ReelWorld Film Festival - Festival Wraps

The third Reel World Film Festival opened in a freak spring ice storm that paralyzed Toronto. The storm accentuated the remoteness of the festival, located at a Famous Players SilverCity Cinema, miles from downtown, and kept audiences away until Saturday. For once, more people attended a festival closing- night gala than the opener.

A good film fest is like a storm. It blows into town, sucks everything into its orbit and suddenly it's gone. The ReelWorld Film Festival isn't yet a hurricane, although it continues to absorb more sponsors, expand its programming and attract a growing audience base. The festival showcases filmmakers of colour who are neglected by the establishment. SAG, the actor's union in the United States, reports that in 2001, Latino roles totaled 4.8 per cent even though Latinos make up 12 per cent of the U.S. population. For Asian-Americans, it is 2.5 per cent vs. 4.5 per cent. African-American representation matched population, but most of these roles were as stereotypical gang leaders, junkies or hookers.

This year's films shattered stereotypes, some more successfully than others. Bob Clark's Now and Forever was named the festival's best Canadian feature. Leads Mia Kirshner and Adam Beach are fine as Angela, a white girl from a dysfunctional Saskatchewan family who strikes up a lifelong friendship with John, a kind Cree Native. An audience pleaser, Now and Forever starts out with promise but suffers from a contrived ending and one-dimensional characters. Similarly, Good Fences, the closing-night film, cruises along, but then trails off. After delivering an articulate Q&A, director Ernest Dickerson introduced this enter-mining chronicle of an African-American, upper-middle-class family, headed by the wonderful Whoopi Goldberg, growing up in the white-bread suburbs of the 1970s.

The most likely crossover hits were the comedies Where's the Party Yaar? and Mi Casa Su Casa. In Where's the Party Yaar?, newcomer Benny Matthews concocts a hilarious story about an FOB (fresh-off-the-boat) attending university with his American cousin in Houston. Borrowing from National Lampoon's Animal House, the guys in this film chase babes and grades while skewering South Asian life in America. Bryan Lewis's Mi Casa Su Casa is a reworking of the overdone "green-card" film in which an American (Roy Werner) marries a foreigner (nicely played by Mulholland Drive's Laura Elena Harring) to keep her in the country. Decent jokes, good timing and sympathetic characters rescue Casa from sitcom hell.

There were more films by Aboriginal, Latin and South Asian filmmakers this year, alleviating criticism that the festival is skewed toward black filmmakers. Asian films fared especially well. Carolyn Wong's Yin Yin/Jade Love, also seen at the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival, took Best Canadian Short. Like the finely edited Yah Yah by Yiuwing Lam and Akira Boch's touching Finding Fire under My Grandma's Fingernails, Yin Yin is an Asian filmmaker's homage to her elders, in this case Wong's grandmother who endured racism and sexism to survive in a country that did not want Chinese. Gil Gauvreau's Spirit of the Dragon deserved its Best Canadian Documentary Award. It profiles Chinese-Canadian civil rights activist Jean Lumb who tells her brave story of her lifelong fight, from the 1930s through to the present, to be recognized as a Canadian, not only for herself but for her people. Lumb shines whenever she is on camera and transcends the film's cardboard narration.

At the ReelWorld Film Festival, documentaries often outshone fictional films. British filmmaker Daniel Gordon brought his excellent The Game of Their Lives, chronicling the 1966 World Cup upset by the Cinderella North Korean soccer team over the top-ranked Italians. Two other fine documentaries illuminated black American history: the Oscar-nominated Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks by Bobby Houston and Joel Katz's Strange Fruit, which chronicles Billie Holiday's classic song and America's shameful history of lynching blacks. Unfortunately, the short films programmed were wildly inconsistent. One program scheduled the acidly funny Educated with the poignant White Like the Moon but also the amateurish Deborah Morris... Everyday after Work, which climaxes-appropriately--with a close-up of dog shit.

In a short period of time, ReelWorld has made a mark in a crowded year-round festival circuit. It gathers filmmakers of colour from across the continent to nurture one another in an industry that usually views them as outsiders. However, the festival doesn't generate enough buzz in the multicultural capital of Canada. Furthermore, Toronto film festivals take place in the downtown core, where clubs and restaurants are readily available for the press and attendees alike. Not the ReelWorld and despite a good mix of films at this year's festival, it is still perceived as a mainly black film festival. More marketing and a better location would help matters and artistically ReelWorld's mandate remains unclear. Two major features--the riveting Midnight Ply, directed by Jacob Cheung, and Aparna Seu's Mr. and Mrs. Iyer--were made in Hong Kong and India, two of the biggest film markets in the world. Shouldn't ReelWorld lend a voice to filmmakers of colour who don't get a break from the white mainstream? If so, then why program purely foreign films? Leave that to the Toronto International Film Festival.

I would like to see ReelWorld flourish, but it appears it has to endure more growing pains before it takes the film industry by storm.

Allan Tong is a Toronto--based

filmmaker and freelane journalist.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Canadian Independent Film & Television Publishing Association
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