The Cree word, Waapake, translates to tomorrow in English. There’s a telluric energy in Dr. Jules Arita Koostachin’s new film, invoking the spirits of children who never made it home from residential schools mandated by the Canadian government to “take the Indian out of the child.” The schools operated from the 1800s until the mid-1990s.
WaaPaKe, through candid conversations with family members and friends who have survived residential schools or are descendants of Survivors, brings emotions to the surface while seeking to quell the effects of trauma in viewing the film.
There are reprieves for people who may be triggered by the accounts of how the trauma of settler colonialism and genocide have profoundly shaped their lives and the lives of their kin. An open window with a curtain billowing, furs, beadwork, and geometric patterns to look at while people are speaking, so you can focus and not focus on what is being spoken.
I’ve never been taught how to pronounce Portuguese words. Obrigada sounds like obrigado, sounds like brigado. A man I met in a hostel seemed not to know the difference. In Romance languages there is always a masculine and feminine. I know that hoje is the word for today, which sounds (in my head) like hoy, in Spanish. Oye, which is kind of like “hey” in Spanish, looks to me like an eye.
On a recent weekend, a group of us at the crosswalk let a truck make a left turn as the light switched from yellow to red. It reminded me that sometimes the big guys are also the underdogs. In Toll, Carolina Markowicz’s new film which premiered at TIFF, Suellen (played by Maeve Jinkings) is late for work. There’s the tyranny of industrialized rock ascending to the heavens in the shot. She hails a truck driver, perhaps the only plausible person passing by this landscape of desolation. Sure, get in, he says. He’s going by the toll station.
Maeve Jinkings as Suellen in Toll. Photo courtesy of TIFF.
It seemed to me that there was quite a bit of hype about Markowicz’s new work at TIFF this year, but maybe that was just me paying too much attention to my email inbox at imprecise times. TIFF’s online programme description reads in part:
“Confirming herself as one of Brazil’s clearest voices in current cinema, director Carolina Markowicz returns to the Festival after regaling audiences with last year’s uniquely dark and twisted comedy CHARCOAL. While training her singular gaze again on the dynamics by which a small family unit tries to stay afloat in the face of chaos, the tone and focus here differ greatly. The narrative and formal economy honed by Markowicz allow rising star Maeve Jinkings to widen her range within a story of motherhood as tough love gone wrong.”
I was excited to see Toll because of my visit to Rio de Janeiro before the pandemic. I also have come to understand recently the breadth of what “diverse” means in the context of Brazil, one of the most ethnically diverse places on earth. I try to guess at where the film takes place, I believe it is somewhere in Distrito Federal, maybe Brasília. But maybe it is in São Paolo.
In the film, Suellen is a single parent looking after her son Antonio (Kauan Alvarenga) who is exploring his queerness, posting videos in which they sing American pop ballads online. Suellen finds this concerning and is determined to help by spending hard earned money to send Antonio to a camp run by a “pastor” who had been “reformed” by bizarre practices that bring a distinct style of humour to the screen. We were laughing in the theatre.
Suellen’s live-in boyfriend, Arauto (Thomás Aquino) is and turns out to be an asshole. You realize that a woman’s life is not just the snapped bra straps and toilet-seat wipings, the cooking and looking after friends by buying them condoms they can’t afford—but a woman’s life is being cheated, again and again, not being able to choose what or who she is cheated by. It’s simply resigning yourself to this kind of life: forgetting. I thought of Penelope, who in Greek mythology is the wife of Odysseus. At night she undoes the work on her loom to keep her suitors at bay one more day. But the more tragic fate is one that is surmised by the undoing that isn’t intentional.
There’s a scene toward the end of the film, when Suellen and Antonio are sitting together outside. “You haven’t gone to the pedágio?” she said incredulously, looking at the belongings Antonio has brought to her. “No,” Antonio says, “The cafeteria.” The sky looks like it’s going to rain, and then it does. The next frame is after the rain I have imagined.
The film ends on a loving note, set in a space between domesticity and industry: at a cafeteria, where people are nourished by food and performance. Suellen has a new job serving people food behind the counter. The end credits roll just as she is scolded by her manager who shows her how to be more efficient in some way. She repeats what she is told to better understand.
