GOD KNOWS WHERE I AM - HOT DOCS 2016 Review By Greg Klymkiw - Poetic Truth

God Knows Where I Am (2016)
dir. Todd Wider, Jedd Wider
Narration: Lori Singer

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Too many filmmakers forget about the power of poetry in cinema. This is especially endemic in documentary work where far too many pictures seem limited to imparting facts and/or become so wrapped up in "story" (demanded by narrow, vision-bereft commissioning editors) that no matter how proficient the films are, they are - as films - all about the issue and/or subject matter at the centre of the work.

There is no such problem plaguing God Knows Where I Am. The picture is an absolute heartbreaker and a good deal of its success is directly attributable to its pace, style and structure which yields a film infused with all the qualities of the sublime. I challenge anyone to not weep profusely at several points within its elegiac 99 minute running time.

The picture charts the last weeks of Linda Bishop, an intelligent, sensitive middle-aged woman found dead in an abandoned New Hampshire farmhouse. Existing only on rainwater and apples from a bountiful tree, she felt trapped by dangers which threatened and frightened her to such a degree that she was unable to leave the comfort and shelter afforded to her by this lonely enclave. Eventually, as the apples ran out and the unheated house was battered by one of the coldest winters on record in New Hampshire, comfort gave way to agony and agony gave way to grace.

Directors Todd and Jedd Wilder have constructed their film using a seemingly endless series of gorgeously composed and lit shots (gloriously mastered on FILM by cinematographer Gerardo Puglia), many of the dollies and tracking shots moving with the kind of slow beauty Vilmos Zsigmond employed in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye. These haunting images, many of which are so stunning they'll be seared on your soul for a lifetime, are accompanied by off-camera readings from Bishop's actual journal by actress Lori (Footloose, Trouble in Mind, Shortcuts) Singer. Singer's performance here is astonishing - she captures the pain, desperation and even small joys in Bishop's life during these sad, lonely days with a sensitivity and grace linked wholly to the "character" of Bishop.

The aforementioned sequences are interspersed with actual 8mm home movie footage of Bishop as a child - once, bright, happy and full of the promise of a full life to live. The filmmakers also wend interviews into the film's fabric with such figures as Bishop's adult daughter, various friends and relatives, and a local police detective and medical examiner - all of whom contribute to a mystery which unravels with spellbinding dexterity.

In addition to the cinematography, the key creative elements in the picture are simply astonishing. Editor Keiko Deguchi creates a gentle, yet always compelling pace that contributes to the poetic nature of the film (and a few dissolves so powerful that each one knocks the wind out of you) while Paul Cantelon, Ivor Guest and Robert Logan have created one of the best scores I've heard in any documentary. Elements such as sound, art direction and visual effects are on a par with the best cinema can offer.

I've seen God Know Where I Am three times. It's not only rich and layered enough to hold up on every viewing, but on an emotional level, I wept profusely - again and again and yet again.

This is great cinema and certainly a contender for one of the best documentaries of the new millennium. It captures profound poetic truths about homelessness, mental illness and loneliness which are rendered with such artistry and sensitivity that this is a film for the ages.

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

God Knows Where I Am receives its World Premiere at Hot Docs 2016.

RAVING IRAN - HOT DOCS 2016 Review By Greg Klymkiw - Iranian House DJs Risk Death

To Rave Or Not To Rave?
To Die Or Not To Die?
Choices Galore for House DJs in Iran!

Raving Iran (2016)
Dir. Susanne Regina Meures

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The genuinely brilliant House DJs Anoosh and Arash create the kind of heavenly pulse-pounding sounds which raise the level of rave music to interstellar heights. The commitment they bring to their artistry is beyond obsessive which, is probably a good thing given the hypnotic beats they etch aurally like a kind of Jackson Pollock x2 on a mixing board. Then again, obsession amidst repression seems to be a life-skill that Iranian artists must have hardwired into their very DNA.

Anoosh and Arash should be stars.

And in a sense, they are, but their celebrity remains deep in the underbelly of the rave scene in Tehran, Iran. To be public in a country that views their music as unholy enough to warrant prison, torture and death is tantamount to suicide. Even working underground is enough to flirt with the aforementioned indignities of pain and eradication.

