Daniel Garber talks with Desirée Mckenzie about the Jayu Human Rights Film Festival

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

Movies are made to entertain — they should be interesting, novel, funny, exciting, or surprising. But movies can also inform, opening our eyes to important issues. Well, there’s a film festival in Toronto that does all that… and more. The JAYU Human Rights Film festival offers movies, poetry, art talks and films for audiences to watch and to discuss afterwards.

Desirée Mckenzie is the iAM Program Coordinator at JAYU — she’s also an award-winning poet, arts educator, and national poetry slam champion.

I spoke with Desirée in Toronto, via ZOOM.

The JAYU Human Rights Film Festival is entering its 10th year; it runs through  Dec 10th. 

Daniel Garber talks with Rebecca Snow about Pandora’s Box

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

It’s as old as humanity, directly experienced by more than half the population, and indirectly by the rest; is crucial to our existence as a species. And yet it’s treated as a dirty and shameful taboo. It’s omnipresent yet never mentioned in public.

I’m talking about menstruation. And because we never talk about it, women and girls suffer social discrimination and economic hardship, at work and at home, in schools and in prisons. Isn’t it time we open this Pandora’s Box?

Pandora’s Box: Lifting the Lid on Menstruation is a new documentary that delves into its history and culture, and looks at human rights advocates around the world — in India, Kenya, North America and Europe — who are trying to normalize periods and to make them affordable, safe and accessible.  It’s written and directed by Rebecca Snow, an award-winning Canadian filmmaker who specializes in social issue documentaries.

Pandora’s Box premiers on Monday, March 8th, International Women’s Day.

I spoke with Rebecca Snow in Toronto, via ZOOM. (Some of the dialogue is inaudible, due to technical difficulties.)

Art and deception. Films reviewed: Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies, The Art of Self Defense, Push

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

The things you see online – or on TV for that matter – aren’t always true (suprised?). This week I’m looking at three movies, two docs and one dark comedy, about lies and deceptions. There’s a man who trains in the art of karate, a look at the art of selling lies, and a look at the lies of selling real estate.

Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies

Dir: Larry Weinstein

What is Propaganda? Is it art and literature? Or brainwashing and fake news? The word comes from a benign Catholic term meaning the propagation of faith, the planting the seeds. The Vatican opened a department of propaganda to counter Martin Luther’s austere reforms. It combined the opulance of baroque cathedrals, the lure of incense and all the lush frescos, paintings and marble statues you’ve seen. But art and magic and religion were around long before that, and so, says this documentary, was propaganda. Some historians trace it as far back as Neandrathal cave paintings.

Propaganda is easy to spot in other cultures but very hard to see in your own.  Many people were entanced by dictators like Hitler and Stalin thanks to their skillful use of films (like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will) radio broadcasts and posters. But with the shift to digital culture, it has taken on new forms; like patently false news stories online, repeated ad infinitum, until people start to believe it.

Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies is a fun, light documentary that talks to a lot of artists and writers – Astra Taylor, Ai Weiwei and Kent Monkman – but also musicians, analysts and others. It shoots a constant barrage of propaganda at you, images from the past 100 years, shown in harsh black and white periodically blanketed in fields of red. A lot of it is familiar but there are also some bizarre juxtapositions you’ve never heard of: like the racing cars that now drive around the former Nazi Nuremberg Stadium. Or Laibach, a Slovenian band known for its fascistic costumes and images, who performed in North Korea before a concert hall of nonplussed party apparatchiks and university students. Very funny.

The Art of Self Defense

Wri/Dir: Riley Stearns

It’s the 1990s in small-town America. Casey (Jesse Eisenberg) is a shy accountant who lives with his dachshund. He’s a 98-pound weakling who works in an office full of alpha males. But when he’s violently attacked by strangers on motorbikes he decides something has got to change. No more sand will be kicked in his face! He joins a local karate dojo with its own set of hierarchical rules. Everyone is ranked by their belt colour. There’s Anna (Imogen Poots) who teaches the kids class; get on her wrong side and she’ll beat you to a pulp. And at the top of the heap is Sensei (Alessandro Nivola).

