BRING ME THE HEAD OF TIM HORTON - Review By Greg Klymkiw - TIFF 2015 ***** 5-Stars

Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton: The Making of Hyena Road (2015)
Dir. Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson
Starring: Guy Maddin, Michael Kennedy, Paul Gross

Review By Greg Klymkiw

You probably needn't bother seeing Paul Gross's mound of mediocrity that is Hyena Road, unless, of course you're into bargain basement Canadian war-porn which propagandistically extols the virtues of the Canuck military during the horrendous, needless war in Afghanistan. That said, WHATEVER you do, do NOT hesitate to purchase Gross's movie when it becomes available on Blu-Ray and DVD since it will include a special feature worth owning and cherishing - the brilliant 30-minute "Making-of" film by Guy Maddin, a genuine Canadian national treasure and made in collaboration with his brilliant young charges, the Brothers Johnson (Evan is co-director of Maddin's brilliant The Hidden Room and Galen was the picture's production designer and composer).

For a "making-of" documentary to be lightyears better than the film it's supposed to prop up and promote is virtually unheard of, but Maddin and the Johnsons have managed to do it. In fact, they've followed in the footsteps of the great 1975 film Vampir-Cuadecuc by Pere Portabella. That film mixes high-contrast degraded monochrome behind-the-scenes images of Jesus Franco's Count Dracula starring the two greats of Hammer Horror, Christopher Lee and Herbert Lom. No such greats appear in Hyena Road, unless you consider Gross a "great" for starring in the insufferably long-running TV series "Due South", wherein he plays a straight-laced pole-up-the-butt Canuck Mountie doing his thing on the mean streets of Chicago. And though Jesus Franco ground out enough horror and soft-porn to fill several racks of video rentals, he was imbued with the kind of style and utter insanity which often resulted in genuine masterworks like the astonishing Vampyros Lesbos. No such luck with Gross as a director as his output adds up to the unfunny comedy about curling, Men With Brooms, one of the worst films of all time, the risible WWI anti-war howler Passchendaele and now Hyena Road.

One of the brilliant aspects of Portabella's film is how it presented a sardonic portrait of both the movie-making process, but most importantly, how it used Jesus Franco's film to examine the notion of myth making via the powerful images of both motion pictures and political propaganda. Let's not forget that Spain had a far more dangerous, insidious "Franco" who ruled with an iron Totalitarian fist and also manipulated his "image" to justify his acts of brutality and persecution.

Maddin and the Johnsons are in similar territory here, crapping on the populist waste of Gross's war-porn whilst condemning Canada's involvement in the Middle Eastern Wars which had nothing to do with fighting for liberty and freedom, but instead were used to instill racist images in the minds of those on the home front as our boys actually fought and died for the insidious needs of the "1%" to control Middle Eastern Oil.

At one point, Maddin actually describes how he's used as an unpaid extra (which, I assume, was A-Okay by Canada's acting union ACTRA): "I suppose it was someone's idea of a joke to cast me as a background extra during a glorious Canadian raping of an Afghanistan village," he says with more than a tiny bit of bile.

In fact, one of the most powerful elements of Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, alluding to the long-dead Canadian hockey star who built an empire of Canadian donut shops and, of course, Sam Peckinpah's greatest film, Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, which dealt with the rape of poverty-stricken Mexicans at the hands of American gangsters in cahoots with Mexico's 1%, is how Maddin and the Johnsons take aim at the corruption inherent in Canada's cultural industries and the country's acquiescence to both America and the very rich.

At one point, we see Maddin lying in the hot sun of Jordan as his voice-over informs us of what brought him to this lowly point. He needs money to desperately finish his masterpiece The Forbidden Room. Not including himself, the film had 15 credited producers (!!!) to what was a complex, but still more-than-do-able avant-garde picture. Facing a veritable swamp with an army of fingers in his creative pie, how is it that one of Canada's greatest artists is so destitute he needs to take this weird job in order to finish his own modest film? Surrounded by an army of indulgence and millions of dollars, this brilliant "making of" morphs into one of the most personal and powerful works of art to ever be made in Canada.

