BROOKLYN and ROOM are NOT Canadian Movies: THE CONTINUING DISGRACE THAT IS NONE OTHER THAN THE BILDERBERGIAN (pathetically so) CANADIAN FILM INDUSTRY - Commentary By Greg Klymkiw

THEY LET YOU KEEP THE CRACKER JACK, TOO!

BROOKLYN & ROOM are NOT Canadian Movies:
THE CONTINUING DISGRACE THAT IS
OUR BILDERBERGIAN (pathetically so)
CANADIAN FILM (ahem) INDUSTRY

Commentary By Greg Klymkiw

The 2016 Canadian Screen Awards in Film were, for the most part, a disgrace. This is not so much the fault of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television who preside over the event (formerly known as the Genies, and before that, the Etrogs), but rather, the blame lies in the pathetic entirety of the Old Boys' Club which presides over the mainstream status quo of feature films in this country.

In a nutshell, many of the top CSA awards were bestowed upon non-Canadians and pretend-Canadian films. It's the pretend-Canadian pictures that are the latest problem in the continued lateral moves plaguing Canadian Cinema - one Judas (or, if you will, Judii) after another, betraying truly indigenous cinema. Canadian Cinema, at least in the world of the Status Quo Old Boys' Club is so pathetically Canadian, that one can never really talk about the art and industry of our cinema as spiralling into the shitter - THAT would at least be something - but no, we're talking about the especially woeful Canadian trait of the slavering mouth chasing after its own golden anal leakage in a seemingly infinite circuitous movement.

Yes, everything in the universe revolves as it should, especially in Canadian Cinema. There's a spanner in the works, though. It's a slow burn. Like Woody Allen's Alvy Singer (as a child) notes in Annie Hall: "The universe is expanding...the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart, and that will be the end of everything."

Alvy's doctor tries to placate the child by placing the lad's depressive ruminating in the context of a problem that will only be happening in the distant future. "We've gotta try and enjoy ourselves while we're here," chortles the scary Brooklyn paediatrician.

Well, in Canadian Cinema, there are a few who have the luxury to "enjoy" themselves while they're here. This, of course, includes all the self satisfied nest-feathering pig farmers - bureaucrats, supposed captains of industry and all the other purse-string-and-power-holders - bestowing the slop and, lest we forget, the private club of anointed hogs feeding at the trough provided by the aforementioned bearers of the nourishing mush.

In a sense, our power brokers are doing little more than fattening select livestock for slaughter, or in the parlance of chicken farmers, they're not using "laying" feed (which allows chickens to live out their lives providing yummy eggs) but are, instead, doling out "finishing" feed, to plump the buggers up for the neck wringing and eventual evisceration.

Now, again, this is Canada. We have the patent on lateral moves and as such, I reiterate, we're not really swirling into a sewer. Not yet, anyway.

As Alvy Singer reminds us, "The universe is expanding" and expansion means eventual destruction, but like everything about Canada, impending doom crawls along the edge of a straight razor at a snail's pace. 

Let's look at one film which our Canadian bureaucrats are especially proud of. It's called Brooklyn, an Irish tale about an Irish lassie making the big post-WWI sojourn across the pond to the new land of America and settling in the ethnic melting pot of Brooklyn, New York. The film stars Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Domhnall Gleeson, Jim Broadbent, and Julie Walters in the key roles. None of these actors are Canadian. The film is directed by John Crowley, screen written by Nick Horby and based on a book by Colm Tóibín. None of these gentlemen are Canadian.

In fact, did anything in the aforementioned summary make you think the film was even remotely Canadian?

Though the movie provided me with little more than the occasional rising of bile and nasty anal fissures whilst watching it, Brooklyn has many admirers amongst the international critical establishment and has garnered extremely substantial box office receipts.

In fact, let me say now that it is a movie my own late Mother would have loved profusely. Mom was Canadian and my educated guess as to her admiration for it, does not, however, make it a Canadian film and in all honesty (in the interests of full disclosure), dear Mom detested pretty much all of the films I produced which were Canadian. She was not fond of movies about necrophilia (Tales from the Gimli Hospital), WWI mustard-gas-induced forgetfulness and electric sodomy machines (Archangel), incest (Careful), AIDS and euthanasia (The Last Supper), pornography (Bubbles Galore) and Gay sexuality (Symposium), etc.

"Why don't you do something that normal people would like?" she'd ask, ad nauseam. Like most "normal" people, she'd have been much happier if I had produced a movie like Brooklyn and if something that unthinkable had happened, I must admit I'd have done exactly what the Canadian producers did and taken advantage of every scrap of available Canadian taxpayer dollars via the international co-production agreements and federal/provincial tax credits to get it made.

I wouldn't have done this, of course. I'd have preferred to make a movie about the immigrant experience in Canada and the myriad of great stories which exist about that.

Telefilm Canada and the rest of its ilk in the public and private sector, however, have no real interest in the wealth of great Canadian literature about immigrants. Almost all of these books lie dormant in terms of film adaptation.

One of my great dashed dreams was to produce a film of John Marlyn's "Under the Ribs of Death" about immigrants in north end Winnipeg, but the response from "powers-that-be" at the time was always the same: "Too expensive" and "Who cares about Winnipeg?" I suspect the response would be the same today. Marlyn's book was never an international best seller and wasn't about the immigrant experience IN AMERICA. This is not sour grapes, by the way, just an acknowledgment of reality.

