Niagara Indie Film Festival

Article posted Wed Jul 7 07:49:19 2004

The Fourth Annual Niagara Indie Filmfest was held over the course of two evenings, Friday and Saturday June 25th and 26th. Twenty-two short films were screened at this year’s festival, divided into five categories: Comedy; Drama; Documentary; Experimental; and Animation. The main criteria were that the entries must be under thirty minutes in length and must have been made by a Canadian citizen.

The festival was held at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, about twenty minutes north of Niagara Falls. The festival drew about sixty people each night, a respectable turnout for a small film festival (a poster for the festival says, “Welcome to the small time”). The scaled-down festival was not, however, without a striking and positively luxurious red carpet (provided by Canco Uniforms of St. Catharines.)

Festival directors Deborah Cartmer, Rob Macmorine, and Joan Nicks organized the event, which was open to the public; tickets were a bargain at Cdn $7.50 per night.

Several awards capped the festival. The Audience Choice Award went to a 19-minute film titled, Selfless, Cold, and Composed; the fact that the filmmakers were locals from St. Catharines (some of the scenes were shot downtown only a few kilometers away) may have swayed the audience. Writer/director Jeremy LaLonde was on hand to accept the award for his piece, which chronicled a writer’s struggle with writer’s block and a rocky relationship.

With so many films, I can only comment on a select few:

• The second night was kicked off with The Crypt Club, about three teenage girls who drive a vintage hearse to a cemetery for an initiation ritual. The initiate must plunge a stake into a grave, and of course no good comes of it. The plot borrows from an old urban legend, as related by my friends at the Snopes.com urban legends Web site: “The ‘killing statue’ story is closely related to another venerable legend, that of the girl who accepts a dare to spend a night in the graveyard. (Variations on its basic theme go back to the Middle Ages in Europe.) As part of the dare — or prompted by her own disrespect — she plunges a knife into a grave. In the morning she's found lying dead across the plot, the knife pinning her skirt to the ground having prevented her from escaping. Died of fright, they say, with a look of terror etched on her face.” (See /www.snopes.com/horrors/ghosts/agnes.htm.) Good acting and solid production values made up for a so-so story.

• Clowns At War is a hilarious documentary about when Canada was asked to send crown (government) troops to help the Allies during WWII. Due to the Prime Minister’s unfortunate penmanship, however, clown troops were mistakenly sent into battle, armed with seltzer bottles, pies, and huge floppy shoes. This clown brigade helped turn the tide and win the war for freedom—and future clowns to wage wars. A delightful film to be seen by clowns of all ages.

• On the other side of the coin, one of the worst films was the interminable and ponderous La Sphatte (Tar). This stultifying story follows two women as they wander through a suburban Montreal night. A large and imposing but benign stranger follows them, whom they alternately befriend and reject. With sparse dialogue and “edgy” camerawork, the film isn’t nearly as moody and profound as it thinks it is. The film’s major achievement is making a mere eighteen minutes seem like eighteen hours.

• Afzal Huda’s Call Me a Paki is a bland and superficial examination of one young man’s quest for cultural and ethnic self-discovery. A young Pakistani man born and raised in Canada encounters a racist one evening and returns to his country to discover his roots. Huda is running a convenience store when he rouses the ire of young man who is refused cigarettes. “All you Pakis are the same,” the irate teen says as he leaves. This insult prompts Huda to reconsider who he is and how he fits into both Canadian and Pakistani cultures. The basic message is pretty trite: be proud of who you are and don’t judge others. Yet, ironically, Huda himself is blind to his own prejudices, for example when he asserts his ethnic pride and decrees himself better than the young man, who, he says, “doesn’t have a culture.” That’s quite an assumption on Huda’s part, and a borderline racist one at that. Huda’s stereotyped generalization is almost as bad as the racist’s. Huda didn’t know anything about the young man except the color of his skin and the comment he made. For all we know, the young man may in fact have very strong and proud ethnic ties; the implicit message that only ethnic minorities have a culture to be proud of is ill-considered.

• In the Experimental category, filmmaker Matthew Therrien won an award for his short piece The Man Who Lived in Leeds, adapted from a surreal and dark childrens’ poem. The written lines are intercut with short segments giving Therrien’s interpretation of the poem. Later this summer I hope to provide an interview with this rising filmmaker.

The festival organizers and participants expressed their appreciation to the audience for showing up. As one indie filmmaker observed, “It’s often easier to make a film than it is to get people to come see it.” Independent films truly deserve a far wider audience than they usually get, partly due to publicity and budgetary restraints but also due in large part to a filmgoer blindness. Most people only think of films as the 90 or 120 minute blockbuster movies featuring big Hollywood stars with household names. This obliviousness to short form and independent films is sad, not only for the filmgoers but for filmmakers who may spend small fortunes and months or years of their lives creating something unique that few outside the indie film circuit have the opportunity to see. Do yourself a favor and seek out regional film festivals, because they are the best (and at times the only) place to see such films.