"Man. Oh man, Oh Man," laments Maddin. "Whatever! Here I am, lying in the dirt. Broke. Flat broke. Down. Out. A lowly unpaid deepest background extra playing a slain Taliban soldier, surely the pinkest of all Taliban soldiers in Paul Gross's big budget Afghanistan war epic Hyena Road. I'm lying in the dirt in the middle of a Jordanian desert, a 100-hour camel, car and plane ride away from home, hiding my pink hands in my pants so they won't be seen by the camera a few football fields away. Jordan is gorgeous, yet everything about my visit here is GROSS, hideous."

Maddin adds: "Dead. Inert. Impotent. I might as well be garbage flapping in the wind."

The garbage, as it turns out, is Hyena Road. Maddin uses this opportunity to dream about the kind of movie he'd make if blessed with millions of dollars. Astoundingly and not surprisingly, the movie Maddin would make is recreated brilliantly - veering twixt high contrast monochrome (which makes this horrific war look a glorious studio propaganda film from the 40s, but blended with the documentary look of the immortal Frank Capra - John Ford - Samuel Fuller - George Stevens "Why We Fight" series). Then Maddin and the Johnsons dive into over-saturated faux technicolor, blending a crazed David O. Selznick/William Cameron Menzies epic with a cheesy 80s video game. Finally, we get the greatest fever dream of them all - an Afghani War Film with the magnificent adornments of a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. (During this section, the filmmakers captured some footage of Paul Gross exiting from within a closed door onto the set, his face plastered with a strange smile that makes him look like he's had some good times in an on-set glory hole and then, ignoring the "spaghetti western" action, he engages in a cel phone call with a smug, distracted smile.)

One of the more oddball bits in the movie (as if there haven't been quite enough) is a perverse montage of Michael Kennedy, the Executive Vice-President of the Canadian exhibition chain (and virtual monopoly) as he provides a kind of Greek Chorus as an oath of fealty to the corporate manufacture and exhibition of machine-tooled motion picture product. As a huge explosion rocks behind Kennedy, he happily chirps, "Stay tuned. We're going to go beyond the scenes."

The most positive aspect to this amazing short work of cinematic art is that it genuinely represents the poetry of movies with references to the play books of great scribes in addition to hockey legends like Guy Lafleur.

There's clearly little in the way of art displayed in Hyena Road, but the film might be the most important work Gross has ever done. It assisted Maddin to finish The Forbidden Room and yielded Maddin and the Johnsons an opportunity to create a work that will long be remembered, long after the mediocrity of Hyena Road is but a fleeting memory in Paul Gross's mind.

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

Bring Me The Head Of Time Horton: The Making of Hyena Road is a Vanguard presentation during TIFF 2015. For further info, visit the TIFF website HERE.

THE FORBIDDEN ROOM - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Take a bath w/ Guy Maddin @TIFF2015 A Film Corner *****TIFF 2015 TOP-PICK*****

Marv (Louis Negin) teaches you how to take a bath in THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

LOUIS NEGIN is MARV

The Forbidden Room (2015)
Dir. Guy Maddin
Co-Dir. Evan Johnson
Scr. Maddin, Johnson, Robert Kotyk
Addl. Writ. John Ashbery, Kim Morgan
Edit. John Gurdebeke
Prod.Design Galen Johnson
Cinematog. Stephanie Anne Weber Biron and Ben Kasulke
Prod. Co. PHI Films, The National Film Board of Canada, Buffalo Gal
Starring: Roy Dupuis, Clara Furey, Louis Negin, Céline Bonnier, Karine Vanasse, Caroline Dhavernas, Paul Ahmarani, Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, Maria de Medeiros, Charlotte Rampling, Géraldine Chaplin, Marie Brassard, Sophie Desmarais, Ariane Labed, Amira Casar, Luce Vigo, Gregory Hlady, Romano Orzari, Lewis Furey, Angela La Muse Senyshyn, Kimmi Melnychuk, Kim Morgan, Darcy Fehr, Jean-François Stévenin, Judith Baribeau, Graham Ashmore

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to take a bath with Guy Maddin in his closet of tantalizing shame, his forbidden room. God knows I have partaken on occasions too multitudinous to enumerate. So please, allow me to assure you, bathing with Maddin is a most gratifying and sensual treat for the mind, body and most of all, your very soul.

