Identity crisis
Does B.C. have a unique cinematic voice, one that tells a story about ourselves?
The 34th Vancouver International Film festival will draw thousands of the film-hungry from their homes to share in the unique and increasingly rare experience of in-theatre movie watching. This is the third year the festival has offered a B.C. Spotlight series, turning the audience’s attention to local auteur-driven dramas and documentaries, the kind of homegrown movies that deserve audiences and distribution deals but too often are lost in the long shadow Hollywood casts over our culture.
Film can entertain like no other medium, but of equal weight is its ability to capture the ethos of a moment and identity, the cultural narrative of a place and time. But whether we in B.C., the third largest film production centre in North America, really have a unique cinematic voice, one that tells us a story about ourselves and gives us cultural visibility, is still a question.
Vancouver recently had a starring role as the ultimate invisible character in a video essay created by former Vancouver film school student Tony Zhou, whose conclusions about our plight are reflected in the title he chose: Vancouver Never Plays Itself. The mash-up of made-in-Vancouver film clips illustrates all the ways Zhou feels the shotin-Vancouver Hollywood movies lie, rather than reveal truths, although one truth does emerge: with clips showing the city disguised as everywhere but here, as stand-in for North Korea, Seattle, the Bronx, Japan, Chicago, we are a place that perhaps too easily and too often pretends to be somewhere and someone else.
Maybe movies are at their best and most entertaining when they are only about illusions, but what if we can’t win even when we achieve the illusion? When B.C. filmmaker Mina Shum followed up her critically acclaimed film Double Happiness with the road move Drive, She Said, the Hollywood entertainment magazine Variety shot her down for eradicating “any sign of Canadian identity in the story’s setting, which is simply generic North American.”
How do we become ourselves artistically if we need major U.S. distribution to bring the wide audiences, big box office and major awards that have come to define industry success? How do we avoid the bad case of cultural cringe that any whiff of Canadian content rules can give us, but still tell our own stories? What are our own stories, anyway? If it is auteur filmmakers, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Lars von Trier, Akira Kurosawa, Denys Arcand — whose works evoke a sense of place, a cultural moment, who are ours?
Terry McEvoy, who screened more than 70 independent B.C. films this year to winnow down the 12 featured in the B.C. Spotlight series, said rather than looking for a singular voice that defines the many in B.C., “our filmmakers form a unique choir with their voices.”
Rather than lament our landscape’s invisibility, he sees two distinct models of filmmaking that in some ways support each other. There is a lucrative film and television service industry that spends millions of dollars to produce American films, the kind of films where we stand in for someplace else. Then there is a thriving indie sector fed by multiple local film schools and programs, with creative feeds into sectors such as gaming, animation, music and video.
Most importantly, said McEvoy, the B.C. Spotlight isn’t part of the program because B. C. filmmakers need special help. Local films, especially shorts, were bringing big audiences at VIFF screenings. “Vancouver has an incredibly sophisticated audience. This is audience-driven. We saw the desire.”
McEvoy, whose official VIFF title is Canadian Images Programmer, doesn’t select films because they remind him of home. “For B.C. Spotlight it has to be a film that will sell tickets and that will satisfy people. It has to be promotable and it has to be a B. C. production with a production company based here and a B.C. director.”
One film in the series, Charlotte’s Song, by Done Four Productions and director Nicholas Humphries, was shot in Vancouver but could well win a place in Zhao’s video essay. The “dark homage” to The Little Mermaid sees our city standing in as the American dust bowl.
Among this year’s feature film selections, The Devout, made by Victoria writer/director Connor Gaston, is perhaps most emblematic of how fertile the ground is here. Gaston is an extraordinarily talented emerging auteur. The film is haunting and spare; watching it unfold feels like entering a sanctuary of private lives, with turns and reversals that spark like precisely aimed fireworks, illuminating the story at exactly the right moments.
Gaston, 26, studied screenwriting at the University of Victoria and moved into filmmaking simply because he wanted to see the films he was writing made and made well. Gaston said when he wrote the story that explores reincarnation in the context of a young Christian family, he imagined it set “somewhere in the southern states, like the Bible Belt.” Budget constraints (he had about $ 100,000 funded by Telefilm) kept him in B.C., which worked to his advantage. B.C.’s brooding grey skies look like grief itself, and the rainsoaked roads perfectly mirror the interior landscape of a family struggling with grief and searching for hope.
The Devout will premiere at VIFF Oct. 2, and just a few hours later at the prestigious Busan International Film Festival (the Cannes of Asia), where it has already been selected as one of 10 films in competition for the Busan Bank Award.
On the documentary slate at B.C. Spotlight, director Charles Wilkinson’s film Haida Gwaii — On the Edge of the World is the third instalment of his award- winning trilogy that includes Peace Out and Oil Sands Karaoke.
Wilkinson graduated from Simon Fraser University’s film program and had a robust career as a commercial filmmaker.
“I spent the bulk of my career directing dramatic movies and television series, and then I just kind of got really, really tired of it. The material stopped meaning anything to me. There was always a guy with a gun, a car chase, a drug deal going down.”
He returned to school, this time to the University of B.C., where he got an MFA in filmmaking. He stepped out of the commercial industry and returned to documentary.
Although there are several filmmakers who successfully combine careers as auteur filmmakers and directors-forhire (Mina Shum’s doc Ninth Floor is part of B.C. Spotlight), Wilkinson said the two industries are rarely symbiotic.
“My perspective on this has evolved over the last five years. I’ve been working on these documentaries in the north in resource-based communities. The syndrome I see in the north is really similar to what I see in the B.C. service industry for film. You see young fellows going up there, they want to do something important with their life, but they get a high-paying job, they get all these toys and cars, they start acquiring payments and 30 years later they realize they’ve been working for a wage their whole lives.”
Wilkinson’s Haida Gwaii is a stunning portrait of a no-logo community that may offer a blueprint for a way of life he believes could change, and perhaps even save, the world.
“On Haida Gwaii you have people talking to each other. As I delved into it, what happened on Haida Gwaii is that the corporations were stopped from clearcutting the archipelago, the Haida and the nonnative populations brought the corporations to heel. Not only did they save the natural world, they upset the economic flow that has such a stranglehold on the rest of the province … People pull together when they perceive an outside threat.”
Wilkinson’s film brings a beautiful perspective, filled with hope. Like the other films in the B. C. Spotlight, it just may be bright enough to divert our attention from that other filmmaking industry that has branded us invisible.