Vancouver Dispatch. 2.

Yes, VIFF ended two weeks ago, and yes, I'm late, but I owe it to the festival to get in one last piece so I can cover just a few of the North American premieres in Vancouver's indispensable Dragons and Tigers line-up of Asian cinema. What I appreciate about the selection is that it's focused on capturing early works and films that engage the state of their local cultures. They aren't necessarily the greatest works coming out of the country, but they are a snapshot of the film culture and an early look into the work of directors who very likely grow into major filmmakers.

Of the 50 programs (feature films, documentaries and programs of shorts), plus bonus short films playing in front of films, well over half were shot and/or presented in some video format, many of them on what appears to be consumer or pro-sumer formats. Just like the micro-budget boom in the US, it's opened up filmmaking to a lot more filmmakers, and just like in the US, the results vary by ambition and talent. Format is no measure of quality.

Case in point: Tropical Manila, a shot-on-video production set and shot in the Philippines from South Korean director Lee Sang-Woo. In the realm of dysfunctional families, this is perhaps the most disturbingly screwed up. The Korean father, counting down the days before he can return home, treats his Filipino wife like a hooker at best and livestock at worst. The mixed race son hates his father and identifies himself only as Filipino; with such a role model for Korean identity, it's no wonder. It's a brutal film and the filmmaking is equally brutal, explicit in some scenes (Lee is not shy about chronicling degrading sexual experiences or private bodily functions with point-blank directness) and circumspect in others (the father is a former gangster running out the calendar on the statute of limitations in Manila, a fact that local Korean audiences may pick up from clues but is nowhere explained for the rest of us). It's also very exacting in its imagery and its editing, which is jarring and brutal in its own right. Lee foregrounds the emotional brutality that the father exercises on his wife and his son and churns up the humiliation and anger that simmers under the grim expression of the increasingly defiant son. After all these years I still haven't warmed to the look of video productions, but here it adds a stark, naked quality to the imagery.

Less effective is Blink, a Philippines production set in the slums of the Quiapo district of Manila. It opens with a promising mix of "documentary" footage of people on the streets and the narrative drama of Ambet, the hustler and small-time petty thief and go-between who looks after his little sister and lives in an abandoned building. Director Ronaldo Bertubin drives through Ambet's petty scams and his increasingly dangerous turn as guide to a freelance videographer with a headlong momentum and a restless camera that seems unsure exactly where it should be (an acquaintance chalks it up to a director who doesn't know how to frame a shot, and the haphazard compositions tend to support the observation). But for all the details of the street level petty crimes and scams, it's elementary storytelling in the tradition of the overheated Filipino slum melodrama, with thin characters sketched in broad brushstrokes wandering through an increasingly generic crime story. The smeary video images, with blown out whites and oversaturated colors, doesn't lend any realism to the melodrama.

Ying Liang's Good Cats is a slackly directed chronicle of an educated young man in Sichuan, China, content to play flunky to a building developer who operates a lot like a gangster. It's kind of cool when, at certain points in the film, a portion of the screen lights up to reveal a rock band that launches in to a song, and there's a genuinely startling moment when we fleetingly see what looks like a body fall past a window in a high-rise stairwell. The way the camera holds on that otherwise vacant stairwell, the window hauntingly looking out onto an empty blue sky, creates a tension out of our need to know exactly what we saw. But otherwise it loses the tension in lazily constructed and shot scenes and the fuzzy visuals of consumer video equipment. The most interesting aspect of the familiar story of a young man working in the cracks of legitimate entrepreneurship is the portrait of a boom economy collapsing as foreclosures rise and credit dries up. Now that sounds familiar.

With Yin Lichuan's Knitting, we move out of the scrappy video production into the realm of films made on film, but remain in the culture of young folks leaving rural villages and scrambling to find their place in the burst of capitalist entrepreneurship in the urban centers of China. Knitting focuses on an uneasy romantic triangle sustained as much by opportunity and necessity as by emotion, maybe even more. It's not like we see any real chemistry between Chen Jin, a guy hustling any job he can get, and his girlfriend Li, a small town girl in vision and ambition. When Chen's old girlfriend, Zhang, comes swaggering into their cheap apartment and into their lives and makes Chen a partner in her mercenary schemes, Li's back is up and Chen is utterly oblivious. Or he simply doesn't care. The film rambles on but it is an interesting look at particular subculture of the poor trying to carve a living out of the city: rural young trying to make their mark in the urban world, Northerners looked down upon by the Southern city folk, outsiders who band together for comfort and support even if they don't really like each other.

From South Korea, Kim Tae-Kyun's Crossing is a much bigger film, in scope, in ambition and in budget. This is ostensibly a social drama about the poverty and deprivation and political repression of North Korea and the horrors that happen when a man tries to cross into China to get medicine for his pregnant wife, dying of tuberculosis caused by malnutrition. His plight is turned into political theater and the family left back home suffers for it, not that Kim is any less manipulative in his storytelling. This is politics as melodrama and Kim wrings every last emotional drop with lingering shots on suffering faces and weepy music played on audience heartstrings. There's no denying his skill as he plays every setback for emotional impact, but for all his efforts to show the human condition as a victim of political posturing on both sides of the border, it ultimately comes off as a different kind of propaganda.

Yang Ya-Che's Orz Boys from Taiwan belongs to another genre, the fantasies of boys who get into trouble as a way of escaping lives of emotional abandonment. The inseparable schoolboys are nicknamed Liar No. 1 and Lair No. 2 by an exasperated principal and the names stick so firmly that even family takes to calling them No. 1 and No. 2 from that point on. As of the film's screening at VIFF, Orz Boys (the title refers to a particular emoticon of surprise or wonder - you might translate the title as "Wonder Boys") was a rare Taiwanese-born film hit in Taiwan. It's easy to see why. While it's bright and funny and full of personality, it also has poignancy that is only seen in the details and never directly addressed in speech or moral. No. 2 has been left by his father in the care of a single grandmother, who is none too happy to be playing parent once again, while the older No. 1 is practically orphaned. His father is mentally incapacitated, a wandering crazy-man who is harmless and utterly incapable of caring for his son, and his mother living and working abroad, or so the boy says and we take it on faith. Maybe because the alternative is harder to deal with. But Yang never wallows in their hardship and never stops to make a social cause speech. He focuses on the humor of their survival skills - pranks, cons, games, flights of fantasy - where they have, for however long, fleeting control of lives without an anchor. For all their bad behavior (which is, at is worst, thoughtless rather than malevolent), I was won over by them, because of their loyalty and their imagination and that spark of being kids that is so alive in them. The story takes some sad turns, but the film itself is always keyed into their energy and what they do to persevere.

One last note: VIFF's festival trailers are traditionally among the best and most clever in North America. The festival website has links to all of them if you'd like to check them out or revisit favorites. They're spot on and have terrific comic timing, but more than that, they are obviously the work of film lovers and festival veterans who manage to both spoof and celebrate excesses, the frustrations and the rarified personality of film festival culture. And the trailers can still be seen here.

The VIFF 2008 award winners can be found here.

- Sean Axmaker

Posted by dwhudson at October 26, 2008 4:42 AM