So then, my dear ones, do yourself a favour and hop into the stew with the Crown Prince of Prairie Post-Modernist Cinema and revel in the myriad of pleasures that motion pictures can offer: the fleshly, the ectoplasmic, the magically incorporeal, the visually and aurally celestial and, most assuredly, the cerebral complexities of all human existence in this world and the next, as filtered through the mind (within an enormous head of magma) of the great Icelandic Satyr who worships - nay, attends to all the needs of that Bacchus who rules over us all, the most holy and resplendent gift that IS the great silver-embossed photoplay, the magic bestowed upon our world by the immortal Brothers Lumière.

The Forbidden Room is 130 glorious minutes you'll want to experience over and over and over again. If, God Forbid, you find you're unable to experience it more than once, or worse, if you're compelled to not see it at all, you either don't care about cinema and/or have no taste and/or hold the unenviable dishonour of exhibiting little more than bone matter twixt thine wax-filled ears and behind eyes of cement.

I, for one, must confess to having seen the film five times now. My fifth helping occurred precisely at the scheduled time of the first public screening in Park City, Utah at the Sundance Film Festival, which I was sadly unable to attend.

I did, however, attempt to replicate the joy of said event, in an outdoor soft tub, located at the northernmost tip of the penetratingly puissant peninsula dividing the moist Great Lake of Huron and its clitoral Georgian Bay, surrounded by the glories of the natural world, the horses, ponies, donkeys, dogs, squirrels, beavers, hibernating bears, coyotes, wolves and chickens, puffing fine tobacco purchased from my Aboriginal Brothers on their cheap-smoke-shoppe and hunting lands down the road, with jets of hot water massaging my rolls of flesh and every so often, just now and then, mind you, the hand not gripping a stick of sacred, smouldering, oh-so natural leaves of First-Nations bliss, would plunge greedily into the bubbly water, seeking netherworlds of sheer exultation to grip, to manipulate, to squeeze and tug with abandon until finally, emitting an ejection, an eruption (if you will) of jubilant gratification, a cascade, a geyser, a blast of liquid force in honour of the grandiose cinematic pulchritude before me.

By a waterfall, bath-time with Guy Maddin is calling yoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!

As a matter of fact - pure and simple - I do not even wish to imagine how many more times I shall partake of this scintillatingly sudsy broth that celebrates the incalculable joys of life, shame, regret, sorrow, love, death and cinema, all those things which render our otherwise pathetic existence with meaning. Even one helping of The Forbidden Room can drain a feller (or lassie) more powerfully than several months of Sundays infused with gymnastics of resplendent amore. Yes, a drain in more ways than one:

Lo! This motion picture is most assuredly one drain we all must want to be slurped down, down, down into. Please, dear ones.

Let me try to explain why.

MAESTRO UDO KIER:
DEEPLY OBSESSIVE
WORSHIPPER
of DELICIOUS
DERRIERES

The Forbidden Room opens with an astounding credit sequence which stutters and sputters by like fragments of decaying film on nitrate stock (not unlike that of Peter Delpeut's 1991 found-footage documentary Lyrical Nitrate, unleashed upon North American audiences by Zeitgeist Films, who also gave us Maddin's Archangel and Careful as well as the similarly stylish work of the Brothers Quay). The imaginative way of placing gorgeous period title cards announcing key creative elements is an equally brilliant way to dispense with the ludicrous number of producers and the decidedly non-period acknowledgments to gouvernement du Canada et gouvernement du Manitoba agencies like Telefilm Canada and Manitoba Film and Sound, etc. (At least the National Film Board of Canada makes sense given the significance of Holy Father John Grierson's efforts during that historical period detailed in Pierre Berton's book "Hollywood's Canada".)

Once these are all dispensed with, the film opens proper with the John 6:12 passage:

When they were filled,
he said unto his disciples,
Gather up the fragments that remain,
that nothing be lost.

It's a powerful passage, to be sure, but its resonance, its weighty thematic substance and, in fact, the very Raison d'être for The Forbidden Room is clutched almost parsimoniously by John's recapitulation of Our Lord's words.

Though the film is comprised of several different stories, they represent fragments of cinema from days long-gone-by which, through the ravages of time and the lack of care ascribed to film preservation during the first half-decade-plus of its history saw so many pieces of time go missing without a trace, or indeed, pieces of time that never even existed, but should have. Maddin, not unlike Georges Melies is a magician of sorts. His film conjures up fragments of films lost, stolen or suppressed, brilliantly re-imagined (or rather, just plain imagined) by Maddin and his co-director Evan Johnson and the pair's co-writer Robert Kotyk. They have been gathered up, these fragments, these very ghosts of cinema, "so that nothing shall be lost".

