4-21-2008
Wow.
Today was, by far, my most fascinating day at a film festival EVER.
There was... An Incident. More on that later...
First
on the docket today was Head Wind (6/8), a mid-length (65
minutes) but good film about illegal satellite dishes in Iran, and the
country’s censorship of all manner of entertainment the government
deems inappropriate. From remote rural regions to more urban locales
like Tehran, satellite dishes—and the programming they import—are
everywhere... until the police move in to confiscate them. The doc
features numerous individuals trafficking in these illegal dishes
and/or other prohibited media (e.g., pirated DVDs of Western films), as
well as the lengths to which they must go to keep everything on the
down-low (e.g., only putting their dishes out at night, and taking them
back inside during the day). There’s a beautiful sequence where two
men, using archaic machinery, mold a dish out of a giant disk of metal,
but the most interesting character was a dwarf who’s like a one-man
Blockbuster Video. He’s not interesting for his size or occupation,
though, but because he had six fingers on each hand!!!! It’s not
actually mentioned in the film, but each time he was on camera I
counted: six fingers per hand!
Speaking of weird anomalies...
My
second film of the day was Beyond Our Ken (7/8), a remarkable film which goes inside Kenja, an Australian cult
accused of, among other things, sexual and emotional abuse of its
members. With unprecedented access to Kenja’s founders—charismatic
80something Ken Dyers and his much younger wife, Jan—and members of
the organization, filmmakers Melissa MacLean and Luke Walker expose a
seemingly benign group (founded in 1982) who, on the surface, seem to
be nothing more than a self-improvement movement. But, faster than you
can say “Xenu made me do it!”, the darker machinations of Kenja’s
operations bubble to the surface. I was completely engrossed in this
movie, and its ending (plus its final 10 minutes or so) literally made
my jaw drop open. The whole thing was riveting.
But this is also where The Incident occurred.
It started before the screening even began. While waiting outside, I
noticed a couple of women working the ticketholders line and very
cheerfully handing out these thick, glossy booklets that, in their
chipper words, "give the other side of the story." Read: they were
Kenja members distributing Kenja propaganda. (They actually flew to
Toronto from Australia just to follow the filmmakers from screening to
screening. That, in and of itself, seemed to prove the film’s thesis.)
People will take anything that's handed towards them, so the women
unloaded literature to just about everybody. I declined because they
totally weirded me out.
While they continued working, I chatted with the woman standing beside
me in line. We talked about cults, and how unusual it was to have these
women here, and I said, "I wonder if they'll also have people 'planted'
in the audience..."
I theorized that, if Kenja was that invested in having their opinions
on the film heard at HotDocs, it would be very likely that they’d have
members purchase tickets to the screenings and then somehow disrupt the
proceedings.
And they did!
After the film (which was at the Bader), both directors made their way
onstage for the Q&A, and I noticed a couple of very large men
(obviously security) materialize at the rear of the theatre. This has
never happened at any movie I have ever seen at this venue at any
festival, ever. They were visibly scanning the crowd, and the assorted
headset-wearing staffers seemed to be scurrying about, consulting with
these big guys and pointing up at the balcony. I knew something was up,
but I didn’t know what.
The always adept Myrocia Watamaniuk was moderating the Q&A and opened
the floor to questions. A woman right in the front row, right in the
middle of the row, stood up (red flag!), turned halfway towards the
audience (red flag! red flag!), said (in her Australian accent) "I am a
member of Kenja..." and launched into this rather impassioned
monologue/question about footage she felt was purposely left out. The
filmmakers, who clearly anticipated the cult's presence, tried to
answer, but she just kept going... and going... and going. She started
accusing them of “interrogating” the cult leaders, and not being honest
about what they shot, and all sorts of things. Security started to move
towards the front, very slowly. I started to get a little antsy in my
seat. What was going to happen? Would this escalate? How many more
Kenja members might be in the crowd??
Then
someone in the balcony, also with an Australian accent and a member of
Kenja, started shouting something, supporting the woman up front. This
exchange went on for a good five minutes while the filmmakers tried to
rein in the Q&A. People in the audience started to get restless, and
*I* started to worry about the safety of the folks onstage. I mean, the
filmmakers expose quite a bit of Kenja's ugly underbelly, and there’s
zero security screening when people come into a theatre, so I didn't
know to what extent its members might want or be able to "silence"
them. I hoped everyone was wearing Kevlar, just to be safe.
Thankfully, it all ended peacefully enough, with one of the directors
actually telling security to let the members stay. He even gave the
woman up front the mic so she could tell everybody about a lecture
being given on Thursday (in Toronto) about their “organization.” A few
other audience members (not affiliated with Kenja) managed to get in
some questions, and then it was over.
The whole thing was super-creepy and freaky and unsettling. But holy
crap, was it ever exciting! Thanks, Kenja members, for inadvertently
reinforcing the entire premise of the film!
Last up was another double bill. First was the short doc The
Unbearable Whiteness of Being (4/8), which was a promising but
ultimately hollow look at a brother and sister peddling a
skin-lightening cream to South Asians in England. All the film did was
feature the pair at some sort of trade show, looking for a distributor,
while a few random individuals discuss why lighter skin is viewed as
more favorable in some South Asian cultures. That’s it. Nothing about
the actual cream or its claims or the siblings or anything. I was
disappointed.
That was followed with Be Like Others (6/8), which
examines sex-change operations for gay men and women in Iran... a
country where sex-change operations are actually sanctioned by the
government, but where homosexuality is punishable by death. The logic
is that same-sex love goes against Islam, but “correcting” a *physical*
mistake is totally okay. It was a very strange thing to observe:
general acceptance of transsexualism, but overt homophobia, all under
one umbrella. Interviews with MTF transsexuals, pre- and post-op, along
with the two key doctors performing hundreds of these surgeries, make
up the bulk of the film (and some are quite sad), but the most
memorable presence is Vida, the kick-assiest transsexual ever to grace
a movie screen. She was amazing!
