through development on two new Sesame Street series being made in Kosovo and Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi team faces a struggle to get approval on the only broadcast network in the country while finding their production delayed thanks to the worst flooding in that nation’s history. In Kosovo, the challenge is ongoing ethnic tension between Serbs and Albanians, as tension erupts into all-out violence. In between all the obstacles facing the producer, viewers get to look into how every Sesame Street is tailored for the nationality it’ll be airing for, including a look at how the South African production included Kami, a Muppet with HIV.
The camera takes exceptional care to capture all the effort, energy, and emotion that goes into the creation of Sesame Street. It also does an incredible job of showing how every Sesame Production is a complete co-production, as local artists and creators use the Workshop lessons to create a Sesame unique to the hearts and minds of the children of that nation. It uses a lot of great archival footage of the show, but the heart of the movie is watching these people put body and soul into their shows, and sometimes it’s just gut wrenching. Like news clips of American pundits denouncing Kami, blatantly missing the point of having an HIV-positive character on a South African children’s show.
This is a great documentary worth watching because Sesame Street is a part of us all; it’s a universal constant, and now you know why.
..GIFF has been going strong ever since. This year the festival repositioned itself as “A Festival for Moving Media” and came with a theme of finding celebration in the struggle.
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