The Forbidden Room is a structural marvel. Kudos to Maddin and team for creating it so solidly from what must have been reams of magnificent footage written, prepped, shot and cut during the over-four-years it took to make this grand epic that honours both cinema and the lives of ghosts. In fact, the movie astonishingly adheres to (an albeit slightly skewed) three-act structure in terms of story and tone. The first third establishes its series of problems and obstacles right off the bat. The middle act slides into a journey in which said obstacles must be encountered and hurtled over or deviated into delicious nap times of dreams and reveries which provide even more obstacles to be hurtled over or deviated into, well, nap time for sure, but in this middle section one will find some of the most heart-achingly beautiful and tear-squirtingly moving emotions and images. And then, there is the third act - more on this later, but suffice to say it's an insanely eye-popping affair.

Tonally, then, the first third is jaunty, fun and occasionally sinister.The middle act is supremely elegiac with dapples of madness, humour and absurdity.

The third act is a hurricane.

Many tales are interwoven throughout and our first story (the writing of which is additionally supplied by John Ashbery) is a garishly coloured industrial documentary featuring a flamboyantly bath-robed Marv (Louis Negin), our host on the journey to the joys inherent in taking a proper bath. Marv recounts the history of bathing, then narrates all the proper steps needed to take a bath. Twixt Marv's peacockish descriptions and asides, we're delighted with images of pretty young ladies (Angela La Muse Senyshyn, Kimmi Melnychuk) bathing each other, then followed by the buff fortitude of a male bather (Graham Ashmore) carefully applying Marv's instructions as he settles into a nice, steamy, frothy tub. The man is especially eager to get to Marv's most important instructions of all:

"Work down to the genitals. Work carefully in ever-widening circles."

The sensual digital manipulations within the steamily sopping froth give way to another tale, another film infused with the serous lifeblood (and yes, danger) of water itself. A submarine carrying dangerous explosives and rapidly depleting oxygen is stuck between a rock and a hard place as the pressures of the sea above will be enough to send the vessel into a massive eruption of its deadly cargo and though the necessary slow journey it undertakes to avoid disaster is the very thing that will guarantee another disaster, the lack of oxygen which could kill every man on board. Luckily, there is some solace taken in the constant serving up of flapjacks, which in spite of their culinary monotony, are found to be full of porous insides which offer added oxygen to extend the men's precious lives.

Roy Dupuis is a dreamy, hunky, handsome woodsman
searching, ever-searching for his lady fair.

When a dreamy, rugged and brave Woodsman (Roy Dupuis) appears in the sub, the narrative becomes even more tied into other films and as the movie progresses, its literary properties seem rooted in a kind of Romantic period use of concentric rings (albeit skewed in ways they never should be).

One story after another, either recounted by characters in one film and represented by another or told as stories within stories or, my favourite, as dreams within dreams, flash by us ever-so compellingly, taking us deeper into a liquid-like miasma, a ripe flatulence of wonder, a churning, roiling sea of volcanic lava - DEEPER, EVER-DEEPER INTO THE VERY CORE OF EXISTENCE AND CINEMA!!!!!

We follow Roy Dupuis's Woodsman into a cave of scarlet-furred-lupine-worshipping barbarians who have kidnapped his lady love. We see his infiltration into this den of murderers, kidnappers and thieves as he successfully proves his worth during several challenges including:

- finger snapping;
- stone weighing;
- offal piling and, my personal favourite;

- BLADDER SLAPPING!!!!!

GERALDINE CHAPLIN
THE MASTER PASSION
Le Dominatrix
des adorateurs derriere

When we meet the Woodsman's lady love, the film takes us into her mad dreamworld wherein she acquires amnesia and we're assailed with glorious images of native dancers, sexy crooners, and a delicious pitstop involving a sexy anal dominatrix, The Master Passion (Geraldine Chaplin) and then, an even more delectable pitstop involving a madman (Udo "Who the fuck else?" Kier) obsessed with bottoms who is then worked upon by an equally mad doctor who performs open brain surgery to slice out viscous portions of cerebellum afflicted with buttock obsession and climaxing with the ultimate fist-fucking as the doctor plunges his whole hand into the buttock-like brain of Udo Kier to attack the deep core, or prostate, if you will of the man's anal intrusions upon his very mind, his very soul.

