Snowy Berlin warms to Kanadiers Maple Leaf cinema is well represented and well respected at this 57th annual festival NAOMI BUCK
From Monday's Globe and Mail
BERLIN — The Berlin Film Festival opened last Thursday in turbulent fashion. As Berlin was being assaulted by the season's first "snow storm" (three hours of snow that melted on impact), local papers gave more space to the stars who had cancelled than those who would be attending. And then Chinese censors withdrew Li Yu's competition film Lost in Beijing to remove all shots of Tiananmen Square and dirty street scenes.
On the Canadian front, though, things were a lot more harmonious.
Sitting in his glassy wedge of an office overlooking Potsdamer Platz, the festival's nerve centre, program director Wieland Speck swoons at the mention of Canada. "I just love Canadian cinema," says Speck, the Canadian flag hanging in front of the Canadian embassy across the street behind him.
For the last 15 years, Speck has programmed the Panorama section of the festival, which forms the middle ground between the main competition films vying for the Golden Bear and the Forum of experimental films. Of the 50 films in Panorama this year, three are Canadian. With an additional five films in the Forum and a total of 12 films for sale on the market, this is one of Canada's most robust showings ever at the Berlin festival.
Running in the Panorama section are Away from Her, the directorial debut of actress Sarah Polley, along with two world premieres -- Poor Boy's Game by Clement Virgo and Bruce McDonald's The Tracey Fragments, which opened the series. Speck, who attends the festivals in Toronto and Montreal every year to scout for films, maintains that Canadian movies distinguish themselves in their diversity and their "very particular way of depicting the North American reality."
"There is a major difference from American film," he says. "Canadian creativity is more playful, more open to the world. It considers more to be possible."
An ethnographer and filmmaker by training, Speck feels that beyond its aesthetic qualities, Canadian film contains important lessons for German audiences. He cites Polley's film, about a woman coming to terms with Alzheimer's disease, and Virgo's tale of a racist boxer who is redeemed through an interracial encounter in jail, as examples of Canada's social progressiveness.
"We spend a lot of time looking to the Netherlands as a model, but in fact Canada could play this role," says Speck. Polley's film, he claims, shows a model of health care worth emulating, and Virgo "has combined the issues of homophobia and racism in a way I've never seen before in film."
While festival favourites, Canadian films have a hard time reaching wider audiences in Germany. Speck regrets that German distributors, when looking for a North American film, usually choose American. "The American market is generally seen as a huge advantage," he says. "But because Canada doesn't have a market on that scale, it sees film as art. I don't know exactly how Canada's subsidy system works; all I can say is that, based on the results, it does work."
There are ample examples of art films on this year's Canadian palette. The Tracey Fragments explores the inner life of 15-year-old Tracey (played by Ellen Page), who runs away from home to search for her brother Sonny, who thinks he is a dog. The entire film is split-screen, depicting various facets of Tracey's consciousness, which is full of visions of crows, horses and tins of pork and beans.
Following the film's screening on opening night, a German critic on a cane asked McDonald what kind of an audience he had in mind when making the film, to which the jubilant director replied from below the brim of his cowboy hat, "People who take a lot of drugs."
Among the Canadian entries in the Forum are two films by Quebec filmmaker Catherine Martin: Spirit of Places, a study of the vestiges of rural life in the Charlevoix region, and In the Cities, a slow-moving feature about four souls lost in a large city, starring Robert Lepage. Canadian actors featured in the festival include Arsinée Khanjian, in Gariné Torossian's Stone Time Touch, a documentary essay on Armenian identity, and the late Nell Shipman, who is seen in a restored copy of the 1920 film Something New, being shown in the festival's Retrospective.
Associated Canadian events include an installation by video artist Deirdre Logue at the Canadian embassy, and an exhibition of photographs by Edward Burtynsky in conjunction with the market screening of Jennifer Baichwal's documentary about Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes.
Eagerly anticipated is a screening of Guy Maddin's experimental film Brand upon the Brain in Berlin's opera house. The silent film will be accompanied by a live orchestra, castrati and foley artists, and narrated by Isabella Rossellini. The event has been dubbed "the most unusual" in this year's festival. The distinction is not to be sniffed at at a festival that also offers cooking lessons inspired by spectacular meals in cinema history, and a lecture by British filmmaker Peter Greenaway entitled Cinema Is Dead, Long Live Cinema.
Although Canada has not landed any films in this year's main competition, Speck is pleased with the Canadian presence. "Berlin audiences tend towards the critical and the radical, so Canadian films are well received here," he says. "Now we just have to get them into the cinemas."
Das Kanada Forum
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13.02.2007 08:00
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