Canada's entertainment power brokers want to be star fuckers.

They're pathetic that way.

And now, because of Brooklyn, they'll have had their stars and fucked them too. Most of all, they'll have fucked Canadians (up their assholes sideways with a red-hot poker) into believing, Spanish Inquisition-like, that Brooklyn is a Canadian film. At the very least, Telefilm Canada and other government financing/funding agency bureaucrats want the country's ruling politicians to know how Canadian it is to ensure continued coffer leakage into their coffers so they can keep their cushy government jobs and provide more money to their friends in the Canadian film industry who are allowed to gobble from their by-invitation-only troughs.

But you know what? I've always hated nest-featherers - especially those who purport to actually care about our culture. They're like some puny, pitiable Bilderberg Club of Canadian Cinema.

I don't fucking care if Brooklyn provided employment. Support for the arts does stimulate the economy, but said support should not be Workfare for crews, actors, etc. and it most certainly should not be corporate welfare to Canadian producers who know how to fill out the endless forms required for this largesse.

In Brooklyn's case, I don't care that Montreal continued the tradition of standing-in quite nicely for old New York. Numerous genuine NON-Canadian films have shot and continue to shoot in Montreal for similar reasons and at most, take advantage of tax credits. They do not, however, purport to be Canadian (this would embarrass them, anyway) and the Canadian Government doesn't claim them as Canadian, either (though they'd probably prefer to, but their guidelines keep them from doing so).

I especially don't care that some deft Irish/UK producers hooked up with some enterprising Canadian producers to finagle a whack of bucks from the Canadian government.

None of this matters because:

Brooklyn is NOT a Canadian film.

Room, of course, is the other Canadian movie that's not really Canadian, but our power-brokers want you to believe it is of the Holy Canuck Order. I love Room and I am thrilled it got made. In fact, its filmmaker, Lenny Abrahamson shares similar traits to some of Canada's greatest filmmakers (Egoyan, Maddin, Rozema, Paizs, McKellar, Harkema, etc.) and as such is, to my way of thinking, an honorary Canadian. Its writer Emma Donoghue is a recent landed immigrant to our shores, so she at least counts as a Canadian for real.

Speaking of Donoghue (more on her later, actually), Room was the recipient of the 2016 CSA Golden Screen Award. Formerly known as the Golden Reel, this has always been the most embarrassing award doled out by the Academy. It honours the highest grossing Canadian film in Canada. Ugh! How fucking pathetic! We're ultimately honouring art and each year we're congratulating a film strictly on the basis of how many tickets it sells. The last time I checked, I don't recall the Oscars EVER officially doing likewise. Doing this is so petty and provincial, it makes me shudder every time the award is announced.

In the early years of the awards, the first three winners of this prize were Lies My Father Told Me (1976), Why Shoot The Teacher? (1977) and Who Has Cut The Wind? (1978), all of which were Canadian to the max. What this proves is that there genuinely WAS a time when Canadians wanted to see REAL Canadian movies about the Canadian experience. Over the years, the award began to be dominated by that of the Meatballs and Porky's ilk, broad Quebecois knee-slappers like Ding et Dong and Les Boys or horrendous English-Canadian turds like Passchendaele which had their huge grosses bought and paid for through the largesse of Telefilm Canada, various other government agencies and Cineplex Entertainment. And sure, there were occasional Canadian films of quality which won the award like those of the wonderful Denys Arcand (Decline of the American Empire, Jesus of Montreal), David Cronenberg's Crash and Jean-Marc Vallée's C.R.A.Z.Y. - proof that Canadians paid oodles of dough to see Canadian movies of quality.

But I ask you?

Air Bud? (Flying Basketball Playing Dog) Pompeii? (Cheesy sword and sandal disaster movie epic with laughable digital effects) The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones? (A horrendous attempt at a new Twilight-like teen franchise with a Rotten Tomatoes aggregate of 12% and the Forbes Magazine declaration that the film's opening gross was "a full-blown disaster" and "the biggest bomb of the weekend") Resident Evil: Apocalypse? Resident Evil: Afterlife? Resident Evil: Retribuition? (All three films featuring Milla Jovovich with her painted-on attire and lithe form battling zombies)

These were all Canadian films and they were honoured for their box office grosses in Canada. Given that The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones was such a huge flop, its grosses were still high enough to outdo every other Canadian film in its year of release. Yup, something to celebrate, alright - a Canadian film that did so poorly that it still managed to beat every other Canadian film in the box-office sweepstakes.

(As a side note here, the CSA offers a Golden Screen to television drama based on the highest ratings. I can accept this, but they also offer a similar award to the highest rated Canadian reality-TV program. This is akin to celebrating the fact that millions of gibbering gibbons scarfed down beer and pretzels while watching this crap. Then again, I guess it's not so different that celebrating the same audiences plunking coin down at the ticket wickets to see Resident Evil: Apocalypse or any other pictures in the Milla Jovovich canon.)

And so, we are brought back, full circle to Room (2016's award winner for highest grossing Canadian film in Canada). The nice thing about this award is that Telefilm Canada generously provides a cash prize of $40K (in useless Canadian dollars given the exchange rate right now against the American dollar).

However, as promised earlier, we're getting back to Room writer Donoghue.  She was the cash prize recipient of the Golden Screen, which, she generously donated to the Canada's stellar ImagiNative film festival of aboriginal/first nation cinema.