There's the tale of a kindly bone specialist who operates upon a sexy motorcyclist who has 47 broken bones after a horrific accident in which she swerves to avoid a family of ducks in her path. Of course, the doctor must take special care to lay his hands upon her prodigiously in order to heal her broken breast bones and, in so doing, falls madly in love with her before being seduced and kidnapped by a bevy of sexy skeleton women who are under the control of a skull-headed medical insurance fraudster.

In DreamLand, Crooners Croon of Derriere Worship.

One yarn after another assails us and as they emit their fantastical glories, constantly astounding us as to how they dovetail in and out of each other - a tale of a mill keeper and his gardener, a tale of a train psychiatrist and his screaming patient and seductive ways, a tale of volcano worshippers always on the lookout for living sacrifices, a tale of a forgetful husband (Mathiu Almaric, that great French actor whom one can watch for an eternity) who ends up murdering his loyal manservant (Udo Kier - AGAIN!!!) to cover-up his gift-giving incompetence, a tale of the manservant in death as his moustache hairs dream about taking him for a final visit (or several) to his little boy and blind wife (Maria de Medeiros), a tale of a consular official and his gorgeous fiancé (Sophie Desmarais) and the man's obsession with a cursed bust of Janus which turns him into an evil Mr. Hyde-like defiler-of-women and the tale of . . .

Have I mentioned the vampires yet?

Oops. Sorry. My bad!

They're called ASWANG (pronounced ASS-WANG).

You will not want to take a bath with any of them - except maybe the ultra-sexy Aswangs.

Will the submarine blow up? Will the woodsman be reunited with his lady love? Will she be cured of her amnesia?

Will we be able to count how many times Louis Negin appears, Franklin Pangborn-like, in different roles?

Will we be able to count how many times Udo Kier appears, Eric Blore-like, in different roles?

Will we ever meet the mysteriously missing Captain of the submarine?

Will we meet his MOTHER!!!!!

Will we survive the mad, fever pitch of a climax, that flings us into the most mind-blowing trip of visual splendour since Stanley Kubrick's stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (replete with . . . colliding zeppelins)?

What HAVE I missed?

Have I missed mentioning that the editing of John Gurdebeke and the production design of Galen Johnson are both as inspired and brilliant as Guy Maddin's most-assured hand? Have I missed mentioning that the exquisite lighting and camera work from cinematographers Stephanie Anne Weber Biron and Ben Kasulke provides the eyes to reflect Maddin's soul? Have I missed mentioning how astonishing the work that all of Mr. Maddin's creative collaborators proves to be in this, his greatest achievement?

I hope not.

I, for one, will take yet another bath with Guy Maddin.

We've taken so many together over the past 30+ years.

What's one (or a few) more.

The Film Corner Rating: ***** 5-Stars

The Forbidden Room is enjoying it's Canadian Premiere in the TIFF Wavelengths Program during TIFF 2015. For tix, dates, times and venues, visit the TIFF website HERE. The film is being distributed in Canada and sold internationally by Mongrel Media. In the USA, it's distributed by Kino-Lorber.

FULL DISCLOSURE

Oh, and for fuck's sake, lest someone point a boneheaded accusatory finger, I present to you the full disclosure that Maddin's late father Chas was business manager of the Winnipeg Maroons, and my own father Julian, who will, by virtue of his stubborn, curmudgeonly qualities, live-forever, played goal for the same team. Both fathers accompanied the team to various European bouts as the Maroons were, indeed, Canada's national hockey team during the early-to-mid-sixties. Maddin and I have been friends for over thirty years, we were flat-mates for many years, we have shared many strange adventures together and I produced his first three feature films (Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel and Careful). I am, however, a true fan of his films. Always have been. I'm perfectly able to assess his work critically and the day I ever hate one of his films (which I have, in fact), I'll goddamn well say so (which I have, in fact, and done so with constructive viciousness).

MAIDAN - TIFF 2014 (TIFF WAVELENGTHS) - Review By Greg Klymkiw

To see Maidan is to see a great film.
To see Maidan as a Ukrainian is to
experience a series of epiphanies.