It's a wonder, then, that filmmaker Susanne Regina Meures captured their harrowing story using hidden cel phone cameras and other surreptitious means to chart an important story of creation under attack.

Given the means of production, the film is raw, ragged and grainy. This seldom detracts from one's appreciation for the picture and does, in fact, contribute to the mix of the artists' creative energy with the frustrating, maddening and often downright terrifying risks they and their fans undertake.

Iranian House DJs Anoosh and Arash risk the
wrath of Allah's self-proclaimed gatekeepers.
Allah, though, would love their music and artistry.

All around them we see armed police and willie-inducing checkpoints. Dark alleys in circuitous labyrinthine back streets and deep, dungeon-like basements are their domain - where, like the undead, all rise with the setting of the sun and scurry into their coffins with its rising. Better they should scurry into them of their own volition than risk being blasted into them from the end of an Iranian peacekeeper's gun.

The film gives us a rare insider's view of the creative process, the raves themselves and the frustrating lengths Anoosh and Arash must go in order to manufacture their album. When they're invited to the largest, most prestigious House Music Festival in the world in Switzerland, dangerous, heartbreaking decisions await them.

In Iran, making a decision might be DEADLY.

From staging a massive secret rave in the desert to the chillingly suspenseful process of leaving Iran, filmmaker Meures is with them all the way.

And so are we.

Such are the joys and sadness cinema can create. When they reflect life, as in this brave, bold documentary, it's all the more edifying.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half-stars

Raving Iran makes its International Premiere at Hot Docs 2016

GRIOT - Review By Greg Klymkiw

Griot (2013) ****
Dir. Volker Goetze
Starring:
Ablaye Cissoko,
Volker Goetze

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The Griot is, at least from my own interpretation of Volker Goetze's film, the very essence of African history and culture. These hallowed individuals are singers, storytellers, community leaders, praise-bearers and keepers of oral histories and traditions. To learn of their history and to be introduced to one of the truly legendary Griots, Ablaye Cissoko was a truly and deeply personal revelation to me.

I'm not African by any stretch of the imagination, but like all of us on this planet, I share the blood of humanity with the African people as they do with me. We are, ultimately the product of stardust and as such, we are the progeny of the Heavens. Call it God, call it a higher power, call it a supreme being, call it dark matter, call it quantum physics, call it the Drake Equation - call it whatever you like. We are all one and it is with both awe and respect that I feel blessed to have been introduced to the dazzling power of this great musician.

Griot is a stirring, colourful and moving documentary and as such, a lyrical and poetic exploration of the West African tradition of the aforementioned Griot, an important personage in African culture with a clear relationship to the indigenous populace, but more importantly, how it seems to have influenced the entire African diaspora - especially in America.

The structure of the film is simple - all the better as this exposes so many factual, historical and finally spiritual properties of the Griot. You will experience heart achingly gorgeous music, you will see it performed, you will experience the joy of dance and musical expression and most of all, you will learn of the great lament of the Griot in the contemporary world. Culture and tradition is a blood right, but history has toyed with it, colonialism and slavery has tried to suppress it, contemporary African leaders seem to have no interest in its preservation and finally, even the Griot is an a world where the very role needs to both grow and yet return to its very roots.

I truly believe the concerns of the Griot are ALL of our concerns and the message Cissoko imparts via Goetze's cinematic eyepiece is truly universal and something that touches us all.

It might even touch you personally as it did me.

Allow me to share a deeply personal and cultural connection to this great story. My heritage is Ukrainian - a culture and language that has been battered, slaughtered and oppressed for over a thousand years - primarily by Russia. Perhaps the most horrific piece of recent history that has always haunted me is the systematic destruction and brutalization of the Ukrainian culture and its people by the Butcher Joseph Stalin. He not only orchestrated the genocide of ten million Ukrainians during the man-made famine known alternately as the Harvest of Despair and the Holodomor, but for me, the most horrendous genocide was a cultural decimation. Stalin not only implemented forced Russification amongst the Ukrainians, he destroyed one thousand years of history.