Here's the disgrace, the embarrassment. Telefilm Canada provides this prize to the central creative forces behind the camera and above the line. The winner of the dough is the writer and director. (Oddly, not the producer. It says what Telefilm really thinks about the creative elements producers should bring to the table.)

But get this! Telefilm will only give the cash to Canadians. Since director Abrahamson is a non-Canadian, he gets bupkis. Since the award is meant to be shared, Telefilm Canada gets to keep $20K and give the other $20K to Room's writer. Perhaps the bean-counting loser bureaucrats could have doled out the entire $40K to Donoghue? That would have been the magnanimous gesture (and the great Canadian aboriginal festival would have been $20K richer).

And you know what? By denying dough to a non-Canadian director seems to indicate more than penny-pinching. For all of Telefilm Canada's crowing about their great Canadian film Room, they can't really believe it is THAT Canadian, after all. 

And they're right. Room is NOT a REAL Canadian film.

Telefilm has essentially created a pathetic conundrum for both the Academy as well as genuine Canadian talent with their mixed-message need to star-fuck.

Let's see how this works:

Several of Room's actors are Canadian including the brilliant young Jacob Tremblay (in spite of his CSA nomination and win in an inappropriate category), the always astonishing Tom McCamus, the eternally vivacious Wendy ("What red-blooded Canuck lad DOESN'T have a crush on her?) Crewson and, additional able support from Amanda Brugel, Joe Pingue and Cas Anvar.

Here's the problem, though.

The Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress CSA Awards were respectively doled out to Room's Brie Larson and Joan Allen respectively. Now, don't get me wrong here - Larson and Allen are great actresses and their work in the film is exemplary. Larson especially takes things to a completely different level and delivers a performance that's not just great in this year - it's a performance that stands up there with the best of the best and will resonate for all time.

Unfortunately the nominations and wins for Larson and Allen in the CSAs gobbled up nominations and wins for CANADIAN actresses.

Is this a petty, provincial, insular, protectionist and myopic concern? To some, it could be seen that way, but in reality, these awards are to celebrate and promote the achievements of Canadians in the motion picture arts. (Some might say that if the BAFTAS can honour non-Brits, the CSAs can honour non-Canadians. Uh, has anyone noticed UK has a feature film industry? They've had it for quite some time now.)

If the CSA awards are to TRULY honour Canadian films AND Canadian co-productions, then they get a major FAIL grade on that front. Let's be honest. The lion's share of media coverage has extolled and will continue to tub-thump the virtues of non-Canadian actresses and the average Canuck will ONLY learn that Canadian films are "growing up" and using "REAL" stars/actors that they know and love from AMERICAN film and television. The punters are going to assume ALL Canadian films will and should be just like AMERICAN films. That's the last thing anyone in Canadian Cinema needs, but it's also the last thing we need to be promoting.

Granted, there have been precedents for this in past CSAs since the beginning of time - non-Canadians have definitely taken home the CSA, Genie and Etrog gold. So what? If more and more fake Canadian films are going to be financed by the Government of Canada and other Canadian public/private entities in order to up the star-fuck ante, to dally with OSCAR, GOLDEN GLOBE and other glories, can our OWN awards not carve out their OWN niche for our OWN Canadian artists? Is this unreasonable? Is this really so petty, provincial, insular, protectionist and myopic?

NO.

If Telefilm Canada and its ilk are now going to be pathetically seduced by star fucking, you can bet such work will explode with ferocity in terms of Canadian money being shovelled into the maws of co-productions, especially those which are this breed of fake Canadian films. These are films that have NO interest in Canadian life and/or culture which, I'm sorry, IS indigenous, IS distinctive and IS decidedly different from the American experience.

A perfect recent example of a REAL Canadian movie is David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars. This is one of the best films of the new millennium - period - Canadian or otherwise. What makes the film so savagely satirical, chilling, jaw-agape shocking and piss-your-pants funny is that it IS Canadian. Yes, it's written by an American. Yes, it's set in America, Los Angeles no less. Yes, it's about the AMERICAN film industry. Yes, it focuses on a variety of New-Agey nuttiness that seems peculiarly indigenous to America (L.A. in particular). Yes, a good chunk of it, mostly exteriors, were shot in America. Yes, it stars mostly non-Canadian actors like Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack and Robert Pattinson, though it does have superb support from Canucks like Sarah Gadon, Eric Bird, Ari Cohen, et all.

And yes, Maps to the Stars is an international co-production, utilizing financing from America, Germany, France and Canada. And yet, because of the fact that it's directed by David Cronenberg, imbued as he is with a singular vision that is uniquely Canadian - a perversity and way of looking at the world that can only come from being Canadian (and keeping him firmly amongst similar Canadian auteur stylists like Egoyan and Maddin), Maps to the Stars feels resolutely, indigenously and ultimately Canadian. Who else but a Canadian filmmaker of Cronenberg's calibre could provide the deftly nasty and (at least for this fella) knee-slappingly hilarious take (and genuine birds' eye view) on Bruce Wagner's great writing?

It takes a poet of cinema to create films like Maps to the Stars and Canadian Cinema has never shied away from visual poetry (in spite of the many power brokers over the decades who've tried to snuff out this "tendency"). Hell, as an international co-production, Cronenberg's picture even brings a formidable Canadian force to the table in one of its three producers, the estimable and highly creative Martin Katz. To believe in and support Cronenberg's vision, to actually get the film up and running, took a pit bull - but one imbued with a superb sense of cinema literacy and impeccable taste. In an interview (a great interview at that) with Real Style, Katz brilliantly, and with aplomb, nails the essence of the film a year before it was unleashed as "an absurdist comedy about the entertainment business". It not only distils the picture's creative essence perfectly, but was a clearly integral pitch in harnessing all that needed to be corralled in order to make Cronenberg's great film a reality.

