Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

100 years ago this week in 1919, the Winnipeg General Strike brought that city to a standstill. But did you know there was another important political demonstration 100 years earlier in Manchester in 1819? So this week I’m looking at movies set in the past, the present and the future. There’s an historical epic set in Northern England, a Swedish cruise set in post-nuclear outer space, and some state-of-the-art Canadian music videos set in the right here, right now.

Aniara

Wri/Dir: Pella Kågerman, Hugo Lilja

It’s the near future. Mimaroben (Emelie Jonsson) is a happy and hopeful flower child who works onboard a cruise ship. The Aniara has champagne bars, shopping malls, discos and restaurants to suit every taste on the 23-day cruise. Passengers are reassured by the stern pilot Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro) the conservative captain Chefone (Arvin Kananian) and veteran Astronomer (Anneli Martini). Mimaroben has a special job. She works with Mima, an A.I. program where homesick passengers re-experience the natural beauty they left behind. But this is no ordinary cruise ship. They’re leaving an uninhabitable planet Earth for a new home on Mars.

The problem is when we humans are busy ruining the planet we’re also polluting the solar system with space trash. A spare piece of metal hits Aniara sending the spaceship off-course. Can the crew reassure the passengers that everything is OK? Will Mimarobe find love aboard a space ship? Will they ever reach Mars? Or will they forge a new life on the space ship itself?

Aniara is a dark (though sometimes warm and funny) look at a possible future when we’re all pulled out of a numbing consumerist existence and forced to face reality. There are nihilists who have wild sex orgies, law and order types who want people imprisoned, and cultists who form new religions and rituals. The story is based on a Swedish poem written in the 1950s when people were most afraid of nuclear holocaust, but it works just as well in a world facing climate change and ecological disaster.

Aniara is a terrific distopian look at our future — and would make a great double feature with Claire Denis’ High Life.

The Prism Prize

…is an annual Canadian award for that underrated cinematic form, the music videos. This year’s winner is Low by Belle Game. It’s directed by Kevan Funk (Hello Destroyer) and is an exquisitely disturbing short film made in an LA factory producing life-like rubber sex toys and robots. It shows the bodies being assembled, part by part, as the music plays in the background. You have to see it to believe it.

Prizes also went to Soleil Denault, Clairmont the Second and Lacey Duke. And the audience award went to Said the Whales’ “Unamerican” for an unusual photographic stop-motion video by Johnny Jansen.

Peterloo

Dir: Mike Leigh

It’s 1819 in Lancashire in northern England and things are not going well. Soldiers with PTSD are returning home, broke, after the Napoleonic Wars. Local weavers find their wages cut in half by greedy industrialists. And the new Corn Laws, which protect rich farmers from foreign competition, means the price of a loaf of bread is going through the roof. Ordinary people working twice as hard can’t feed their families. Politicians ignore ordinary people, and the magistrates are even worse, flogging an old women for drunkenness, and even hanging a man for taking a coat to keep warm.

Something has got to give. Luckilly it’s also a time of great change. Orators like the middle-class Henry Hunt (Rory Kinnear) are speaking out: put the common people into the House of Commons!  Preachers, rabble rousers, journalists, organizers and advocates – both men and woman – are pulling people together for a mass rally scheduled for August.

They face opponents, though. An effete Prince Regent adorned in white plumes fears a French style revolution. Factory owners want absolute control over their workers. Local magistrates hate and distrust ordinary people. Spies, thugs, and agents provocateurs are hired to make trouble among the protesters. And the military, who normally fight on foreign soil, are called in to quell the masses. What will happen on the day of the rally?

It’s not a spoiler to say that the title of this movie, Peterloo, refers to the massacre of hundreds of unarmed men, women and children in Manchester’s St Peter’s Field by military and local police on horseback. But most of this terrific historical drama looks at the period leading up to the demo and the subsequent government attack on its own people.

It’s an ensemble picture with many dozens of characters, each with their own memorable stories, portrayed over the course of the film. Fantastic music, settings, costumes, and acting, in many ways it’s like a great Hollywood epic from the 1960s, with a “cast of thousands” moving en masse across a wide screen. But it also shows the poignant individual stories of the odd characters you meet along the way. It is long (and somewhat confusing) but always interesting and politically relevant.

Peterloo is another memorable movie from the great UK director Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies, Mr Turner). I liked it a lot.

Aniara and Peterloo both open today in Toronto at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Check your local listings. And you can watch the top ten Prism Prize music videos at prismprize.com.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.