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Spending ten or eleven days in a row in and out of cinemas is, as festival going audiences have come to know, a pretty great way to spend ones time, when possible. Depending on how happy-go-lucky one is about a which films one sees, a festival goer can make their picks that day and take what’s available, or one can start planning and reading a week, or weeks in advance, and have it all locked in before the event has even started.
Owing to the popularity of TIFF now, one pretty much has to go the latter route: plan ahead or perish in rush lines. The growing audience for HotDocs is pushing it in that direction too, although tickets for daytime screenings (for those who have the time off) can still normally be obtained the day of. Neither planning ahead nor spur-o-the-moment guarantees a perfect festival: if you are seeing 20, 30, or 40 films, you are always going to end up at some duds, but with the calibre of festival we have with both TIFF and HotDocs, the duds are the exceptions at least. No prizes for guessing that tonight I ended up at a dud. A friend programmed it after reading up on it a couple of weeks ago; the programme guide said it was beautiful. And the guide was right, for the most part the visuals were beautiful. Too bad the guide did not mention the narrative was utterly incoherent: 72 minutes of disjointed musings can feel like forever. I do have a day to warn others prior to a second screening though, so General Orders No. 9 would be best avoided by all but the most hardcore rambling-film-lover.
DISCO AND ATOMIC WAR
Far better tonight was Disco and Atomic War, a film made by an Estonian who looks back to his youth, when Soviets ruled his country, and everyone in Tallinn covertly watched Finnish TV as a way to learn about the world that had been fenced off from them by their masters. Made for a home audience, the film occasionally assumes the audience will already be fully versed on the majority of the events of recent Soviet-Estonian history, so it may give too short shrift to some events for all to be understood by audiences not so well versed, but nevertheless Disco is a captivating assemblage of period footage and contemporary reenactments. The Disco of the title refers to one of the delights of western television that Tallinninites availed themselves of that those in the Soviet union who were beyond the reach of Helsinki’s television signals were doing without. The American shows Dallas and Knight Rider also loomed large in the lives of the covert TV watchers of the time, and much of the film is spent explaining the their influence in helping to end the communist regime in Moscow. Dallas brought about the end of the previous world order? Who knew?! The problem with me having made a last minute decision to see this film was that now I only have minutes left to me to get the word out about the second screening: today, Saturday May 1st, at the Cumberland 2, at 2 PM. So there you go: if you’re reading this soon enough, you have a chance to see it. Yesterday I mentioned that HotDocs was bringing back some golden oldies: three of those play Saturday. Of the three, Spellbound and American Movie are fairly well known, so the less well known third film is the best one for me to write about.
CZECH DREAM
Czech Dream, a.k.a. Cesky Sen, really impressed me for its audacious hoax when it debuted at Doc Soup in 2004. A couple of Czech film students have something to say about their country’s rush to consumerism in the time since the wall fell in 1989. Everything seems to be about what you own now, and Czechs, who were for so long deprived of the Western material cornucopia, are in a headlong ask-no-questions rush to have it all now. To explore whether or not all of this is healthy, the filmmakers devise an elaborate marketing plan for a new hypermarket, and mount an aggressive advertising campaign promising unbelievable bargains for all, that culminates in a grand opening in Prague’s western suburbs... It’s just that the store doesn’t exist. Will the horde that has shown up for the bargains get the message? Will they get the joke? And how will the Czech populace feel about it all when it comes out that this hoax was taxpayer funded? It’s a pretty amazing film, this. Run don’t walk, Czech Dream screens at the Isabel Bader Theatre at 11:30 AM.