It is Canadian and a co-production and one that I'd be proud to proclaim as a Canadian film.

The problem, finally, is not so much the Canadian Screen Awards, the problem is that many Canadian producers lack the vision and imagination (of Katz, for example) to present international co-productions to the money people, international co-productions that ARE Canadian first and foremost. Ultimately, the guiltiest of all the parties are those bureaucrats crossing Ts and dotting Is, ravenously and slavishly making the whole star-fuck happen to please their boss, le Gouvernement du Canada. They want to have their pouding chômeur and eat it too.

As for co-productions being honoured by the CSAs, the answer is simple: Add a category for international Canadian co-productions for feature films as the Academy has done for television drama.

The only category in co-productions that they wouldn't have to do this for is in Feature Documentary. The nominees for 2016 feature documentaries included genuinely Canadian docs like The Last of the Elephant Men, The Amina Profile, Hadwin's Judgement, How To Change The World and, of course, the grand prize winner, Alan Zweig's mind blowing Hurt. Our documentary producers are interested in Canadian stories and/or Canadian perspectives upon international events.

They're not whores - well, not obvious whores, anyway.

As for non-Canadian stars (or key non-Canadian craftspeople involved) in Canadian films being honoured, co-productions or not, the answer is also simple: Add special citations and round them up into a gorgeously edited presentation of film clips with appropriate commentary for the TV broadcast Gala. (And while they're at it, DON'T leave out docs and shorts for the broadcast which, as the CSAs do now is so petty, so insulting and so infuriatingly Canadian.)

Restructuring to have a citation process for non-Canadian elements would add nomination and awards opportunities for Canadians who would otherwise be shunned and shut out of the process of celebration and promotion.

And you know what?

It'd still allow for some star-fucking.

Or in the immortal words of the immortal Clarence Carter:

When I start makin' love, I don't just make love
I be strokin', that's what I be doin', huh
I be strokin'

Anyone interested in buying Canadian Films (fake Canadian, or otherwise) can click on the following Amazon links and in so doing, support the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner:

LIVE MUSINGS of GREG KLYMKIW during the 32nd Annual Genie Awards - Celebrating Excellence in Canadian Cinema

Here is a reprint of some of my musings during the 32nd Annual Genie Awards as they sprouted from my mind, shot through my fingers and spewed into cyberspace.

By Greg Klymkiw

The pre-show show is now going on for the "less important" awards. They gave the Golden Reel Award to Starbuck. This is still the weirdest award ever - given to the highest grossing Canadian movie of the year. Do the Oscars acknowledge the highest grossing film of the year with an award? No, because supposedly such awards ultimately (or supposedly) have to do with artistic achievement.

A Dangerous Method won Best Art Direction and Production Design. Here in the press room, Richard Crouse is up on a mini-stage interviewing him (and other winners) for our benefit while the pre-show is broadcast without sound. Richard graciously takes a lot of time with the winners and allows ample opportunity for questions from the assembled press corps. Still, there are murmurings from a few that they'd rather be watching the pre-broadcast show onstage.

Crouse is now interviewing the winners of the various short film prizes. I think I will eat my hot buffet while this is going on.

Great, the Jutra prize for first feature films is also deemed unworthy of the live broadcast. Way to support emerging talent, CBC!!!! Winner Anne Emond, director of Nuit #1 is gracious in the press room and Crouse does a lovely job interviewing this clearly intelligent, talented young filmmaker. Too bad the CBC didn't think it was worth broadcasting her win to the rest of Canada.

La Nuit, Elles Dansent / At Night, They Dance is the winner of Best Feature Documentary Award. It's about a family of Belly Dancers. Something tells me Julia Ivanova's movie Family Portrait in Black and White about a woman who cares for unwanted mixed-race orphans in Ukraine got hosed.

Fantastic, they're doing the tribute to great Canadians in the movie business who died during the pre-show. Way to go, CBC. Way to support our cultural heritage and the passing of those who contributed to it, by NOT sharing it with the rest of the country.

I'll grant that Starbuck is not much good, but again it sucks that the Best Original Screenplay Award is presented in the pre-show. Way to go CBC! Way to support screenwriting!

HERE IS MY DELICIOUS MEAL:

The live broadcast has begun. Some guy I've never heard of is singing a lame song.

Viggo - not surprisingly - wins Best Supporting Actor. His speech is going on a bit. Big deal. It's Viggo. The orchestra is playing - signalling to Viggo to get off the stage. Viggo is making a funny Canadiens joke. CBC wants Viggo offstage. Now Viggo is unfurling a Habs flag. They still are trying to urge him to leave. What to go CBC! Real classy! I guess they have something better to air after the Genies. God knows, the CBC would not want to go overtime.

Oh Jesus, they have figure skaters skating during the Best Song nominees. Way to go CBC! Kitsch Galore!

Backstage, Viggo admits to wearing a pair of Ken Dryden's old gitch and that in spite of a few holes in them, they're very clean.

Ingrid Veninger has just asked if she should have some lasagna now. I choose not to stop her.

