PRESS RELEASES – PAGE 9

NON-FICTION FEATURES
Wednesday, September 5, 2001

This year’s Nonfiction Features program, including the already announced series THE 10 COMMANDMENTS, consists of 43 films, including one World Premiere, seven International Premieres, 22 North American Premieres and six Canadian Premieres. Screening as a Special Presentation as well is George Butler’s gripping documentary THE ENDURANCE: SHACKLETON’S LEGENDARY ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION. Butler utilizes old footage, including the amazing images of expedition photographer Frank Hurley, and new to create an exceptionally vivid picture of the disastrous but ultimately heroic 1914 Antarctic expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton. This film makes a wonderful companion piece to the sensational IMAX hit, SHACKLETON’S ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION.

Two extremely topical issue of the day are given extraordinarily insightful dimension in the NFF series this year. We see new angles on the alarming situation in the Holy Land in PROMISES and THE INNER TOUR; while the current situation in Afghanistan is dramatically demonstrated with two intense first-hand encounters Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s dramatic feature KANDAHAR and the Italian documentary JUNG (WAR): IN THE LAND OF THE MUJAHEDDIN.

This year’s Nonfiction features program includes a surprising number of films on the topic of globalization. Globalization has become one of the buzzwords of our times, but what does it mean exactly? Beyond the imperatives of the flow of capital, labour and information, how is it affecting the lives of people here in Canada and in the rest of the world? Beyond ideology, we have discovered an extraordinary range of films that provide answers to these questions. These answers are often surprising . . .

Hubertus Siegert’s BERLIN BABYLON looks at the psychic and physical effects of the post-Wall building boom that has Berlin in the throes of transformation, focusing particularly on the Western world’s largest and most hyper-organized construction site at the central Potsdamer Platz. Rithy Panh’s compassionate and haunting THE LAND OF WANDERING SOULS plumbs the depths of the contradictions of modernity for average people in the developing world, as it examines the lives of labourers hired to dig a trench across the country for a multinational company’s fiber-optic cable.

Dylan Howitt and Zoe Young’s deeply edifying SUITS AND SAVAGES: WHY THE WORLD BANK WON’T SAVE THE WORLD looks at a World Bank "ecodevelopment" project from the ground up -- travelling between a remote tribe in India and another, just as remote but much more powerful, in Washington. Shantha Bloeman’s timely documentary T-SHIRT TRAVELS takes us on a journey from our local charity bin to the remote fishing villages of Southern Africa, where our donations are put to use.

Micha Peled’s lucid, quietly powerful STORE WARS: WHEN WAL-MART COMES TO TOWN looks at what happens to the people of Ashland, Virginia, when Wal-Mart wants to move into their small, historic town. WORKING WOMEN OF THE WORLD is a fascinating look at symmetrical challenges of textile workers in Belgium, France, Turkey, Indonesia and the Philippines in the wake of Levi’s jeans global reorganization.

Two films on globalization are sure to appeal to the art community as well. IMAGES OF THE ORIENT is a stunning new work by the Italian team of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi that uses early found footage to investigate the iconography of Orientalism (India, in this case) and the "vandalistic" effects of mass tourism. Paul Carlin’s provocative SPECTRE OF HOPE features a fascinating meeting of the minds of two figures in the art community who have examined the human consequences of social and economic change. Award-winning photographer Sebastião Salgado and critic John Berger discuss Salgado’s recently published Migrations, an arresting chronicle of the negative effects of globalization.

Other films about globalization, from a fictional approach, screen in our Cinema of Our Time sections. These include: Sérgio Bianchi’s scathingly realistic Brazilian satire CHRONICALLY UNFEASIBLE, which follows the lives of six disparate characters trying to survive the chaotic inequities of everyday Brazilian life; John Gianvito’s THE MAD SONGS OF FERNANDA HUSSEIN, a raw and passionate work describing in particular the persecution of Arab residents in the US during the Gulf War, and the difficult battle of an adolescent to feel politically engaged; Murali Nair’s A DOG’S DAY, a sly fable about what happens to a small village when the gift of the local lord’s dog leads to disaster; David Caesar’s MULLET, a controlled, charming and superbly acted character-driven piece set in a small Australian fishing community; Robert Connolly’s THE BANK, a slick, intelligent film about the downfall of an unscrupulous bank executive; and the latest work of Newcastle-based collective Amber Films, LIKE FATHER, a very moving, true-to-life version of BILLY ELLIOT that deals with complex generational conflicts in a changing industrial landscape.

For the first time this year, the Nonfiction Features program is being generously sponsored by The Documentary Channel

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