As Education Officer for SAVAC (The South Asian Visual Arts Centre), Allan conducted two workshops to discuss Sharlene Bamboat's film, Tapestry, at yesterday's Asian Heritage Month Symposium. The Toronto District School Board and Toronto Catholic District School Board organized the event at OISE all day yesterday. Classes of grades 9 through 11 discussed the challenges of maintaining and understanding their parents' traditions in multicultural Canada.
The West Coast loves DESI. The Okanagan International Film Festival has chosen the short documentary by Allan Tong to play at its annual festival taking place July 21-25 in lovely Kelowna, B.C. Desi2 has already screened in San Diego, Vancouver and Portland.
Screening times will appear on the Okanagan site as soon as renovations are done, but sign up at the festival's Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=36407298283&ref=ts&v=info
Carla Zilbersmith is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease and laughing all the way to her grave. She's a comedian and singer, and making audiences laugh is her way of fighting death and accepting her fate. This is a touching film with a sad undertone, lightened by laughs. Like all comedians not every one-liner by Zilbersmith is a zinger and some jokes fall flat, but that's not the point. It's her battle against death that's the theme. Her relationship with her son is particular honest and resonant with son switching roles with his mother to be the caregiver. Music cues are one too many and tend to sound sentimental. They are unnecessary, since Zilbersmith's story is strong enough on its own.
Director Zaritsky returns to the theme of death after his successful Suicide Tourist a few Hot Docs ago with another strong documentary.
Young, German filmmaker David Sieveking takes the advice of his idol, David Lynch, and studied transcendental meditation (TM), which was founded by the same guru whom The Beatles embraced in 1968, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. David embraces TM and one days hope to "fly" while cross-legged in the meditative position, which looks like a dodo hopping across the floor.
Problem is, the deeper he delves, the more inconsistencies he uncovers: a power struggle that erupts after Maharashi dies; an estate worth billions; the German yogi who wants to open an institute to make Germany "invincible" again, which sounds like Hitler to some; finding a former assistant who poured his savings into serving TM until he was tossed away; a woman whom Maharishi seduced then abandoned; a disillusioned donor who poured $150 million into TM; and so on.
I don't know if Sieveking set out to expose TM or if it came about by serendipity. What's more convincing is TM being a cult with gurus riding stretch limos, mind control, and lawsuits threatening nosy filmmakers.
Oddly enough, Sieveking uses his rocky relationship with his girlfriend as a subplot and it somehow works. Their rollercoaster romance emotionally grounds the film, which is really an investigative piece but told in a wide-eyed tongue-in-cheek manner. David Wants To Fly won't expand your consciousness, but open your eyes.
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Cash-strapped Russia is now sending tourists into outer space. Well-helled businesswoman Anousheh Ansari is willing to pay $20-million to don a space suit and orbit the Earth for a week. We cheer her for fulfilling her childhood dream of beholding the world inside her capsule. Back on Earth, Kazakh scavengers salvage valuable, but dangerous rocket debris that tumble from the sky after each flight. What are dreams to one person is dinner to another.
Though an award-winner at Sundance, Space Tourists suffers from a languid pace and muddled storytelling. There are some intriguing threads here and contrasts to be made. However, I found the pacing too slow to hold my interest and felt that the story meandered in the middle, despite breathtaking footage of the heavens and intriguing characters like Ansari.
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The little Baltic nation of Estonia was a pain in the butt of the old Soviet empire, according to this entertaining, tongue-in-cheek doc. Lying across the Gulf of Finland was a bourgeois capitalist country that beamed decadent Western shows into Estonian TVs that were rigged with an illegal antenna. Shows like "Dallas" undermined the Workers Paradise, because those antennae as well as videotapes of those shows spread across the Soviet empire like a virus.
Never mind Reagan and rampant corruption, "Who Shot J.R?" and the soft-porn classic Emmanuellehelped bring down the U.S.S.R. Director Klimi sets the right tone throughout. He weaves together stock footage and excerpts from vintage Estonian and Finnish TV (the disco footage is hilarious) to poke fun at the bad old Soviets, but features interviews with historians to keep his story grounded and complex. Tune in, comrade.
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