That cute little girl from Monsieur Lazhar just won. In my heart I knew this was the no-brainer decision, but part of me thought that the Academy would toss a nod to The Whistleblower here. I was wrong. Happily wrong.

Oh Jesus, more figure skating!

This show is moving so fast it's kind of oppressively dull because of it. Sort of like how Michael Bay cuts his movies.

Strombo: Wondering how people are doing in their Genie Pools? Genie Pools? Is this some kind of hot tub?

Had myself a nice cigarette outside while Falardeau picked up his Best Director Genie.

Sorry folks, I'm going to switch to Facebook and Twitter for awhile. See you there.

FAMILY PORTRAIT IN BLACK AND WHITE - Review By Greg Klymkiw

Family Portrait in Black and White (2011) dir. Julia Ivanova

***

By Greg Klymkiw

The first time I visited Ukraine, the land of my forefathers, two things struck me.

First of all, I felt a strange, overwhelming sense - perhaps due to my own upbringing in Canada - that THIS was where I came from, even though I wasn't born anywhere near the place. The feeling of being from this seemingly magical country, being able to read the cyrillic letters, listening to people talk and realizing I understood more Ukrainian (and to a certain extent, Russian) than I thought I did and even feeling like it was a place I could live in since Canada (or more specifically, the city of Toronto) was really starting to drive me nuts. Even later in the first and subsequent trips when aspects of my time there became utterly horrendous, I somehow was able to explain it away by thinking to myself and/or saying to my (non-Ukrainian WASP wife), "I know my people all too well."

The second thing that struck me was that during my first few days there, I saw absolutely no Black people - not one single person even VAGUELY resembling someone of African descent. This was so overwhelming that even now I can clearly remember the three times that I actually DID see people of colour (excluding Asians, of course, there seemed to be plenty of them - more than enough Ukrainian women were raped when Mongol hordes occasionally pillaged the land).

The first Black person I saw was in a loge in the majestic Kyiv Opera House. He was an extremely handsome, dressed-to-the-nines gentleman with brown skin and a mix of African and Slavic features. The second time, I saw three Black people. They were clearly students, in their early twenties and entered one of my favourite restaurants in Kyiv - the best Ukrainian food I've had since my Baba died and cheap like the proverbial borscht. The third and final time I saw a Black person was on the stage of the Ukrainian National Philharmonic - the acclaimed American baritone Stephen Salters who performed a stunning selection of traditional African-American spirituals that had a standing-room-only house of Ukrainians leaping to their feet again and again and frankly, not leaving too many dry eyes after each and every song.

This latter experience especially came to mind as I watched Julia Ivanova's feature-length documentary Family Portrait in Black and White because it was so shocking to see and hear some of the most virulent racism towards people of African descent that seemed more at home in Alabama (easily the most openly racist place I ever had the displeasure to spend time in), but surely not the same countrymen that were so welcoming and moved by Stephen Salters.

Then again, I had to remind myself that Ivanova's documentary is set in the Sumy Oblast of Eastern Ukraine and that my most horrendous experiences in the country happened in the East. After Stalin butchered millions of Ukrainians and parachuted millions of Russians into Ukraine - most of them settled in Eastern Ukraine and this is where the insular, backwards and ruthless Soviet influence was most prominent. In fact, many cities in the East are rife with corruption and are major centres of the Russian mob.

In this sense, half the country - the East - is kind of like one big, ole' Alabama.

And it's in this setting that the film focuses upon Olga Nenya, a primarily Russian-speaking Ukrainian woman of middle age who has opened her heart and home to children who have been abandoned by their birth parents because of the colour of their skin. Over the years, many African men - primarily from Uganda - have come to Ukraine as foreign students to study. Ukraine has a great reputation for its educational institutions and low tuitions. (A Lebanese acquaintance studied medicine in Ukraine and has a successful practise in Paris - though, speaking of racism, his credentials weren't "good enough" for Canada.) And as any healthy, young lad is wont to do anywhere, but especially when alone in a country populated by some of the most stunningly gorgeous young women in the world (Olga Kurylenko, for one), they'll more than likely partake of the forbidden fruits (as it were). What this has sadly resulted in are huge numbers of Black children abandoned in orphanages.

However, here in the Sumy Oblast, seventeen Black kids have a home and a mother. Granted, the home is physically a shambles (though from my experience, pretty common for Eastern Ukraine), but the kids have a surprising amount of privacy, they have food, shelter, a bed, companionship and yes, a sense of family.

Nenya is a powerhouse - a true Russian-Ukrainian battle axe. She only wants what she thinks is best for the kids - a good work ethic, an education and a chance to get a job and contribute to the "new" Ukraine. That said, two of her children are gifted in soccer and music respectively and she has absolutely no use for this - she has no understanding how these interests will put "bread" on their tables when they leave the nest.

The kids are all expected to do their part - tend to the goats, cook, clean and do well in school. Nenya also has no use for the ignorance and racism of her fellow neighbours and countrymen. She especially detests snooty bureaucrats and in one delightful scene she deals with a barrage of social workers and city officials who pop by for a visit in the only way one can deal with these horrible people - with the sort of contempt that hurls garbage back in their faces. Bureaucrats the world over are all the same, it seems.

Her foster children clearly love her and are grateful that they are treated as family. That said, a few of them have established relationships with foreign families in Italy who sponsor children for holiday visits through a humanitarian program that began after the Chernobyl tragedy. Some of them long to leave Ukraine and move to Italy. Nenya essentially thinks of these foreign foster parents as part-time babysitters who also allow her time off and the opportunity to save some money for those periods the kids are away. Besides, as she points out, a bird can only have "one nest". I can't say I really disagree with this sentiment.