Here is why I was so personally moved by this film - my people were agrarian in nature and their entire history and culture was maintained in a very strict oral tradition by men who were not unlike the West African Griots. In Ukraine, they were called Kobzars. Like the Griot, their talent and place in the world was not through formal training, but through blood. They were the keepers of the country's history. Joseph Stalin invited all the Ukrainian Kobzars to Russia for a national conference to celebrate and discuss how the Kobzars would remove the yoke of Czarist oppression and adopt a new direction in praise of the revolution, of communism, of Stalin. Once all the Kobzars were assembled under one roof, Stalin had them all shot. One thousand years of history gone in one fell swoop.

To see the brilliant, caring, committed Ablaye Cissoko as he laments the horrid lack of a proper cultural centre, the indifference of a government to tradition and a millennia of history and culture was so profoundly touching. All the more so because the Griot still exists and his place in African culture - bound by blood - will only be eradicated if it is done so by force. Thankfully, we have filmmaker and musician Volker Goetze to put this important tradition in front of a camera and preserve its sound, image and yes, even soul so that the tradition can travel well beyond the borders of West Africa, beyond the borders of its intended audience - to travel into the hearts and minds of humanity all over the world.

My people lost their Kobzars, but as long as the Griot exists and thrives, I am confident that through the power of stardust, the river of blood that binds all of us and most of all, through the soul cleansing grace and beauty of the Griot's music, the history and tradition of man will be reflected in the words and teachings of the great people of West Africa. This is a film that gives me so much hope that culture is what binds all of us.

As Cissoko states, "Without culture one becomes a person without an identity."

He has nothing to fear, however. His blood flows as does the blood of others like him. It flows into the music of the soul and it cascades out via the tributaries of the Earth and thank whatever power is responsible, but the Griot thrives. Cissoko is here to soothe us, to offer praise to the heavens and to the ancestors - who ultimately are the ancestors of all of us.

For we are one.

"Griot" is launching a cross-Canada tour via Ryan Bruce Levey's Vagrant Films Releasing and Publicity. The film begins at the gorgeous Royal Theatre in Toronto - a perfect launch pad as it's still the one standalone cinema in the city with the most exquisite sound and picture quality. The film, miraculously, will be launched by a concert that features blaye Cissoko and Volker Goetze. For tickets and further information about the concerts and screenings across the country, please visit the official Griot website HERE.

THE CLOSEST THING TO HEAVEN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Inside Out LGBT Film Festival

The Closest Thing To Heaven (2013) ****
Dir. Ryan Bruce Levey

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Love is the great equalizer. It's the root to all humanity. With it, we flower, we blossom, we reach for the light in the sky and the elusive wonder and mystery of the Heavens. With love, we are all one. Without love, all that exists is emptiness, and a spirit bereft of love is one that yields hatred. Thankfully, all the arts, literature, cinema and within the boundless cornucopia of cultural expression, music, are those things which can reflect, inform and solidify in all of us the the infinite and limitless nature of love.

A new documentary premiering at Toronto's Inside Out LGBT Film Festival 2013 utilizes the principles of good old-fashioned storytelling to explore love. I was, while watching the film, reminded of the great speech yielded by Orsino in Shakespeare's "The Twelfth Night" and the oft-quoted line: "If music be the food of love, play on." Orsino is, of course, referring to his frustrating attempts to court the love of his life and that he requires an almost gluttonous infusion of music to soothe his passionate breast and quell his aching heart. The subjects of this film, however, discover love - a love that grows and deepens across a lifetime, one that is heightened by a love for music and where that music - like the spirit of those who are in love, traverse the heavens - is music that fills the heart, not as a substitute for love (as in Orsino's case), but as love itself and the power of love proves to be truly eternal.

In nine minutes, filmmaker Ryan Bruce Levey delivers his deeply moving film The Closest Thing To Heaven and though the running time is short, the impact is as profound and layered as a lifetime. In spite of the title, Levey moves beyond the notion of being close to Heaven. His film, his subjects and most importantly, his audience are given a great gift - in nine minutes we rise ever-so sweetly, we soar with humour, elation and love, until Levey continues to work the magic of cinema, hitting all the thrust controls, allowing us to be jettisoned to a place that feels like Heaven itself. If the film does anything (and frankly, it does a lot), it simply and beautifully allows one man to spin a tale of love that delights and finally, moves us to tears.