British director Dominic Savage’s new film, Close To You, co-produced and written with Elliot Page, is visually speaking a slice of the Canadian film canon—astute and memorable for its languid cuts and close shots that look beautiful on the big screen.
Page stars as Sam, a trans man from Cobourg, Ont. who revisits his family for his father’s birthday after making a new life in Toronto. After a serendipitous and confusing encounter with Katherine, a childhood friend (Hillary Baack) on the train, he goes home with even more trepidation about returning to a place where he was not okay and misunderstood.
Punctuated with witty banter and moments of levity in ordinary life, Close To You shows that “classic” scenes—a family gathering, awkward reintroductions, unrequited love—can still be remade in ways that move. This is in thanks to a generous performance by Page, who since his breakout roles on the silver screen has undergone gender-affirming surgery and, over the past decade, has become more active behind the camera.
Elliot Page as Sam in Close To You. Photo courtesy of TIFF.
In Close To You, Page brings himself to the screen. His skin and body are such a part of the visual language of the film and he brings a soulfulness to the quieter frames, quips, and moments of internal dialogue. When it comes to the actual speaking, Page has revealed that the script was without dialogue and 100% improvised—an astounding fact given how cohesive the narrative feels.
“Are you seeing anyone?” seems to be the most recurrent question to someone whose gender or sexuality is nonconforming, or who is perhaps is undergoing any type of transition. Elegant cuts give the long shots movement, like cars on a train, taking you somewhere. This is a skillful intention that brings to an understated story the momentum it needs to cross the threshold from commentary to art.
A film can be judged by how invulnerable it is to scrutiny. That’s to say, whether or not it’s possible to tell if it was strategically marketed, impervious to its audience, or a film that has something for everyone. Close To You is a film that has the contours of universal experience, but it also has an educational component, as an eighteenth-century novel once did. There’s an homage to the need for greater representation, which illuminates the discomfort people have with trans people’s existence and alludes to the need for mental health supports at home and in health systems.
The film got its release at the Toronto International Film Festival amid a tide of LGBTQ hate and transphobia in North America. Whether it is a shooting at a U of Waterloo gender studies class or the Saskatchewan government engaging the notwithstanding clause to protect a policy that requires parental permission to change students’ pronouns, the realities at the heart of the story can be felt as a tide or a ripple.
Close To You is a meditation on distances—across time, between people. I’ve been on that train from Toronto to Cobourg, ruminating on the waves lapping the beaches of Lake Ontario. There’s an ode to how home is constructed physically and in the mind, the smallness of it set against a bigger city, improbable acts of love. You hope that Sam’s character can find a way to separate feelings of joy and sorrow, when they are so often soldered together.
In the word for youth in Mandarin, there is also the word for spring. I did the algebra in my head watching the opening credits of Youth (Spring), director Wang Bing’s 3.5-hour film, the first chapter of a three-part documentary about the lives of young garment workers in Zhili, China. Add an hour and a half to to the length and I think an eat break or pee break might be legally required by the Employment Standards Act in Ontario, if it were work to watch a film.
The director himself wasn’t there at the screening, which could have owed to any number of reasons—visa or scheduling issues, production on another project, maybe he wasn’t in the mood to see people trickle out as time went on. Maybe it’s Maybelline.
Zhili is a small township in Zhejiang province, close to Hangzhou, a port city, former outpost of the Silk Road, and jewel of the Song Dynasty. In Zhili, about 300,000 migrant workers are employed in workshops that produce mostly children’s clothing that demand grueling hours and highly skilled labour for little pay. Most of the workers in the documentary are from Anhui, another southeastern province bifurcated by the Yangtze river and home to Huangshan (“Yellow Mountain”) and agricultural fields, stately homes made of concrete.
At the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year where Youth (Spring) premiered, Wang was asked a series of strange but artful questions about two of his films that were selected. The other was a shorter film called Man in Black. When Wang was asked what he felt the differences were between his generation of youth and the youth of today, he answered that he thought they experienced pretty much the same conditions of life, which I think is a courageous answer, but maybe that’s really what he thinks and maybe that’s even the case. He added that today’s youth live under more stress.
Migrant workers in Youth (Spring) examine rates for the piecework they do. Photo courtesy of TIFF.