Of all the children, it is probably the story of Kiril that is the most compelling. He's the eldest and closest to leaving the nest. His feelings about Nenya are mixed. He clearly loves her and appreciates that she's made a home for him and the others, but he's also an artistic soul and wishes to pursue his love of music and literature. This, he eventually does, leaving for Kyiv to study journalism at university. Nenya is bitter about this decision and clearly there's bad blood between them that's not resolved.

Then again, there are many unresolved issues in the film. Ivanova has chosen to mostly eschew the oft-expected narrative tradition - especially in recent documentaries. As the title suggests, she is presenting a "portrait" which, delivers a portion, a glimpse, a tiny window into something that is clearly bigger. This is, on one hand, admirable, but it's equally frustrating. Ivanova tries to present all of the children's stories equally and instead, we get not enough of too many. Kiril, is by far the most compelling of the kids and I probably would have preferred more of his story and relationship with Nenya than the others.

What's especially confounding is that the film never adequately addresses how or why Nenya was compelled to undertake this compassionate responsibility. What was it like to take legal charge of these kids? What was the process? What were the challenges? What were the joys? The pain? By the end of the film, we get a portrait of Nenya, but we don't get a bigger picture. I really don't feel like I know enough about her and frankly, I want to. Who is she? What is her extended family like? What was her relationship with her own parents? Did she ever have any friends, lovers, neighbours or anyone other than her foster children that she was close too? Why does she detest Kiril's artistic pursuits and intelligence so much? Is it, as Kiril suggests when commenting on Nenya, that the Stalinist form of communism she reveres and misses, really what drives her? (He calls his mother "the leader" and compares her to Stalin, "the great leader". I really loved this kid!) OR is there something more? She's clearly an intelligent woman, but what is it that drives her to such an anti-intellectual and anti-cultural position?

At a certain point I wanted Ivanova to move beyond the "portrait" because the subject, Nenya, is so fascinating that she demands more. While there might have been exigencies of production that didn't allow for such added probing, the fact remains that based upon the finished product, more was needed.

There are numerous things that are either left maddeningly unsaid or, for all the film's attempts to present things raw WITHOUT a slant, or angle or too much of the filmmaker's voice (all admirable, but not always satisfying), the movie DOES present a few unbalanced issues that feel (intentionally or not) like a very one-sided portrait. At one point, Kiril talks about what it means to be a Ukrainian and that it is a cultural identity he relates to and wants to relate to even more. I'll grant you it is because I feel close to this heritage that I was so deeply moved by this, however, the movie also disturbed me since it provided far too many one-sided negative portraits of Ukrainians and Ukrainian culture.

There are, for example, very few Ukrainians presented who share Nenya's compassion for these children. I just find this hard to swallow. Ukraine is a country that has suffered under the yoke of Russian, Polish, Turkish, Austrian, German and Mongolian oppression for its entire history as a nation and culture. Maybe I cannot proclaim the entire country or nation as being open to relating to the African experience on (at least a level of repression and/or genocide) based solely upon a few hundred Ukrainians weeping and cheering the African-American spirituals sung by Stephen Salters in Kyiv, but for all the documented racism, there are always two sides and some balance might have been nice. Why, for example, does Ivanova go out of her way (it seems) to present ONLY fuck-witted Ukrainian skinheads or Nenya's drunken, ignorant racist neighbour? And what about that neighbour? What drove him to drink to the point where he LOST his children? Why present such a one-sided portrait without even attempting to understand where this comes from? Who knows? Eastern Ukrainians suffered a great deal under Stalin and subsequent Soviet regimes (including the ethnic Russians forced to move there). The repression, poverty, discrimination could well be traced back to policies of genocide and Russification.

Another oddly offensive one-sided portrait is of the Ukrainian women who supposedly "abandoned" their Black children in orphanages? Why are they portrayed as so thoughtless? So heartless? For a multitude of Ukrainian women - no matter what or who their children are - placing their children in orphanages is their only hope that maybe, just maybe their children will have a better life than they can provide them?

What of the African men who have seduced and abandoned their blonde, blue-eyed living sex toys and by extension the results of their seed-scattering - the children? Are they blameless? Throughout the entire film I kept wondering if we were ever going to get an interview with an older African male in Ukraine. I would have loved to hear the opinions of some of the Ugandan students on the fates of these children who were sired by fellow members of their country? And finally, when Ivanova DOES present an interview with ONE African man who DOES care about his children and wants them back. It's a brief interview that takes place well into the film and the context it's presented in, once again, raises more questions that the film doesn't bother to answer. The man claims he will wait in Ukraine until the children can legally leave the care of Nenya so he can be their father. He states that the Ministry presiding over Ukrainian orphans are asking him to prove, via DNA testing - at his expense - that the children are really his. Well, uh, yeah! Makes sense to me. Anyone can say they're the biological father of a child. It has to be proven. If he can't afford it, what is his embassy or consulate doing about it? Has he even tried to secure their financial and/or political assistance?

This is a movie so full of magnificent moments that I kept longing for it to soar as it had the potential to. It's finally never enough for any movie to present a "portrait". When there are too many questions left unanswered, when there are endless one-sided perspectives as unfair and hateful as those presented amongst some of the film's subjects, part of me thinks that the filmmaker didn't get the job done. That said, Ivanova clearly has the soul of a filmmaker. She shot the film herself and there are images of such poignance, beauty and artistry, that I simply cannot believe that this is all there is.

