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

Toronto’s Spring Film Festival season continues with the Jewish Film festival closing this weekend and the Japanese Film Festival just starting up. And ICFF, the Italian Contemporary Film Festival starting in two weeks.

This week, I’m looking at two new movies playing at the two TJFFs, both based on writings and their writers. There is a radical feminist on violence against women, and a zen Buddhist on sustainable vegetarianism.

My Name is Andrea

Wri/Dir: Pratibha Parmar

Based on the writings of Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin was a poet, a writer and a radical feminist theorist who wrote about the outrage of violence against women, abuse, harassment and rape. Born in the 1940s in Camden, NJ, she grew up in a happy, middle-class family in suburban Cherry Hill. She was assaulted as a teenager, and later, as a college student protesting against the War in Vietnam, she was arrested and sent to the notorious Women’s House of Detention in New York. There she and other political prisoners were subject to horrible abuses by the doctors there. (Her testimony against the prison led to its eventual closing.) She travelled to Europe where she was exposed to the writings of Franz Fanon, Kate Millet and others, which, together with her own experiences, helped develop her radical feminist theory that the patriarchal system of power was based on violence against. And as a poet and writer, she expanded her critique to include the arts by deconstructing the male gaze within literature 

She was also an activist, participating in movements like Take Back the Streets, the aftermath of the École Polytechnique massacre and later, along with Catherine McKinnon, in the movement of Women Against Pornography. She died in 2005. 

My Name is Andrea is an unusual biographical documentary, that looks at Dworkin’s life, her writings and her philosophy. It includes early home movies, TV footage and personal letters and notes. What’s unusual is there’s no outside narrator or recent talking heads; instead it relies on recordings of her own voice (and those of other people she talked to) to advance the narrative. And since much of her writing was never recorded, a number of actors — including Christine Lahti, Ashley Judd and Amandla Stenberg — take on her role. I’ve read some of her writing before but this is one of the first times I’ve heard her voice and she was an extremely passionate speaker, whether giving a speech at Cambridge or on the Phil Donahue show. And it also lets her own voice defend herself from misrepresentation of her ideas (at various times she was accused of hating men, of calling intercourse rape, and of advocating obscenity laws). My Name is Andrea is a fascinating tribute to Dworkin’s work.

The Zen Diary

Wri/Dir: Yuji Nakae

Based on the book “Tsuchi wo Kurau Hibi; Waga Shojin Juuni ka Getsu” by Mizukami Tsutomu

Tsutomu (Sawada Kenji) is a prize-winning Japanese novelist who lives alone in a remote farmhouse in the mountains. His wife died 13 years earlier but he still keeps her ashes. He’s under pressure by Machiko, his publisher (Matsu Takako ) to write another book, so he decides to record what happens each month over the course of a year (hence the title). Interestingly, while this includes big events in his life, it’s also about the minutiae of living. As a kid, he was a novice monk at a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto, where he was trained in cooking, cleaning, planting, harvesting and foraging for food. He brings those childhood memories into play as an elderly man who is also a vegetarian.

Everything he does is done by hand: from cleaning rice to finding edible roots in the garden. He digs up bamboo shoots in a forest and looks for mushrooms and fiddleheads on the hillside. Even seemingly inedible vegetables — like the first sprouts of certain tree leaves in the spring — are delicately picked, scrubbed clean, cut-up and cooked. He shines the wooden floor on his hands and knees. He also visits his elderly mother-in-law who lives in a tiny shack, and trades foods with far-off neighbours. But a surprise death — and the threat of his own mortality — makes him rethink his daily life. Should he settle things and prepare to die? Or forge ahead with new projects?

The Zen Diary is a subtle, low-key drama about life off the grid. It feels almost like a documentary, but the parts are actually all played by actors (Sawada Kenji has been a pop idol, composer, actor and celebrity for 60 years.) And the book it’s based on is real — it’s Mizukami Tsutomu’s last work (he died in 2004). There’s something deeply satisfying and inspiring about watching the foods being made from the dirt to the table — and some of the dishes he makes, like tofu made from sesame seeds and daikon with miso, look truly delicious. It’s also a  bittersweet story about death and remembrance, family, kinship and relationships. The storyline is simple, and the film is extremely low-key, but it leaves you with something you didn’t have deep inside you before you saw this movie.

The Zen Diary is playing at the Japanese Canadian Culture Centre on June 17th, at the Toronto Japanese Film Festival; and My Name is Andrea played at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival.

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