He says karate is not just a martial art, it’s a way of life. You must punch with your feet and kick with your hands. Casey is starry-eyed, and ready to do whatever Sensei tells him. You must become more masculine, he says.  Stop learning French, start learning German. And throw out those adult contemporary CDs; only listen to metal! Casey takes the blue pill. He leaves his job and devotes his life to karate. He worships Sensei, has a secret crush on Anna, and proudly displays his low-ranked yellow belt for all to see.

But something is not right. When he joins the mysterious night classes he is exposed to a violent world of hyper-masculinity he doesn’t subscribe to. He is asked to perform dubious tasks outside of the dojo. Is this place only about karate? Or is it a cult? And what is hidden behind Sensei’s secret door?

The Art of Self Defense is a low-budget, uncategorizable, odd sort of a movie, part dark comedy, part mystery, with a bit of violence and horror mixed in. It’s slow to develop, but picks up nicely about halfway through. It’s filled with wood paneling, old computers and ugly clothes from the 90s, which adds a humorous tinge. But It’s hard to tell whether it’s being satirical or straightforward, comic or scary. Jesse Eisenberg is totally believable as the wimpy accountant trying to become more manly, and Allessandro Nivola is good as the mysterious sensei.

Take it as a cautionary tale about the search for masculinity, self-confidence and the cult of martial arts and you’ll enjoy this dark comedy.

Push

Dir: Fredrik Gertten

There’s a housing crisis in the world’s cities and no one knows seems to know what’s going on. In Toronto there’s a shortage of affordable apartments, with stagnant wages, soaring rents and home prices quadrupling. Speculators are buying up land as a bankable commodity, something bought and sold, with little thought given to the people who live there. And in many cities entire blocks of housing sit empty, because rent income is dwarfed by what they can earn from the constant increase in value of the buildings themselves. What’s going on?

Enter Leilani Farha, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing. She’s a mom from Ottawa who travels around the world collecting data and advocating on behalf of tenants everywhere. She views housing not as an investment but as a right.

This documentary looks at the dire situation in the world’s cities – from Milan to Berlin, Seoul to Valpariaso – where people are facing the same situations: gentrification, renoviction, and the displacing of average- and low-income earners from the world’s cities.

It explores the role of organized crime in the housing crisis. They use property investment as a way of laundering money by over investing in legit properties, driving up demand and prices and hiding their illicit profits.

It looks at how the financial sector is turning housing into an investment commodity, with the people who live in them entirely erased from the equation. One particularly notorious player is Blackstone – founded by former Lehman Brothers execs – a voracious American property investment company that swooped into the real estate market after the stockmarket crash of 2008. Now they’re making money by buying up public housing for profit, while neglecting the people they were actually built for.

And it looks at the role of pensions, both government and private, which invest in housing to grow their capital, but, unintentionally, lead to skyrocketing prices and increasing homelessness.

Push is an incredibly important and informative documentary that explains in simple terms the economics, politics and effects of this crisis. It uses experts – like Joseph Stiglitz, Saskia Sassen and Roberto Saviano – to explain the reasons behind the crisis. But it also talks with ordinary people around the world. It shows the multiple, small-scale problems people face as well as the large-scale disasters, like the Grenfell Tower Fire in London. They are all related. And it’s the great Leilani Farha who is trying to confront these problems in a new way.

I recommend this doc.

Propaganda: The Art of Lies, Push, and The Art of Self Defense all open today in Toronto; check your local listings.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.

Fighting Monsters. Films Reviewed: Tickling Giants, The Void, The Zookeeper’s Wife

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

If relationship, family, work or school problems are too hard to handle, a movie is a good place to escape it. Especially if the people on the screen are fighting real monsters. This week I’m looking at movies bout people facing monsters. There’s a Polish zookeeper facing the Nazis, a political comic facing a military government, and a smalltown sheriff facing something scary… he’s just not sure what.