When I think of the classic Chinese novels The Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber, which I do because of the many personages in Youth (Spring), I think of the novelistic impulse to resolve most everything about people who are introduced. In a documentary, this is not a requirement. One is reminded that a young man can get on a bus with his friend, never to be seen again. As the footage rolls, we are introduced to more and more migrants who are around the same age, 19 to 21. More fall away, or are sent to get abortions. Some ponder their own youthfulness and talk about getting married to a person of their choosing. 30 is old.
Because art imitates life, or vice versa, the very act of putting a camera down, or holding it to your chest, turning it on, and eavesdropping on a conversation will get you a meaningful shot. Meaning will sprout from the ears of the footage. It’s inevitable, and the metaphors don’t even ask permission to appear, they just do when you watch it back. Unintentionality is beautiful. It attracts envy because it didn’t even ask to be born, yet it’s out in the world, like a peach pit sunning itself on the sidewalk in the middle of the day. Then again, what use is beauty in a garment workshop on Happiness Road? Is it there for dramatic irony or is it appreciated? I wonder if certain people in the film know they are beautiful.
It might be surprising to think of beauty in such a polluted environment. There is no society in Zhili, one angry resident points out early in the film. People freely litter the floors of their dormitories and the rainy streets outside with whatever they are holding in their hands or in their mouths, because they are too tired to have possessions, and this is not their home. I remember hearing a commercial on the radio years ago when I was visiting Beijing: “When water is dirty, what will we use to wash it?” was the kicker. Why worry at this point? I assume the answer would be.
As Wang has elucidated, freedom in documentary is proportional to how much time the filmmaker has to make it. Without at least a few years in tow, you produce a frenzied, stressful film. Time builds trust, by its own virtue, needing very little else. But being a good person doesn’t hurt the odds. Youth (Spring) condenses 2,600 hours of footage, I assume digital. Wang’s longest documentary, 铁西区: West of the Tracks, is considered an epic at 9 hours long, and some people in the audience apparently had seen it.
Looking at the workers in the film is like looking at the Mona Lisa: she’s smiling, is she happy? The young people laugh and jest, the cultural differences between East and West are so apparent. But happiness is not the preferred currency, and being jovial is seen as bringing no value. When people speak of “family” in corporate life, the term dulls in comparison to the family that really is forged in these workshops. There’s a way difficult things are said, and imagine what’s not. In a film that reveals such intimate moments, one certainty is that many more such moments are deliberately not shown. Phone calls to one’s children are tender, phone calls to one’s mother are private. There’s the showers, what the inside of the bathrooms look like.
The Mona Lisa.
Throughout the documentary we see a strange balance of power. An elderly man who owns a workshop can defy the wishes of a room full of able-bodied workers. Is this what the law does in practice? Negotiations for rates of pay for different types of work are convoluted and obfuscated, even by the people involved in and affected by them. Workers jostle for the rate that best suits them, sometimes undercutting others who are slower. Some people shop around for better rates and treatment since there are so many workshops looking for people with the same skills. But this turns out to be a futile exercise as the prices are set by a modern day cartel.
At some point in the advent of capitalism, workers were separated from the means of production. This is visually represented by the owner of one of the garment workshops cleaning and testing his machinery while trying to quiet a group of discontented workers, who have nothing to care for but themselves. Garment making and the requisite skill needed to make clothing were removed from their place inside the home and placed in factories and workshops. These activities accelerated during the Industrial Revolution and, despite the hype around new technology writ large, has changed remarkably little since then. The entire system, which includes the owners of these workshops, tries to keep pace with the whims of capitalistic fervour, the appetite for new styles and batches of clothing each season.
The starts of spring, not the throes of winter, mark the New Year in parts of the world. And it is the time in China when migrant workers go home to visit family, reunite with loved ones, sleep in their own beds. You start to wonder: will they ever get to go home? You start to track the time of year by what they’re wearing. The fashionable clothes they wear, which they can afford just as they can afford to eat fast food every day, for every meal. Toward the end the workers are wearing short sleeves, so you wonder if winter has passed. If winter has passed isn’t it springtime? On the walls of one of the shots someone has inscribed in black marker: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. They’ve scribbled the words vertically in three sets, just like I would if I were practicing the remembrance of how characters are written. Seasons of change when the only constant is the hum of machines and the music that plays over speakers. Communal music, ubiquitous and unrelenting.