Maybe, just maybe, there's enough material on the cutting room floor and, more importantly so much more material yet to be shot, that eventually, Ivanova, like Michael Apted and his extraordinary "Up" series will return to these people and this subject and present a lifetime document as anthropologically and artistically important as Apted's.

I hope so. She owes it to the kids, to Nenya, to the country and its culture. She certainly owes it to herself to take potentially wonderful material to even greater heights. Most of all, she owes it to the audience and potential audiences. With Family Portrait in Black and White, I personally see the beginnings of something that could be imbued with significance and staying power beyond its wildest dreams.

That's what makes it art.

"Family Portrait in Black and White" is in limited platform release across Canada via Vagrant Films (with a current playdate at Toronto's Royal Theatre). It played at the Sundance Film Festival and is a Hot-Docs Award Winner. It has been nominated for a Genie Award for Best Feature Documentary.

LE VENDEUR - Review by Greg Klymkiw - This stunning Quebecois kitchen sink drama is so raw and real, the pain evoked so acute, you'll be devastated by its quiet power while at the same time dazzled by its cinematic genius. The film had its World Premiere in Competition at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011 and was cited as one of Canada's Ten Best Films of the year in the Toronto International Film Festival's (TIFF) CTT. That it has not garnered one single nomination for a Genie Award is an utter disgrace! Don't miss it!

Le Vendeur (2011) dir. Sébastien Pilote
Starring: Gilbert Sicotte, Nathalie Cavezzali, Jérémy Tessier and Jean-François Boudreau

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

It's a rare experience for me, but when it occurs, there's nothing like it. Sometimes I see a movie and after the final end-title credit has faded and the lights come up, I bolt from the cinema to be alone with my thoughts and to savour and extend the emotional response I had. Off the top of my head, other movies that made me feel this way were Au Revoir Les Enfants, Les Bons Debarras, The Straight Story, Ivan's Childhood and seeing the restored print of Nights of Cabiria. The experience, so indelibly etched into my soul, is as close to soaring as I'm ever likely to get.

And now, there's a new gun in town, pardner.

While its thematic concerns and narrative are both timeless and universal, and though it is set in a small factory town in Quebec, I was profoundly moved and deeply taken with just how Canadian Sébastien Pilote's astounding film Le Vendeur is. This staggeringly powerful, exquisitely-acted and beautifully written motion picture is easily the first genuine Quebecois heir apparent to the beautiful-yet-not-so-beautiful-loser genre of English Canadian cinema of the 60s and 70s (best exemplified by films like Don Shebib's Goin' Down the Road, Peter Pearson's Paperback Hero and Zale Dalen's Skip Tracer).

The title character of Pilote's great film is ace car salesman Marcel Lévesque (Gilbert Sicotte). He lives in a small town on the brink of complete financial collapse - the primary industry has shut down production and locked out its workers and yet, while people are starving, losing everything, moving away and many local businesses shutting down forever, Marcel turns a blind eye to all this. He's not the undisputed Salesman of the month in the dealership for nothing - and not just one month, but EVERY month, for years on end.

Financial crisis be damned! There are cars on the lot and they need to be moved.

And they will be moved.

At any cost.

Marcel, you see, has nothing. With a healthy nest-egg and no financial commitments, he's at an age when most men would retire and enjoy life. For Marcel, life is selling cars. His late wife has been six feet under for a long time and his only real human connection is to his daughter Maryse (Nathalie Cavezzali), a hairdresser and single mother to Antoine (Jérémy Tessier). If it weren't for them, he'd have even more time to sell cars.

He is, however, in spite of this obsession, a devoted, loving and caring father and grandfather. He makes regular visits to his daughter's shop, attends local events with her, watches his grandson play hockey in the local arena whilst gently tut-tutting any suggestion from his only surviving blood relations that perhaps he should retire.

He is a friend to everyone in town, yet in reality, he has no friends. His effusive manner with all he meets is part of his ongoing schtick - he knows damn well that people will buy from someone they like.

And he must be liked to be successful.

His colleagues love him too. It's no matter to his fellow salesmen that he outsells them ten to one. He's a great guy and because he's a great guy they all believe his prowess and luck will rub off on all of them.

And then there are the locked-out workers at the factory he passes every morning on his way to the dealership. They stand in the frigid Quebec climate, snow piled up around them and warming themselves on the fires raging in steel drums as they keep vigil over their only hope for employment - their placards demanding fair treatment while the factory's fat-cats get bonuses and they potentially lose their jobs, benefits and pensions.

No matter to Marcel.

The unemployed need to buy huge, gas-guzzling American cars they can't afford as much as the next guy.

And he's just the man to make the sales. Marcel prides himself on remembering and knowing as many details about his customers (past, present and future). For those times he needs his memory jogged, he maintains a collegial and caring rapport with the guys who work in the service department. He plies them with daily cans of Coke from the pop machine and when he spies a familiar vehicle up on a hoist, he gets as much info as he needs from the mechanics about the owner of the ailing vehicle. He then consults his files to confirm he actually sold the car (and any salient details that can breed added familiarity), finds the "mark" in the waiting room, greets him as if they've known each other their whole life and slyly presents options available to trade-in the old and buy the new.

