Dancing. Films reviewed: Nang by Nang, Dancehall’s Asian Ambassadors, Saturday Church at #CaribbeanTales
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Toronto’s Fall Film Festival Season has begun, people, bringing you a first look at the best movies you’ll be watching over the next year. TIFF is the grandmother of all Toronto festivals – and you’ll be hearing a lot more about that one in weeks to come – but you shouldn’t miss the smaller festivals that come right before and after TIFF. September 20-23 is TPFF, Toronto Palestine Film Festival celebrates Arab cinema at the TIFF Bell 
Lightbox. And before TIFF is Caribbean Tales, showing films and docs from Trinidad to Jamaica to Barbados and Haiti, as well as the US, Canada and South Africa. Caribbean Tales starts Wednesday (running Sept 5 – 20) with a sneak preview of HERO, about the legendary Ulric Cross.
This week I’m talking about three movies at Caribbean Tales. There’s a one-time dancer in Trinidad, Japanese dancehall DJs in Jamaica, and a boy in New York who is yearning to dance.
Nang by Nang
Dir: Richard Fung
Nang is a 90 year old woman in Trinidad with a remarkable history. She was illegitmate – didn’t meet her father, a playboy, until she was in her 20s, but she knows her background well. Her ancestry reads like a Caribbean history lesson: she’s part Chinese, part Black, but also descended from Indian indentured 
servants and indigenous peoples as well. Her names range from Dorothy to Mavis to Russel to Anang, constantly changing and morphing throughout her life. . As a young woman she joined a dance troup headed by brothers Geoffrey and Bosco Holder. (Choreographer Geoffrey Holder is most famous in North America for 
The Wiz and his role in James Bond movies.) Though not a trained dancer they loved her beautiful face and natural skills and she embraced the behemian lifestyle.
In this documentary filmmaker Richard Fung meets his aunt for the first time and uncovers her story. They journey back to her former houses spread across the islands and all the way to New Mexico. She has married many times, and she shares stories and photos of men long dead. She has outlived everyone, from a loving husband, to a professional, to a playboy and to a scoundrel. Nang by Nang is a personal history that serves as a fascinating look at a women with in a multifaceted and polyglot culture.
Dancehall’s Asian Ambassadors
Dir: Kaneal Gayle
For such a small island, Jamaica has a huge influence on music around the world. Ska, rocksteady, reggae and dancehall are adored by listeners who have never been to the caribbean. But there’s one place you might not immediately associate with Jamaican music… and that’s Japan! But did you know they’ve had a huge underground reggae scene there 
since the 1970s? And now Dancehall has landed in Japan and is growing in popularity.
Dancehall’s Asian Ambasaadors follows four Japanese women who fell in love with genre and moved to Jamaica to be nearer to its 
pulse. With names like Rankin Pumpkin, and Kiss Kiss, they they are music organizers, DJs, dancers and singers, competing on TV and attracting international audiences on youtube. The English they speak is Jamaican, and they earn a living by driving cabs, exporting local music and parephernalia, and importing fans from back home who want to explore the scene.
As one woman says: life in Japan is easier, and more comfortable than Jamaica, but no vibes.
Saturday Church
Wri/Dir: Damon Cardasis
Ulysses (Luka Cain) is a high school kid in New York. He lives with his mom and little brother Abe. His soldier-dad recently died in action, so his mother has invited stern Aunt Rose (Regina Taylor) to help take care of the kids. Ulysses is an altar boy, a good kid with a face as angelic as the saints on the stained glass windows. But he has a forbidden secret: He likes his to try on his mom’s shoes and clothes.
No one at school has seen this, but the locker room jocks can sense something anyway, and constantly bully him. Homelife is equally perilous, with Abe threatening to tell mean Aunt Rose. Is 
there no escape? One weekend, he hops on the subway to Greenwich village to explore, and ends up on the Christopher Street Pier. There he meets some women like he’s never seen before. With exotic names like Dijon, Ebony and Heaven (Indya Moore, Mj Rodriguez, Alexia Garcia), they exude confidence and attitude. One of them, Amara (Margot Bingham) takes him under her wing and leads him to a sanctuary. Saturday Church offers him food shelter and a space to feel free.
It’s also where he is first exposed to vogueing, the life blood of the women he met. And a boy named Raymond (Marquis 
Rodriguez) – his first boyfriend? But when things explode at home between him and aunt Rose, he runs away. And he discovers his church sanctuary is only open on Saturdays. He’s left homeless, lost and vulnerable. Can he survive life on the streets?