Not a moment’s peace, one young worker says, freeing him from the work that never ends, from how he gets picked on by others. But also not a moment of privacy. In some shots the young men and women are wearing their own earphones, listening to whatever music they want. In a choiceless life a person looks past choice. It’s probably a romantic pop song much like the one that’s often blaring, prodding fast hands to work faster. Quality control works itself, as it becomes harder to do a bad job the more work is done. Skill accumulates, slack is for beginners.
A note about love: I don’t think the film deals much in it. Love isn’t love just because someone says it is. But there is desire, there is intimacy. From beginning to end the young workers are shown touching each other, making jokes about perversion and harassment. There is the desire to be touched, the recoil from a person’s touch, all in the same shot. This cues us to the fact that there is nothing these young people can do for leisure but be proximate to each other. Closer and closer. Sometimes they have to be held back.
I thought I might lose my mind sitting there in the theatre. At one point my eyes sensitized to the theatre darkening even more and what I thought were shadows lengthening. I was also feeling antsy because there was another overlapping screening, at 7:00 p.m., of Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine. What better way to spend the day than to compare the works of two contemporary Chinese filmmakers, both considered vanguards.
I sat in the bottom row in preparation to leave a little early to stand in the rush line. But the question was how early? I decided as the picture went on that it would be better to watch the film in its entirety and arrive at half past the hour so as to avoid the line altogether. There was bound to be at least one unoccupied seat. But as time passed I realized it would be physically impossible to watch another three-hour film immediately after. I’ve seen Farewell My Concubine before, by the way it is also about toil under a different regime. The film has just been restored and I can see it another time at another venue, or even on my laptop again. But aside from the disrespect I thought would be evident by my leaving the theatre in the middle of the trappings of these young people’s lives, I didn’t know where I’d see their faces again.
As the end credits rolled, and as we were walking out delirious, with oils on our cheeks and haze in our brains, I overheard two women talking about the film. One said something along the lines of it needing character development, forgetting or not knowing that the people in the film are not characters. “You can’t just turn on the camera, you have to do a little work,” she opined. I thought among other things that this woman had wasted three-and-a-half hours of her life. I’m ruthless in leaving this here, as it’s one of those arcane, incantatory maledictions that shouldn’t be repeated. But like the film, I’m unsure where it will be seen again and by whom.
A film that screens at 11:59 p.m. is bound to draw the eye. Although NAGA, a Netflix film out of Saudi Arabia, would be inconspicuous otherwise—a title among other titles on the TIFF programme, it certainly found the right crowd as part of a Midnight Madness screening at the Royal Alexandra Theatre on a Tuesday.
An unassuming Meshal Aljaser (dir. Arabian Alien, Is Sumiyati Going to Hell?) walked out onto the stage, conceding that he didn’t expect such a large audience and making a point to say, in a Jordan Peele way, that he would classify NAGA as a comedy instead of a thriller. It’s true that there were more than a couple of jokes.
It’s unusual to see a film that isn’t like anything else you’ve seen before. Not to say that NAGA doesn’t look or sound (remarkably) like a big-budget, box-office smash like Uncut Gems. But the uncanniness running through it, the unlikelihood of its making and release to a mainstream, international audience (it was programmed at TIFF as a rough cut), in conjunction with the exact sum of its artistic parts, the gazing back into the abyss of a Western audience, all make the film something that evades description.
Adwa Bader is at the forefront when it comes to the success of the picture, earning her a TIFF Rising Star award. An LA-based Saudi renaissance woman, Bader makes a stunning breakout performance as Sara, a deadpan young woman who takes off with her boyfriend on a psychedelic trip into the desert under the guise of a shopping trip that her father will pick her up from at 9 p.m. To hear the narrative described as simple might not be intuitive, because it’s non-linear and embellished by a sound design that makes Transformers seem quaint. But the container for the 111-minute movie is as easily understood as Inception and Ulysses: a clock ticking, the events of one particular day.