Tickling Giants

Dir: Sara Taksler

Bassem Youssef is a heart surgeon in Cairo. In the heady days of the Arab Spring, he heads to Tahrir Square to help support protesters as best he can. Many of them are beaten and need medical attention. But what he really wants to be is a comedian – specifically a political comic like Jon Stewart of the Daily Show. Under Mubarek, outright criticism of the government was not permitted. But with the newfound freedom that came with the popular uprising, he is able to launch a TV show, known simply as the show. With a team of writers and producers it brings political satire to the masses. The show is wildly popular, but the newly elected president Morsi, from the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t like him one bit. So he takes him to court and loses! Baassem Youssef is a free man. Until… Morsi is overthrown in a military coup, putting General Sisi in charge of Egypt. Sisi is popular and dictators don’t like criticism. SomeoPro-Sisi protesters declare Youssef a traitor for criticizing the army, while others fear he will disrupt the relative calm the military coup brought. Is Bassem Youssef just what Egyptians need? Or is he too much, too soon?

Tickling Giants is a funny and informative documentary about how US style political humour fares in Egypt’s. Illustrated with political cartoons by a young man Andeel, it offers behind the scene look at TV production and how it influences and is affected by politicians. One criticism: it could have been a bit shorter; it doesn’t take almost two hours to tell this simple story.

The Void

Wri/Dir: Jeremy Gillespie, Steven Kostanski

Daniel (Aaron Poole) is a police sheriff in a small town – a place with very little crime. So he’s startled to see a bloodied young man, under the influence, come stumbling out of the woods. But when he takes him to the nearby hospital where his wife Alison (Kathleen Munroe) is a doctor in the ER, things get strange. Patients behave erratically, and two heavily armed men show up at the gate threatening to kill the kid. Stranger still, a group of identically-dressed men appear outside the hospital brandishing large knives. They are wearing white sheets and hoods, sort of like flat-topped Klansmen, but with a mysterious triangle painted on the front their faces.

And otherworldly visions appear in Daniel’s mind, full of dark clouds roiling over a lunar landscape. Has the town been invaded by satanic worshippers, drug fiends or sex-crazed maniacs? Nobody knows for sure. It’s up to the people trapped in the hospital — including a pregnant woman, a kindly doctor (Kenneth Welsh) a young intern, and a state trooper (Art Hindle) – have to settle their differences and fight the mysterious powers before they tear each other apart.

The Zone is a horror and psychological thriller about ordinary people driven to extremes in there resistance to unknown killers. There are some fun scenes and a few shocking parts — and I loved the weird images that appear in Daniel’s head — but on the whole, it’s more unintentionally funny that genuinely scary. Some of they dialogue is atrocious, and much of the movie left me scratching my heads as to what exactly is going on. (For example, when two characters are fighting in an imaginary landscape, you don’t know which of them is hallucinating.) I kept waiting for the robot commentators from Mystery Science Theatre 3000 to appear on the screen to explain it all to me.

The Zookeeper’s Wife

Dir: Niki Caro

It’s 1939 in Warsaw. Husband and wife Antonina and Jan Zabinsky (Jessica Chastain and Johan Heldenbergh) run the zoo as if the amimals are family members. Especially Antonina. She’s a female Doctor Doolittle, who really does talk to the animals. She goes for daily runs around the park with a dromedary and sleeps with a white lion cub. And at a party, everyone sees her save an elephant calf from choking. Especially impressed is Lutz Heck, a leading German zoologist (Daniel Brühl). But when the Germans invade, their world is turned upside down. The zoo is bombed and wild animals run rampant across the city. Afterwards Lutz offers to help save the zoo animals by sending the best ones – the purest breeds – to Berlin. (Purest breeds? Sounds a bit Nazi…)  Sure enough, the next time she sees him, he’s dressed in full Nazi  regalia. He’s a high-ranked officer. And he has his eye on the beautiful Antonina. But she and Jan have a plan of their own: to help save their Jewish friends and colleagues from certain death in the Warsaw Ghetto, and help move guns to the resistance. The concoct a complex plan to smuggle people out of the ghetto inside a garbage truck holding slop to feed their pigs. (They’ve turned their beloved zoo into a pig farm.) They are hidden in plain sight, inside the Zabinsky villa even while Lutz is operating an army base on the same premises. Will there plan succeed? Or will they and their rescued friends be sent to their deaths?