Saturday Church sounds like another sensitive coming-out story about a black teen in New York. What’s remarkable, though, is that throughout the movie, the characters burst into intricately-choreographed dances and songs. From locker rooms to homeless shelters to locker rooms, characters suddenly switch to impromptu, modern-dance-inspired musical numbers and torch songs. Luka Cain is great as Ulysses, and Saturday Church is an inspiring and unusual musical.
Saturday Church, Nang by Nang and Dancehall’s Asian Ambassadors and many others are all playing at CaribbeanTales film festival, which opens next Wednesday with Hero.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Visuals. Films reviewed: Papillon, We the Animals, Madeline’s Madeline
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
All movies need good sound and pictures, but in some films the visual aspects are especially notable. This week, I’m looking at three, new, visually-oriented movies, with two approaching the avant-garde.
We’ve got three brothers exploring their home, two men escaping from a desert island, and one young actress channelling her inner self.
Papillon
Dir: Michael Noer
It’s 1930s Paris and Henri “Papillon” Charrière (Charley Hunnam) is living the life of Riley. He’s fit, smart and well-to-do, and is passionately in love with his beautiful wife. He 
figures at this current income he could retire in six more months. His job? An expert safe-cracker, working freelance for the mob. But his luck runs out when he is sent down for a murder he didn’t commit. Papillon is a good fighter but not a killer. They send him off to an inescable prison in French 
Guyana but he is already planning on how to get out. On board the ship he meets Louis Dega (Rami Malek) a small but snobbish counterfeiter with glasses. Dega is rich – he keeps a roll of bills hidden up his rectum – but can’t defend himself, and Papillon needs money to get away. Together they form a grudging alliance that deepens as their friendship grows.
Prison life – including hard labour – is brutal, with violence coming both from other inmates and from the 
guards. Any escape attempt means two years in solitary, with absolute silence required Repeated attempts mean permanent exile to Devils island a cliff covered desert. Papillon – his nickname comes from a butterfly tat on his chest – takes 
the fall for dega when he blows an escape attempt. He keeps from going insane in solitary by keeping his inner mind awake. The warden wants to break him, but Papillon never gives up.
Can he ever escape this hell-hole? And can Dega make it out too?
Perhaps because I’ve read Papillon’s true prison memoirs, and seen the 1970s film (starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman) this version seems too long and two slow… almost like a prison sentence. Still, it is visually gorgeous with period costumes, exotic settings, and epic scenery. Hunnam and Malek – two actors I really like — carry their roles well. So I ended up liking it, mainly as an adventure/action movie.
We the Animals
Dir: Jeremiah Zagar
It’s the 1980s. Manny, Joel and Jonah (Isaiah Kristian, Josiah Gabriel, Evan Rosado) are three biracial brothers in their tweens who live in a country home in upstate New York. Their Ma (Sheila Vand) has pale skin and long black hair – she works in a bottling plant. Pops (Raul Castillo) is Puerto Rican and looks like Freddie Mercury with his buzzed 
hair and black moustache. He keeps the boys’ hair buzzed short just like his, but Jonah, the youngest, has his mother’s blue eyes. Mom wants him to stay with her and never grow up and turn bad. Always stay nine years old, she says. Together the three boys run rampant around the house in the woods, though Jonah is shyer than his brothers, and afraid to go 
swimming.
Their playful and fun lives are interrupted by reality when Paps beats up mom, and drives away. She locks herself in her bedroom, so there’s no one to feed them. They become like wild animals exploring local stores and farms for food they can steal. On their travels they meet another kid. Dustin, who shows them their first porn videos and shares their first smokes. He’s from Phillie, and Jonah adores him. Will he and 
Dustin run away to somewhere they can be together?
We the Animals is an amazingly beautiful movie about growing up, as seen through a young boy’s eyes. He narrates the story, and keeps a record of everything in his secret journal along with bold crayon drawings. These drawings are animated in the film, and together with handlheld camera shots and aerial optics, we feel like we’re part of Jonah’s thoughts and dreams. The three, first-time actors are fantastic as the brothers, as are the parents.
We the Animals is a gorgeous, surreal film.