They're not tears of sadness, however, but of elation, happiness and the warmth of feeling that only love and the expressions of love can bring.

Levey is a young man, yet he is a veteran of independent cinema in Canada. He has worked tirelessly as a distributor, promoter and publicist for movies that fall outside of the mainstream. He has specialized in Queer Cinema, but has done so within the forward-thinking and visionary manner which the great theatre auteur Sky Gilbert brought to bear during his longtime tenure as the Artistic Director of "Buddies in Bad Times" theatre. Gilbert promoted Queer Culture as that which transcended the boundaries of the mainstream (in terms of sexuality and/OR aesthetic form) and in his own way, this is something Levey has done over the years with cinema. If it ain't straight (sexually OR otherwise), it's product needs a home for those who crave ALL that is Queer.

Here, he takes a logical and, to my mind, very successful step ahead in his distinguished career. He's made this simple, glorious and beautiful film as a director. And yes, I place an accent on simple in the best sense of the word. As a filmmaker, an artist, Levey understands that the best cinema is that which is simple and that it's this assured, no-frills approach that yields so many layers of tenderness on both narrative and thematic levels.

Using the hoariest of cliches, allow me to say that The Closest Thing To Heaven is a film that makes you laugh and makes you cry. Tried and true, yes, but truth is what great filmmakers always try to expose. And that, is a lofty goal indeed. As lofty as love itself.

Inside Out has a number of genuinely great pictures on display in the 2013 edition. Here's a few I loved:

Continental (2013) ****
Dir. Malcolm Ingram
Starring: Steve Ostrow, Sarah Dash, Holly Woodlawn, Edmund White, Frankie Knuckles

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Steve Ostrow created the Cadillac of gay steam baths in New York, the immortal Continental. Here his clientele were treated as human beings, with respect. Ostrow gave them a class act to pursue their sexual expression. Once he erected his glistening Crown Jewel of steambaths, he didn't rest on his laurels and merely count his shekels - Steve Ostrow always kept several steps forward of the game and his game. In so doing, The Continental Baths became more than a mere bathhouse - Ostrow created one of the major landmarks in Gay Rights and one of the hottest, most cutting edge launch pads for a myriad of performing artists. Yes, live entertainment, ladies and gentleman. If the action got too steamy in the baths and you sought more, shall we say, restful heat, you could wrap a towel over your genitals, retire to the performing space and watch the likes of Bette Midler (backed up on piano by Barry Manilow, no less).

READ MY FULL REVIEW HERE.

Valentine Road (2013) ****
Dir. Marta Cunningham

Review By Greg Klymkiw

One boy is flamboyantly gay, the other is a potentially burgeoning white supremacist. One is now dead, the other is spending 21 years in prison where, given his age and good looks, is no doubt "enjoying the benefits" of sexual abuse and eventually seeking the protection of being another con's "bitch." And these, are just the surface facts. Director Marta Cunningham draws us into the true story by painting a portrait - an extremely graphic and horrifying one at that - of a young gay man's flirtatious action leading to his murder before shocked classmates and teacher while at school.

READ MY FULL REVIEW HERE.

Interior. Leather Bar. (2013) ****
Dir. James Franco, Travis Mathews
Starring: James Franco, Val Lauren, Travis Mathews

Review By Greg Klymkiw

James Franco, one of the great actors of the 21st century, teamed up with acclaimed queer filmmaker Travis Mathews to co-direct this exploration of gay male sexuality within the context of re-imagining 40 minutes of excised lost footage from Cruising, William Friedkin's MPAA-butchered masterpiece from 1980. A lack of time and money, however, forced the filmmakers of Interior. Leather Bar. to re-imagine their re-imagining, so what we're treated to is a documentary about the making of a re-imagining as re-imagined by Franco and Mathews before, during and after they re-imagine it. Fine by me.

READ MY FULL REVIEW HERE.