Montreal Film Festival: Many Small Films With Big Messages

By
Mike DeRosa

While Hartford has been blessed with a few outlets for independent films nothing  can beat an international film festival like Canada's Montreal Film Festival. The Festival has existed for 27 years and I had an opportunity this year to spend 6 days at the beginning of this September watching both small and big films from around the planet at this unique festival.

The Montreal Festival is a place where many producers and directors try to get their films into the North American market by making deals with distributors and film theaters chains. It is also a venue where independent and small films with big messages get an opportunity to be seen and appreciated. While many film festivals exist in the U.S., the Montreal film fest makes a special effort to feature films from all over the world. It doesn't hurt that some of the films seen at the Cannes film festival end up at the Montreal festival either.

Take for example the Italian film, The Soul's Haven (Le Siege De L'Ame) by Director Ricardo Milani, a dramatization of a real event. The film tells the struggle of 500 Italian workers in a small village in Italy whose factory is closed by an American multinational tire company. The workers go on strike and occupy the factory and begin a nationwide media and protest effort to bring support for their "siege".

The film is not simply a piece of political drama but characterizes the strikers as real persons who can be both weak and strong. The main character Antonio, longs to have a full life with his girlfriend Nina who has abandoned the village for a more successful life in Milan. Another striker, Salvatore has major  conflicts with his son who is more interested in computers than in the strikers struggle. In one of the more humorous scenes (in a film filled with ironic humor), a delegation of strikers get a resolution supporting their struggle from the European Parliament, but little else. The film ends, as the striker's delegation travels to the American headquarters to try to negotiate an agreement that will allow their factory to stay open and that will address major health concerns at the factory. Unfortunately, Antonio soon dies from years of exposure to toxins at the plant but the struggle for justice continues for the strikers in the creation of this film. 

If you haven't heard about this strike on CNN, C.B.S., N.B.C., or the FOX network, don't hold your breath. Don't expect to see The Soul's Haven in any theater near you any time soon. Stories about the global economy and its discontents are definitely forbidden in the brave new world of U.S. film distributors during the age of George II. It seems that we will have to continue to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger in remakes of the "Terminator" series (Watch for Terminator VI: Arnold Terminates California) while being fed a popcorn mass culture of violence and banality.

Another entry in the festival, a small comedy from Sweden called KOPPS, tells the tale of what happens to a small Swedish police station that the central government plans to close because the small town it protects has no crime. Of course, Sweden's finest decide to start a crime wave that includes stealing some sausages, burning down the local hot dog stand, and getting the town drunk to kidnap and hold hostage a willing young friend of the "Kopps". The film is full of wild special effects that sometimes seem to be a satire of many American "cop" movies. But these workers find the answer to their unemployment problems after they beat the rap for their failed attempts to raise crime statistics and are laid off. They open a wildly successful local pizza shop called the Pizza Police!

Documentaries have always been important at the Montreal Film Festival and numerous documentaries filled the screens this September. Crapshoot: The Gamble With Our Wastes, tells the story of how billions of gallons of waste are flushed into our sewers every day. This Canadian film documents how chemicals, pharmaceuticals, solvents, heavy metals, and other waste that are flushed down our toilets and put by industry into our rivers and oceans, stay in our environment to plague our food chain and us. Documentary filmmaker Jeff McKay questions whether sewers are the solution or the problem. It's too bad that people in Hartford and Wethersfield will never see a film that could have been made here about the same problems described in Crapshoot. 

A U.S. entry in the festival, Dogs In The Basement, a comedy by Leslie Shearing, tells the "documentary story" of Mary and Joe and their frustrations with their sex life. The film is a satire of the "documentary" style and is partly improvised from the script. The film shows us what happens to an upwardly mobile "ideal American couple" that looks for help in improving their sex life. Mary and Joe decide to seek the help of a crazy psychologist who practices "replacement therapy", a dehumanized urologist who offers a "clitoral pump" and numerous creams and pills, and a "Tantra" sex technique group that resembles a sex cult. Mary and Joe find these "therapies" ineffectual and expensive. Their journey does teach them things about each other that end in the friendly dissolution of their relationship and they begin a search for a better life on their own.

But perhaps the biggest movie in town, besides the more than 300 other films at the festival, is out in the streets and cafes of a country and a province that is both so much like the U.S. and "yet so different". Canada and Quebec are not spending $87 billion dollars to occupy another country and give billions of dollars to its political elite through tax cuts and overseas contracts. They are not advocating a hyper- aggressive foreign policy, which has spent almost $200 Billion on a "war on terrorism". Activists in Quebec are right now trying to defend Quebec's $5 a day care program from the conservatives. Who has ever heard of $5 a day care in the U.S.? With only a fraction of the GNP of the U.S., Canada has provided a single payer health care system that serves its population well and gives health care to all. Even thought the local paper the Gazette, ran an anti-labor editorial on the front page of the paper on Labor day, Canada and Quebec have a much higher percentage of union members than you will find in the U.S.

Watching the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) is really a pleasure. The CBC reporters actually ask tough questions from their leaders and real investigative reporting takes place on a regular basis during news shows. Even documentaries dealing with issues like pollution and sex find their way on the airwaves in prime time. You do not see Canadian flags everywhere. Quebec as an independent province seems to be creating its own identity and unique culture within the Canadian "confederation". You learn from the CBC that George W. Bush cancelled his recently planned trip to Canada because over 40 Liberal party members of the Canadian parliament criticized him in the press and on the floor of the Canadian parliament. Canada has an actual functioning judiciary that is coming close to establishing a domestic partner law and Canada's judiciary does not allow its citizens to be held without charges and does not allow its citizens to be kept incommunicado from the country's press and from the family members of the accused. Canada and Quebec are small nations that have a big message to convey. Maybe someday some of the elements of this "movie" will be seen in the U.S.