DO DONKEYS ACT? - Review By Greg Klymkiw - 2017 Hot Docs Hot Pick - Grace of Ungulates

These two sweeties from Do Donkeys Act? in identical pose
I've seen my own sweeties strike on my hobby rescue farm.

Do Donkeys Act? (2016)
Dir. David Redmon, Ashley Sabin
Starring: Willem Dafoe

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"Obviously these other beings do not speak with a human tongue, they do not speak in words. They might speak in song, like many birds, or in rhythm, like the crickets or the ocean waves. They may speak a language of movements and gestures, or articulate themselves in shifting shadows... Step into shade. Listen close." - David Abram, Becoming Animal, opening title card in the film Do Donkeys Act?

Full Disclosure: I own donkeys.

Even if I didn't, I'd love this gloriously poetic film. Much like God Knows Where I Am, last year's masterpiece by the Wider Brothers, Do Donkeys Act? is a documentary that blasts through the preconceptions of the form and delivers precisely the genuine, and I think, true promise of cinema - that of an art form infused with lyrical, almost dactylic qualities. This is not to say that such works must be bereft of "narrative", some of the very best which display these properties embrace a dramatic form. When you see movies like this, you know you are in the presence of greatness.

Do Donkeys Act? is nothing if not great.

The unmistakeable eyes and demeanour of a poet.

David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, the directing team of Girl Model, 2011's powerful, moving exploration of Japan's exploitation of teenage girls from Eastern Europe, train their cameras upon altogether different living beings that have been desecrated, abused and subjected to appalling inhumanity.

Donkeys.

On the surface, the film, like the best art, is simple. We follow donkeys from their admittance to a series of heavenly refuges, the Donkey Sanctuary in Sidmouth, England, Cork, Ireland, Guelph, Canada and upstate New York, and then through a variety of medical/grooming procedures, their daily lives and finally, the sheer peace of what will be their existence until they leave this Earth. Simple? Yes, but as such, it yields a bounty of complexities - some fact-based, others philosophical and finally, pure, raw emotion.

Of course, it is lovely to see the donkeys interacting with their kind, caring human charges, but even more astonishing is seeing these sweet four-legged ungulate mammals communicating with each other.

Though it is a work that blends the great pioneering approaches of Michel Brault and the other legendary Québécois practitioners of Cinéma Direct via the National Film Board of Canada (NFB/ONF) as well as the great Cinéma Vérité artists Chris Marker and Jean Rouch, I was even reminded of the unfettered filmmaking style of cinema's greatest storyteller Robert Bresson. This is not only because of Bresson's dazzling Au hasard Balthazar (its main character being, yes, a donkey) and the occasional references by Redmon and Sabin's film to the Bresson picture, but like Bresson we experience both emotion and ideas by the power of the image itself and the lean stripping away of overt manipulation.

Donkeys living in peace. As should all creatures.

Happily, one thing that Do Donkey's Act? does not strip away is the use of words. Though the film's soundtrack is exquisitely laden with natural sounds (most notably the beauty of the donkeys' braying), there is a "score" of lovely poetic voice-over performed with power and grace over images by Willem Dafoe. I watched this film not knowing until the end title credits that Dafoe was the voice speaking the "poetry" of the language. This was an extra-special treat for me. Throughout the movie I kept thinking, "Jesus, who is this dude? He's amazing!" Well, and so, it turned out, he is (was). In a way, this overall approach reminded me of the brilliant way Terence Davies used the poetry as "score" in his Emily Dickinson biopic A Quiet Passion.

When images and words are infused with poetic grace, you soar in ways that so few films can inspire. Here, however, we have a subject that's more than worthy of this, creatures of the most sublime qualities of grace.

I know all too well. After I write this review, I'm on my way to feed carrots to Shasta and Cindy, my sweet, gentle and graceful donkeys.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

Do Donkeys Act? is a Blue Ice Docs release and enjoys its North American Premiere at Hot Docs 2017 in Toronto.

After its first steps, the baby rests.

GIRL MODEL - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The exploitation of Russian girls as young as age 13 in Japan is examined in a chilling portrait of shattered hopes and dreams within a modelling industry that values youth, beauty and the sexualization of pre-pubescence.

Girl Model (2011)
dir. David Redmon, Ashley Sabin

***1/2

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Much has been documented about the appalling sexual exploitation of women in Eastern Europe - the out and out chicanery that amounts to kidnapping women of all ages and forcing them into sexual slavery the world over. What has not been adequately detailed is the "legal" entrapment of similar young women - desperate to end the crushing poverty they and their families experience in the relatively new "capitalism" of former Soviet countries. Girl Model is just such a film. This extremely harrowing depiction of a perverse business connection that links Siberia to Japan exposes a brutal reality that sadly still exists.