Maidan (2014)
Dir. Sergei Loznitsa

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Part of me wishes I could just respond to this great documentary as, one supposes, it should be - as a stunning, stirring work of film art that adheres to the tenets of direct cinema by simply focusing upon three key months of the revolution in Ukraine from late 2013 to early 2014. And make no mistake, Maidan, by Sergei Loznitsa is a grand achievement of the highest order. Other than occasional inter-titles describing the historical context in a simple, fact-based manner, Loznitsa allows his exquisite footage to speak for itself.

Using long takes, beautifully composed with no camera movement, the film captures key moments, both specific historical incidents and deeply, profoundly moving human elements. As such, the film evokes stirring and fundamental narrative, thematic and emotional sensations which place us directly in the eye of the storm.

The storm, ultimately, is of ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovitch's doing. After all, it was he who refused to align Ukraine with the European Union and instead, as a corrupt puppet of Russia, cut a deal Ukraine did not want - to align itself with the pig Vladimir Putin and his desire to swallow Ukraine into Russia.

The film simply records the actions of thousands upon thousands of Ukrainians as they protested in revolt against Yanukovitch and Putin. In the background we hear stirring speeches, but in the foreground we see the real Ukrainian people as they set up camp in the Maidan of Kyiv, Independence Square.

It is in the Maidan that Loznitsa captures moments of peace - often those individuals who are strenuously volunteering to provide warmth, shelter and food to those protestors in need of it - as well as moments of friction and violence as we see Yanukovitch's Gestapo-like police inching ever closer towards the people. One of the most stirring moments is seeing ordinary people smashing the cobblestone in the streets to be hurled towards the heavily armed pro-Russian forces. Most sadly, we see Kyiv burn. And, then there are the shots fired and the public funerals of simple folk who have died as heroes. There is very little in this film that does not evoke tears of both joy and sorrow.

Though some might argue this approach eschews a political perspective, I'd argue strenuously that its direct cinema approach cannot help being political given the subjects and subject matter. That Loznitsa chooses three separate sequences involving groups of people ranging from huge to intimate as they sing the Ukrainian National Anthem and in each case bracketed between highly charged moments detailing the events of the revolution, there is clearly not only a political subtext, but one which feels like it's a choice the filmmaker has indeed made to accentuate the need and importance of this revolution.

The lyrics of the anthem Shche ne vmerla Ukraina have always been translated as "Ukraine Has Not Yet Died", but in recent years, slight modifications from the early 2000s to the original verse written by Pavlo Chubynsky in the 19th Century provide the somewhat more hopeful "Ukraine's Glory has not yet Perished." It is this latter version which we hear within the film and yet, to anyone who grew up singing the original lyrics, there's a sense that no, Ukraine has not yet died.

This brings me to my aforementioned desire to respond to Loznitsa's film solely on an aesthetic level, but the fact remains that it's virtually impossible for me to do so.

As a Ukrainian-Canadian raised within a strongly Ukrainian Nationalist culture, the film's qualities as cinema are accentuated in ways that go much deeper. Anytime I hear the anthem, I soar, but maybe most importantly my own feelings about Ukraine take on an added intensity when I see the events Loznitsa has chosen to capture based upon the following key personal elements:

1. Though I was born in Canada, the first time I set foot on Ukrainian soil infused me with a sense of finally "belonging" to something, some place I'd always imagined, but had not yet experienced fully. This only intensified as I spent more time in the country - including, I must add, Eastern Ukraine, where much of the current strife now exists.

2. My apartment in Kyiv was a mere half-block away from the Maidan. Seeing all the locations I'd become so intimately acquainted with and have such fond memories of (including the McDonald's with its strange cyrillic menu items pronounced as "Beeg Mek" or "Da-bl Chees-boorgoor"), forced me to experience Loznitsa's film with the added emotions of one who lived there for an extended period and had come to recognize and love something that became all too real.

Witnessing these events as captured by Loznitsa is a moving document of human solidarity in the face of corruption. Witnessing them as a Ukrainian, however, is to experience every beat, word and action as a series of epiphanies. Maidan is a film that places the revolution in the broader context of what is happening in Ukraine now, but in its simple, beautiful and staggering way, it is a film of considerable importance as it expresses how we must all choose revolution when the criminal actions of very few affect the lives of the majority.

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

Maidan screens at the Toronto International Film Festival in the Wavelengths series. For further information, visit the TIFF 2014 website by clicking HERE.