Madeline’s Madeline
Dir: Josephine Decker
Madeline (Helena Howard) is a young, biracial stage actress in NY City. She lives with her mom (Miranda July) and little brother She has her own bedroom decorated with fashion photos of models with their faces cut out and replaced by skies, clouds and sunsets. She sometimes sneaks in friends and prospective boyfriends to chat and maybe maybe more, but she’s always on the lookout for her overprotective mother… ready to intrude into her 
private life. But there’s a reason her mom is so intrusive. Madeline is prone to undiagnosed “episodes”, brought on by God knows what. She behaves erratically, inappropriately possibly even violent, so her mom tries not to upset her.
Currently Madeline is cast in an avant-garde stage project directed by Evangeline (Molly Parker). The actors – think yoga outfits and man buns – enter the minds of animals they imagine. It’s part acting, part movement, 
part dance, performed wearing masks. Evangeline is a Jungian, and longs to share in her actors’ thoughts and dreams, especially Madeline’s. She is obsessed by her, perhaps because Evangeline is pregnant and she sees Madeline as her baby (Evangeline’s unborn baby is also biracial).
So now it’s up to Madeline to negotiate her fraught relationship wihth her mother, a new one with her surrogate mom, and her inner turmoil that torments her dreams. All this while playing a version of herself in the project. Can Madeline, and the inner-Madeline she’s channelling – survive the daily stress of a scriptless production? Or is it too much for a 17 year old to handle?
Madeline’s Madeline is a semi-mystical look at the process of putting on an avant garde play. You have to accept the premise of experimental theatre to get the movie, but once you do, it works. The three main actors – supported by a group of almost mute performers – makes a great mom-daughter-mom rivalry, but Helena Howard especially stands out with her great and unpredictable acting.
Papillon, We the Animals and Madeline’s Madeline all open today in Toronto; check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
More Films by Women. Films reviewed: Never Saw it Coming, Skate Kitchen
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
TIFF promises one third of all movies showing this year will be directed by women. This was virtually unheard of even a few years ago. But I’m finding — especially with indie productions — that there’s been a sea change with loads of good movies being made by women. This week I’m looking at two such movies, one from Canada and another from south of the border. There’s a body hidden beneath the ice in Sudbury and a subculture hidden between the skyscrapers of Manhattan.
Never Saw it Coming
Dir: Gail Harvey
Wri: Linwood Barklay
Keisha (Emily Hampshire) is a psychic in Sudbury Ontario. She specializes in locating lost relatives, dead or alive. By touching a personal item she has visions pointing straight to a grave site. But is she authentic? Keisha lives with her young red head son Matt (Keegan Hedley) and her on-again, off again boyfriend Kirk. He moved in with her four months ago but has yet to pay rent.
She’s saving up to buy her son the keyboard he’s always 
wanted but money is scarce. So she agrees to pull off a onetime scam, involving parents desperate to locate their drug-addicted son.
At the same time she searches out a family with a mother who has gone missing. (The movie opens with her car sinking into a frozen lake as the woman screams for help) The missing woman’s husband Wendel (Eric Roberts) and daughter Melissa (Katie Boland) have appealed for help on TV, along with police detective Wedmore (Tamara Podemski). Keisha sees this as a 
chance to locate a missing person and make some quick cash. But her meeting goes terribly wrong, and her chaotic life becomes impossible to handle. Now she has to deal with a suspicious detective, her partner in crime turned junkie blackmailer, and threats from her volatile, layabout boyfriend.
Can her visions – if they actually exist – save Keisha? Or is she heading for the big house?
Never Saw it Coming is a short but credible Canadian mystery thriller, with lots of scurrilous characters without many sympathetic good guys. It seems like almost everyone in Sudbury is a lowlife. Still, I always enjoy a good noirish Canadian movie, despite its flaws. Emily Hampshire and Tamara Podemski as the psychic and cop in a battle of wits, stand out. And Eric Roberts is great as a sketchy schemester.
Skate Kitchen
Dir: Crystal Moselle
Camille (Michelle Vinberg) is an 18 year old vegan who lives with her mom in Long Island. She has long hair, glasses and wears shorts, white socks and thrasher T shirts. She spends most of her time hanging at a nearby skate park practicing her moves, despite the catcalling and abuse she takes from the guys there. But when a mishap sends her to hospital with 
gushing blood between her legs, her mother forbids her from using a skateboard again. But skating is her life. What can she do?