Japan, it seems, always needs meat - fresh, tender, young meat. In the Land of Nippon, the vast publishing industry can never get enough young models to feed the bottomless pit of periodicals that place emphasis upon extolling the virtues of creamy, white, wide-eyed, innocent and highly sexualized female flesh. And as this chilling documentary points out - the younger the better.

In fact, a look of pre-pubescence is what's very often admired. There's certainly nothing ethnocentric or racist in pointing this out. Much of Japan's manga and anime constantly sexualizes innocence of young women - quite openly and with nary a shred of objection. Lord knows I've seen my fair share of it - everything from simple tales of love amongst burgeoning sexuality to wide-eyed animated little girls in school uniforms being pursued and often raped by demons bearing huge snake-like penises.

The film follows two subjects.

The first is Nadya, an innocent 13-year-old girl from Siberia who participates in a modelling cattle-call. She is eventually flown to Japan and endures endless, gruelling "casting" sessions, hoping she'll strike it rich as a model.

The second is Ashley, a beautiful though world-weary former child model from America who ten years earlier worked in Japan and now makes a very good living as a talent scout - plucking these stunningly gorgeous kids from their squalid villages and plunging them before the expert Japanese oglers looking to place these children on and within the pages of the cornucopia of fashion magazines filling shelf space in every conceivable retail outlet.

Nadya's parents naively sign an insane contract in languages (English and Japanese) they do not even understand which includes legalese designed to favour the exploitation of their child. When Nadya arrives in Japan, nobody is there to meet her at the airport and there isn't anyone who can speak Russian. How or where she might have ended up is anyone's guess. It's clear the presence of the filmmakers is what gets her where she needs to be.

Nadya is flung from one casting session to another and there's every indication that some of the photos ARE being bought and sold, but that she's not getting a penny. She's broke, in debt to the agency, achingly lonely and desperately homesick to the point where she breaks down in tears more than once.

Ashley speaks about the freedom her current work as a scout brings her, but within her eyes we see the pain she endured during her own childhood indenture in Japan. She shares her video diaries from that period where she is clearly going through a similar experience that Nadya is now in.

She even questions why she is drawn to luring these children into what she herself suffered. At one point she talks about how these young women need to be on top of the game to make a living from modelling and even admits that those less savvy will use their bodies as strippers or prostitutes.

Interviewed in her American home, what we see is even more horrendous. Ashley's house is clearly modern and upscale, but its interior is utterly bereft of anything representing a personality - those little touches that give either a sense of warmth or character.

The only personal touches are two grotesque looking unclothed baby dolls that she dotes over (she admits there used to be a third that she destroyed limb from plastic limb) and we then follow Ashley into a medical procedure wherein cantelope-sized tumours are removed from her belly - resembling deformed progeny that almost symbolize her desire to have a baby growing in her stomach instead.

One of the most reprehensible figures in the movie is an agency middleman, the Russian-speaking Tigran who, with the straight-faced intonations of a zealot trying to hide the truth from himself and others, claims that he is devoted to saving these young girls from their lot in post-Soviet-Russian life.

If he wasn't adorned in the garb viewed by most North Americans of Eastern European heritage as strictly chic by Old-Country-boys-at-heart standards and if it wasn't for the thin, almost indistinguishable layer of metaphorical slime coating his body, we might actually believe him when he claims that his work is akin to being a "religious matter" - that he is a saviour instead of the glorified pimp really is.

I almost expected Tigran to morph into Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy in the back of the cab with Rod Steiger's Charley in On the Waterfront - paraphrasing the famous Budd Schulberg-scribed speech as something like, "I could'a bin' a saviour, 'stead of a pimp, which is what I yam!"

I watched Girl Model with my 11-year-old daughter. She was riveted throughout, though occasionally gasping open-mouthed and both commenting and questioning how little girls not much older than her were being paraded about as sexual objects. "Are you sure this is real, Dad?" she asked at one point. I nodded. "How can they do this to kids? This is so sick," she responded.

She's right. These are kids. Children. And they are being exploited in a fashion as reprehensible as if they were being immediately tossed into the streets to turn tricks.

Though the film brilliantly doesn't go out of its way to slant the material, it goes a step further in capturing the proceedings with an objective eye - proving, once again, that objectivity can be the harshest point of view of all.

This is a movie that demands to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. It especially demands to be seen by those who only want the best for women in a world which is not changing as rapidly for them as some might believe it is.

See Girl Model.

See it with your daughters.

For your daughters.

"Girl Model" is currently in theatrical release from Kinosmith. In Toronto it can be seen at the Hot Docs Bloor Cinema.