Based on a true story, the Zookeeper’s Wife is a romantic drama set in war-torn Warsaw, where a zoo serves as a secret sanctuary for Jews escaping the Nazi death machine. It’s also a Holocaust rescue story… with furry animals. As such, it abbreviates familiar images that have been shown in movies so often: broken windows, Nazi banners covering public buildings, ashes falling like snowflakes, children loaded onto cattle cars… At the same time, it avoids most of the blood, death and gore — the camera always turns away. There are some devestatingly sad parts, like a young girl, Urszula (Shira Haas) who is raped by two German soldiers before she is rescued.  Still the movie didn’t show me much I haven’t already seen, aside from the zoo  — which had new, haunting images.

Good as a tearjerker.

The Zookeeper’s Wife and The Void both open today in Toronto; check your local listings. Tickling Giants is playing at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival this weekend. Go to tiff.net/human-rights-watch/.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com

Daniel Garber talks to Migrant Dreams director Min Sook Lee

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

Canada is a land of opportunity for citizens and permanent residents alike. Immigrants, students and asylum seekers share in the country’s bounty. But not everyone has the rights and privileges the average Canadian takes for granted. Temporary Foreign Workers lead a precarious existence, subject to fraud, abuse and neglect by their employers. Many come saddled with a crippling debt owed to the recruiters who bring them here. Workers who fight back are threatened with job loss or even deportation. Will Temporary Foreign Workers ever achieve their migrant dreams?

Migrant Dreams is a new documentary having its world premier at Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival on May 9th. It follows the plight of a group of Indonesian women working in the greenhouses of Leamington, Ontario. It was directed by award-winning filmmaker Min Sook Lee, known for her documentaries on the plight of persecuted minorities and precarious labourers.

I spoke to Min Sook Lee at CIUT.

Daniel Garber talks to Elisa Paloschi about her new documentary Driving with Selvi premiering at the ReelAsian Film Festival

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for cultural mining,com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

Selvi was a 14-year-old child bride in Southern India. Her husband was so abusive she contemplated suicide, but instead ran away. She made her way to home for young women where she learned to be a driver, and after a ten-year journey, she became South India’s first female taxi driver. How did she reach that stage? And what’s it like to go driving with Selvi?

Driving with Selvi is also the name of a new Canadian documentary that tells her story. It’s directed by Toronto-based filmmaker Elisa Paloschi, known for her documentaries dealing with social issues around the world.  Her film is having its  premier at Toronto’s ReelAsian film festival. I spoke with Elisa in studio about visiting India as a tourist, how she first met Selvi, 10 years of shooting the film, making a film in a developing nation, why Indian women in smaller cities rarely drive, Selvi’s motivation, human trafficking, child brides, poverty, feminism, women as second-class citizens, dowries, divorce, motivation, how to share her story …and more! The film has its Toronto premier on November 5, 2015, at the ReelAsian Film Festival.

Daniel Garber talks with Paul Emile d’Entremont about his new NFB documentary LAST CHANCE

Hi This is Daniel Garber at the Movies for CulturalMining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

Canada has long been known as a safe haven for refugees from around the world who come here to escape persecution or physical danger in their home countries. A new documentary from the National Film Board, LAST CHANCE, looks at five members of a “particular social group” as covered in the 1952 UN Charter. These five people — from Jamaica, Egypt, Lebanon, Colombia and Nicaragua — are all LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered) refugees.

The film’s director, Paul Emile d’Entremont spent more than three years and travelled to five countries and across Canada to capture their stories. The film follows the subjects as they struggle to escape physical and emotional persecution and achieve refugee status in their new country of safe haven.

Paul Emile, speaking by telephone from Halifax, Nova Scotia, explains the special obstacles they face, why one man had his sexuality questioned, what particular dangers refugees can encounter even in so-called “safe” nations, how a series of upcoming legal changes — based on Bill C-31 — could impact potential refugees, and more.

The film LAST CHANCE is available for free viewing this weekend (Dec 7-9, 2012) in honour of International Human Rights Day.