Find a crew on instagram to skate with. An all female one. She joins them in Manhattan and makes fast friends. They skate the city, exchange stories and defend themselves against asshole 
guys. There’s strength in numbers. After a big fight with her mom she ends up moving in with Janay (Ardelia Lovelace), one of the girls in the group.
She also gets a day job, as a cashier in a super. There she meets Devon (Jaden Smith) who works in the stock room. He’s a skater too, with dyed red hair, and asks her to let him snap her pics. She does some solid moves on the top of a 
skyscraper near the empire state building. And sparks seem to fly.
The problem is she likes him, but Devon and Janay used to be a thing. And she never got over their nasty breakup. Can Camille keep her relationship with Devon a secret from her fiercely loyal crew? Or will her life collapse like a house of cards?
Skate Kitchen is a great coming-of-age story set within the world of skateboarding – the music, fights, drugs, sexual experimentation, tampons, comeradery, as well as misogynistic bragadoccio on the male side.
This movie, though, is unique in that it’s painted from a female point of view, a community usually totally absent from anything skate-related. It’s modelled on a real group, also called Skate Kitchen, with many of the actors playing roles based on themselves, including Vinberg, its founder. This gives it a very realistic feel, and provides a genuine look at a seldom seen subculture. This movie’s the real thing and I liked it.
Skate Kitchen and Never Saw it Coming both open today in Toronto; check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Daniel Garber talks with Sofia Bohdanowicz about Maison du Bonheur
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Juliane is a retired astrologer in her 70s who lives in a Paris apartment in the 18th arrondissement, in Montmartre. She believes her personal presentation – hair, makeup, clothes, and shoes – must always be impeccable. Her life should be full of delicious food,
lovely colours and fast friends. And her apartment, part of Haussmanns original design, should be a veritable “house of happiness”.
Maison du Bonheur is a wonderful new documentary that follows Juliane over the course of a month by a 
Canadian filmmaker who comes to stay with her. It records the mundane, yet fascinating, details of the everyday life of a classic parisienne, even as it subtly reveals her — and the filmmaker’s — unspoken secret histories. The film was directed, shot and edited on a microbudget by Toronto-based Sofia Bohdanowicz. Winner of the Jay Scott Prize, the Emerging Canadian Directors award (at VIFF) and many more, this is Sofia’s second film.
Maison du Bonheur opens tonight at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto.
I spoke with Sofia at CIUT 89.5 FM.
Fighting Oppressors. Films reviewed: Puzzle, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, BlacKkKlansman
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
This week I’m looking at three American movies about individuals dealing with oppressive forces. There’s a man in the 1970s fighting the K.K.K.; a girl in the ’90s fighting to remain gay, gay, gay; and a woman trapped in small-town New York fighting the urge to stay, stay, stay.
Puzzle
Dir: Marc Turtletaub
Agnes (Kelly Macdonald) is a committed wife and mother in a sleepy, workingclass town in New York. She wears frumpy clothes and has an unobtrusive manner What With home, family and church she’s always busy, but no one seems to appreciate her – herself included. She cooks, cleans, does the accounting – she’s a whiz at math — and takes care of everybody else. Her husband Louis (David Denman) and son Ziggy (Bubba 
Weiler) work at Louis garage. Her other son Gabe (Aaron Austin) is the golden boy, headed for University. Louis says he loves her, but does he ever include her in important decisions? Not a chance. it’s like she isn’t even there. Until a birthday present from her aunt changes everything. It’s a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, and she puts it together almost automatically. 
Something in her brain is awakened and she wants more. She takes the train into NY City to find more puzzles and in a serious of coincidences, ends up meeting Robert (Irrfan Khan: Lunchbox, Slumdog Millionaire)
A millionaire inventor and dilettante, Robert lounges around his townhouse in silk robes. He is as impressed by her naïveté as he is by her genius at 
puzzles. And she’s overwhelmed by everything about him. He invites her to be his partner at a two-player puzzle competition. If they win, they’ll fly off to Brussels for the Iinternational Championships.
Soon Agnes is splitting her life between her home and Robert’s glamourous mansion. 
And she keeps it all a secret from her family and friends. Are her clandestine meetings just a temporary diversion? Or do they signal a change in her life?