Adwa Bader as Sara in NAGA. Photo courtesy of TIFF.
NAGA, with its immediate visual appeal and quick dialogue (I thought of White Teeth, hysterical realism, and also magical realism), is laden with symbols. Every film is an ode to a place, but to witness the levity, freedom and absence of mystery with which Aljaser treats Riyadh’s street-level conversation was refreshing. And it was as if the film could anticipate where every laugh would be, glossing over the belly laughs and turning each potential for ignorance into a greater cause for satire.
The shiny appeal of a cup of drug-infused tea, little mountains on tin foil, the luxury assumed by a chandelier (or a whole window of them) serves as a simple visual cue that invites speculation about what the film is gesturing at on a political level. Also, camels. Lots of them, in varying levels of aliveness and decay. It’s rare to have a film call to mind animal studies, but that’s what I was thinking about as I considered the parallels between human and animal life, the abdication of responsibility in a lawless, stateless reality (or fever dream), the cruelty of humans.
Sara moves through the day in different styles of dress—her hair is uncovered and covered, she uses a hair tie. There is the moment she stops in front of her gate to put on her headscarf before darting out to whoop her little brother’s ass. It’s not hard to picture how universal forces enter the strainer of quotidien life in Saudi Arabia, where as common knowledge goes, women were not legally allowed to drive motor vehicles until 2018. Where, perhaps, restraint and duplicity exist in poetry and freedom exists in one of its forms in the cars that line the streets after a win by the national football team.
Wayfinding is another powerful theme in NAGA, where at the almost-end of the film, Sara drives a motorcycle from the dunes ensconced in darkness back to urban streets by recalling the instructions given through a half-cracked window by a stranger. The billboards, mosques, and monuments trained in the view of one’s Google Map are not only the most mundane parts of life but can save your life. Are they beautiful? Sinister? It depends what time of day it is. Those of us privileged to travel have had “relatable” moments where a phone dies, a charger is needed—the specific type of charger that fits a later model of phone. A reliance on the luxury of time, dumb luck, and a will to live is something we all have in common.
NAGA is Aljaser’s first feature-length film. Based in Los Angeles, where he studied screenwriting, Aljaser garnered a large YouTube following with the release of several short films that also deal in divertive and aesthetically ambiguous ways with his birthplace. For Aljaser to make his feature debut at TIFF is truly exciting to see. A release date for NAGA is yet to be announced by Netflix.
Day six of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. I feel lucky to have entered the world of Anand Patwardhan’s documentary filmmaking through his latest, most personal film, The World is Family. I wandered into the screening enchanted by the title, which seems not to be an anomaly but an extension of some sort of artistic hand. In Patwardhan’s body of work there are many poetic names that also seem a touch philosophical: In Memory of Friends (1990), A Narmada Diary (1995), Reason (2018). He is widely known for the two-hour documentary, War and Peace (2002), which deals with nuclear weapons testing in India and Pakistan in 1998 and the politics and nationalistic rhetoric surrounding these events.
Indian politics, religion in the subcontinent, and Mahatma Gandhi figure prominently in Patwardhan’s documentaries, and The World is Family is not an outlier in this respect. His family, on both his maternal and paternal side, have personal connections to the independence movement in India, to Partition, and to Gandhi. But, as the filmmaker discussed with the audience after the screening, The World is Family is about his parents, and politics and history serve more as a backdrop. For those familiar with Patwardhan’s work, the tone of his latest feature-length documentary will seem more meditative and less prickly. (It depends, however, how you respond to the back of a needle versus the tip of one.)
Still from The World is Family. Courtesy of TIFF.
I can list a few types of scenes that are uncomfortable to watch on screen, either real or constructed: infidelity, assault and physical violence; blood, if you’re squeamish. But in seeing this film I found one other: dying. I do not mean the enactment or portrayal of death but the intimate moments of one’s dying. Even a photograph of a deceased person can confront one’s sight in a way that doesn’t register emotionally until a few seconds later. Photographs and archival footage are used generously throughout the film, from Patwardhan’s family archive as well as public archives. Patwardhan ‘shot’ conversations and scenes in the film over the course of three decades and during COVID the material revealed itself to him as being more interesting and deserving of an audience.