One such mark is the sad-sack François Paradis (Jean-François Boudreau), an out-of-work labourer locked out of the factory. This is a man who is unsure of where his family's next meal is coming from, but all Marcel knows is that a trade-in (at a loss to the customer), easy financing (at usurious interest rates) and cars on the lot that must be moved are the ultimate order of the day.

A sale is imminent.

So too is disaster.

Marcel's single minded need to sell knows no bounds. When this results in not just one, but two major tragic events, Marcel holds the ultimate key to his own survival - he can sell.

Pilote has crafted an astonishing screenplay - rife with details that are indelibly rooted in the realities and truths we all have experienced and/or recognize. As a director, he renders his screenplay with one jaw-droppingly poetic shot after another and yet, as exquisite as Pilote's eye is, the frame is rife with the reality of both beauty and despair.

And it is so Canadian: The endless snow, the frosty breath permeating the air, the crispness of the night, the sun and clear skies beating down on a frozen Earth, the constant parade of tractors clearing the streets, removing ice from the windshields, plugging and unplugging one's car to keep the block and interior heaters working overtime in sub-zero temperatures, the hot cups of java in the local diner, steaming hot chocolate in the hockey arena, the forays onto the frozen lakes to ice-fish and the ice-and-snow-packed highways that convey people from one solitary place to another - sometimes even as solitary as death.

Pilote's mise-en-scene has been rendered with the keen eye of cinematographer Michel La Veaux and I submit this might well be one of the best shot Canadian films in years. The compositions are often painterly, but most astounding is both the lighting of the interiors (starkly beautiful with a delicate grain and considerable detail) and the stunning exteriors wherein La Veaux paints with natural light. One of the shots I'll take to my grave is an interior of a snow-packed frigid car - that special beauty of darkness and light that we've all experienced at some point or another as we enter a vehicle that's yet to be swept free of the layers of frozen precipitation. This is great shooting and puts so much of the more expressionistically flashy Quebecois cinematography to shame.

Finally, the most Canadian image of all in Le Vendeur is the bloodied carcass of a moose who has strayed in the path of a car cascading along the black ice on a wilderness-enshrouded highway and the twisted wreckage of said vehicle that has collided with the huge, lumbering beast. I'd argue that anyone who has not seen this with their own eyes, experienced it themselves or, at least knows or knows of someone involved in such an accident can't possibly be Canadian - or, at the very least, lives a very sheltered life from one of the more characteristic experiences of Canadian life. (I've accidentally hit everything from rabbits to porcupines to coyotes to deer on the highways of northern Canada and a dear friend was invalided for life after hitting a moose. I can assure you, it's not a pretty sight.)

This is Quebec. This is Canada. And this is a film replete with so many aspects of indigenous familiarity that adds to the already tremendously moving narrative of Le Vendeur.

Yet amidst these details that speak to our culture - both English and French - there are the details of both the character and narrative which reflect realities as profound and universally recognizable as such works as Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" or David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross" or Joseph Heller's "Something Happened" or Saul Bellow's "Seize the Day". These are stories of men and families torn to shreds by the seeming freedom of capitalist society.

And so too is Pilote's Le Vendeur.

While watching the film, I could not get the aforementioned canon of English-Canadian loser cinema out of my head. For the townspeople who leave Le Vendeur's northern Quebec - especially the young men, I thought about Joey and Pete in Shebib's Goin' Down the Road, leaving their small Maritime town for new horizons, yet facing equally uncertain futures once away from the nest. I imagined the future of Marcel's hockey-playing small-town grandson and wondered, if fortune allowed him a full blossoming, would he too remain a big fish in a small pond like Rick "The Marshall" Dylan (Keir Dullea), the boozing, brawling, womanizing small potatoes hockey player from Peter Pearson's Paperback Hero? Worse yet, I wondered if Marcel himself was actually Joey or (more likely) Pete from Shebib's masterpiece if either had stayed in their small town and channelled the malevolent drive to succeed at any or all cost as imbued in the character of John the psychopathic debt collector in Zale Dalen's Skip Tracer?

Look, I doubt any of the aforementioned English Canadian films registered with Pilote when he wrote and directed Le Vendeur, but what's truly uncanny is just how connected and rooted to the English Canadian experience and aesthetic his film is. Perhaps the two solitudes are not as solitary as some would like to believe.

Like those films, Pilote has crafted what may well become a masterwork of CANADIAN cinema and one that is rooted in an indigenous cultural tradition no matter what side of the French-English fence one is on.

Le Vendeur is from Quebec.

And it is truly Canadian!

This is a good thing.

"Le Vendeur" is in limited release in English Canada via E-One Films. It begins a theatrical release in Toronto February 3 at the Alliance Atlantis Cumberland Cinema. Alas, it lasted one week there and moved over to the loathsome Canada Square Cinema for a mere two shows per day. If it's not playing in your city, demand it be shown at your local Cineplex Entertainment or independent theatre. It had its world premiere in competition at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2011 and was wisely - VERY WISELY - cited by the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) Canadian Top Ten (CTT). How it has not garnered one single Genie Award nomination is not only beyond me, but frankly, a disgrace. (Even the Quebec-based Jutra Awards have egg on their face for ignoring Pilote's direction, but citing the film in other categories - but the Jutras are regional and the Genies are national. They should know better.) In any event, do yourself a big favour and DO NOT MISS "LE VENDEUR" ON A BIG SCREEN WHERE IT MUST BE SEEN.

The film's official website can be found HERE