Puzzle is a fun, feel-good movie about the awakening of a middle aged woman. Scottish actress KellyMcDonald is perfect as Agnes and actor Irrfan Khan is great as the diffident Robert.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post
Dir: Desiree Akhavan
It’s the1990s. Cameron (Chloë Grace Moretz) is a teenaged girl raised by evangelical grandparents. (Her own parents died in a car accident.) Cam is smart, popular, and has a steady boyfriend. But her whole life falls apart on prom night when she’s caught having sex in the back seat of the car – not with her boyfriend, but with a girl she likes.
Next thing you know she’s being shipped off to a camp in the woods called God’s Promise. It’s run by Reverend Rick – he looks and acts like Ned Flanders – who plays the guitar and is always upbeat. And behind the scenes, the boss of it all, is his sister, Doctor Lydia Marsh in her shoulder-pad Atlas Shrugged power blouses. Pretty soon, Cam figures out why she’s there: to be “cured” of her same sex attraction. Because – they say — there’s no such thing as 
homosexuality, just sinning. The gay conversion therapy goes like this: Each kid is given a cartoon drawing of an iceberg. The students had to fill in all their sins – and the underlying trauma that gave them their “disorder”– before they can be free of their gayness.
In practce this means they’e subject to tough love: watched 24/7, woken up in the middle of the night by guards with flashlights – to make sure they’re not being “sinful” (doesn’t work) – and forced to go to group therapy sessions to bare their souls – only to be humiliated by the other members.
Luckily, Cam discovers two rebels she can hang with: Jane (Sasha Lane), a cynical girl with dreads who loves polaroid cameras; and 2-spirited Adam whose politician dad sent him there (Forrest Goodluck – he played Saul in Indian Horse). Can Cameron resist the brainwashing? Can she leave this place? And will she ever see her girlfriend again?
The Miseducation of Cameron Post is an eye-opening look at a repellent practice that’s now banned in most of Canada. And while this role was hardly a stretch, I’ll see anything with Chloë Grace Moretz in it. On the other hand some of the period dialogue feels anachronistic, and the story, though realistic, is tamer than I might have liked.
Still, it’s a good indie pic.
BlacKkKlansman
Dir: Spike Lee
It’s the early 1970s and Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) is the first – and only – black policeman in Colorado Springs. Hi first job as an undercover detective? To infiltrate black activists at a speech by civil rights leader Kwame Ture (whom the white cops still call Stokely Carmichael.) There Ron meets Patrice (Laura Harrier) the leader of a student group that invited Ture to speak. They begin to date, without Ron ever admitting he’s a plainclothes cop.
But things take a big turn when Ron discovers the 
notorious white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan has a branch in this city. Ron calls them up – using s real name, and lets loose with a racist tirade, including frequent use of the N word. So the KKK – composed of powerful locals and sketchy rednecks — invite him to come by their shack in the woods. problem is… he’s black (they don’t know that) and the KKK was founded to terrorize African Americans. What to do?
He gets Flip (Adam Driver), a white cop from his team — to play him in front 
of the KKK. It just happens that Flip is Jewish, and the Klan – headed by notorious racist David Duke – doesn’t like them much, either.
But soon, they are deeply involved in an undercover operation to stop the Klan. Can the two of them fool the KKK at its own game, and possibly uncover domestic terrorist cels? And will Ron come clean with Patrice?
Blackkklansman is Spike Lee’s latest and his 
best in a longtime. It’s very entertaining, funny, exciting, even a bit of a thriller. And it’s full of film references, chronicling Holywood’s anti-black attitudes, from Birth of a Nation to Gone with the Wind to blaxploitation. The photography is sumptuous, including a montage of faces during Ture’s “Black is Beautiful” speech. This is a great movie.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post, BlackKklansman, and Puzzle all open today in Toronto; check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Daniel Garber talks with Alison McAlpine about her new doc CIELO
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Have you ever stared at the night sky and the stars and planets up there? What does it mean and how does it relate to our lives?
A new documentary premiering next Friday looks at the skies above the Atacama desert in
northern Chile, the scientists and astronomers who observe them, and the people born there and who live beneath them.
It explores the filmmaker’s personal impression and interactions with the people she meets. It’s an astronomical, 
spiritual, anthropological look at life in a desert beneath the vast bright stars.
The film is called Cielo, and its filmmaker is Alison McAlpine. Alison’s award-winning and critically acclaimed documentaries have played at film festivals around the world. 
I spoke to Alison McAlpine in Montreal by telephone from CIUT 89.5 FM in Toronto.
Cielo opens in Toronto on Friday, August 10.
culturalmining.com 
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