Patwardhan’s preferred aesthetic—simple, dignified, and straightforward—stuck out to me, making it easier to write about the film. Near the beginning, while interviewing a guide, Patwardhan beckons to someone to hand him the camera so he himself can continue to film while having the conversation. The result, in the next frame, is a view of the person from the chin up, and a closer shot. At times the narrative as told through oral tradition is difficult to follow, as well it should, demanding the whole of the viewer’s attention. Geographically the film traipses from Sindh to Delhi to Bengal, with much of the movement attributed to Patwardhan’s mother Nirmala whose first love happened to be ceramics and whose schooling at the experimental university Santiniketan brought her closer to Gandhi.
The World is Family is a 96-minute film made entirely by the filmmaker (with the aid of contextual footage, music, and other public domain and copyrighted materials)—its release to a worldwide audience is an opulent humility afforded to someone at the very beginning and past the zenith of celebrity in their career. This film expresses hope that more people will know Patwardhan’s work. At the core of the portrait of his parents is a somber but joyful meditation of beginnings and ends. I don’t think it tries to say that beauty fades, but that it carries less and less meaning as time goes on, or perhaps needs to be transfigured in order to be understood again.
Patwardhan seemed touched by the viewing, and in answering some questions after the public screening was gracious and attentive to those present in the room, spoke frankly about his views when asked. I myself was happy and somewhat relieved to witness the openness he had to the audience, signifying a willingness to be seen, and as if they too could partake in the naming of things.
I’ve been a little bored lately, circling the complex where I live like a prisoner of my own making. Except ‘my own’ is a little heavy handed a remark; it is a collective kind of incarceration that besieges us in an array of consequences. Even with restrictions loosening in public life, I find myself staying with the same boxed-in routines, that seem more airy than they were months ago. I looked out the window the other day and saw that the fence that separates our homes from the train tracks had been vandalized. It was cleaned, by whatever means possible, and then graffitied again. I keep looking to see if the cycle repeats.
Two films recently woke me from what feels like a long slumber: Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep, and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. In both cases, viewer discretion is advised – which is the least of their appeal.
Both films are, visually speaking, about looking: what happens when you examine the contours of someone’s face — looking at what they are looking at — closely. In the opening scene of Irma Vep, Maggie Cheung walks into a French film production company’s offices without a common language, looking around as we do for a clue. A clue is not what we get in this film, which is nevertheless about creation, re-creation, and reflexivity. Maggie is cast as a version of herself – an actress from Hong Kong who is to be the star of a remake of the silent 1915 French film, Les Vampires. A French film within a French film, in which intellectualism is almost parodied. In the end, however, an argument seems to be made for its necessity, or at least its fruitfulness.
To focus on what the film means is to overlook what it makes us see; its limns of the banalities of filmmaking that produce great scenes. Maggie’s task, according to the film’s off-kilter director, René, is to “be herself,” something that is hardly possible in a black latex, skin-tight costume and powdered face. Her performance throughout, as herself, are strong: she is self-conscious, exchanging pleasantries and controlling the level of intimacy she feels with characters, a girl at a party who isn’t in on the joke, or able to speak the language. Others fawn over her. It may as well be a movie about stardom, a movie about stars that don’t align.
In The Piano Teacher, the person with the most power is scrutinized from the position of someone who doesn’t sit in the glare of their scrutiny. You wish you knew how to play piano so you could be grateful for the fact you were not playing. The camera is smart: it looks at you, looking at the characters, looking at each other. Isabelle Hupert’s character, Erika Kohut, is cold and calculating as she is sympathetic. We see her peer at female skaters being forced off the ice by a group of male hockey players. Her lower lip trembles and we let down our guard. But the film as a whole is one where you would prefer to look away.
In the last scene, one of the most powerful cinematic moments I hold in my memory, there is a break in understanding. We lunge after Erika’s feelings in this moment of resonance and dissonance. Why is this emotion—whatever version of it makes her human in our eyes—off limits to us in a way that refurbishes our interest in her motivations? Or is it not a matter of choice? A violent act toward oneself draws sympathy in a way that we cannot fully comprehend, but we go with it, and her, into the dark contours of the city. The doors are there, they swing open. She leaves.
Faithful Correspondence 