WolfCop (2014)
Dir. Lowell Dean
Starring: Leo Fafard, Amy Matysio, Jonathan Cherry, Aidan Devine, Sarah Lind, Corine Conley

Review By Greg Klymkiw

THE DVD/BLU-RAY, REVIEWED

Now that WolfCop is available on DVD and BluRay via Anchor Bay Entertainment, it's as good a time as any to take a second look at this clever, but ultimately flawed effort that displays far more promise than what it ultimately delivers. The extras-laden home entertainment package and the film's occasional virtues certainly make the movie a worthy title to place on the shelves of any genre fan's horror movie section in their basement apartment.

The best item on the DVD/BluRay is the commentary track featuring writer-director Lowell Dean and the inimitable Emerson Ziffle, one of Canada's foremost makeup and special effects artists. On the plus side, both young men are very well spoken, amiable as all get out and throughout the running time, offer plenty of practical information on both the storytelling and filmmaking aspects of the entire production. In fact, the tidbits they parcel out - often screen specific - will be worth their weight in gold to those unfamiliar with the process of film production. To those who are well versed, much of it will feel old hat, but at least the facts are delivered clearly and succinctly. Elements specific to the process which relay to the actual exigencies of the production are also of value to ALL viewers.

The annoying aspects of the commentary are the usual suspects. The one that is extremely tedious is the, "this shoot was so hard" or "we only had 17 days to get this in the can" or "I had to pick the scenes I didn't want to compromise on" or the worst (and saddest of all) "this scene/sequence really needed [take your pick] two, three or more days".

This angers me beyond words. On a low budget film, there IS NO REASON FOR COMPROMISE. I say this with some authority as having myself produced a whole whack of no-to-low-budget features. The less money one has, the more freedom this affords. Furthermore, one utilizes lack of dollars to work into the film's aesthetic. As I noted in my original review, there are sequences in WolfCop that fail miserably because it's obvious there was not enough money. No excuse - my own, shall we say, achievements on this front aside - NO excuse is acceptable. It's nice for filmmakers to have commentaries to explain exigencies of production, but at the same time they're either betraying the flaws in the process of financing and/or the flaws in aesthetic approaches to lack of dollars.

The problem, I suspect, is the financing model of WolfCop - a horrendous dog and pony show that does little more than promote and extoll the virtues of the model itself, an entity called Cinecoup, which also benefits from considerable assistance from the hugely profitable, vision-bereft exhibition giant Cineplex Entertainment. It's a deeply sickening financing model which places undue pressures upon filmmakers to work their asses off for months creating a raft of publicity materials in order to garner online votes/support until eventually, about 100 films are whittled down to 5 finalists whom in turn are dragged to the Banff TV Festival where they make public pitches to a smug panel of "industry giants" until one film is declared the winner. This lucky film gets a cool million in financing and an automatic coast-to-coast theatrical run across Canada.

WolfCop was the first lucky recipient.

Through the glorious Cinecoup and the "generosity" of Cineplex, Wolfcop received a perfunctory theatrical release in mostly second rate cinemas in the chain. This was backed by a perfunctory ad-buy and, frankly, for a film like Wolfcop to succeed properly in a THEATRICAL market, it needed to open across the country on at least 100 screens with trailers and posters actually exhibited in Cineplex venues MONTHS before the release. Online awareness and "free" publicity is great, but hardly enough.

Even though I personally feel WolfCop was flawed, it's miles above most of the crappy American genre pictures Cineplex Entertainment fill their screens with. The box-office on many of these movies is hardly stellar, yet the gobble up screens unnecessarily (save to allow Cineplex the honour of wearing comfy knee-pads before their studio suppliers and forcing Canadian as well as non-Canadian indies into the horrendous new model of playing limited theatrical platforms, often day-and-date with VOD, etc.)

It was sad listening on the commentary track as the director happily exclaimed how wonderful it was to see the film in a real movie theatre that he frequented in his hometown of Regina. Call me a curmudgeon who's been around the block more than a few times, but what he seemed so grateful for didn't seem like too big a deal.

100 or more screens and GENUINE dollars and cents support would have been a big deal.

As noted above, the production financing was woefully inadequate. I feel for the filmmakers. The entire Cinecoup thing did little more than give them a crappy amount of money to make a movie that needed twice to three times as much and frankly resulted in a picture that is okay instead of genuinely great - on a par, say, with Joe Dante's The Howling which, by rights, it could have been.

One of the neat things in the extras are all the amazing promo videos made by the filmmakers. It's clear Lowell Dean and his team have talent to burn. What's sickening in this same section are the B.S. promo items featuring the smug, disingenuous corporate slime openly shilling themselves and their corporations in the guise of promoting the efforts of all the filmmakers. Let's not forget, that all the hard, free work the Wolfcop team put in to garner Cinecoup support was matched by several handfuls of other filmmakers. They walked away empty handed. I feel for all of them.

Cinecoup promotes itself as the best way to get a movie made because it guarantees exposure to marketplace needs and a theatrical run. Big deal! One movie, poorly sold and exhibited does not make an acceptable model. (Let's do the math again - ONE MOVIE!) Given the traditional lack of support Cineplex bestows upon Canadian Cinema, maybe - just maybe - they could ante-up some of their profits and allow for more pictures and/or better production budgets, and most of all, something more than perfunctory in-house promotion - maybe they could start aggressively and months ahead of time.

Even more hilarious on the commentary track was the director defending his decision to have American flags on display everywhere and to pepper the film with cultural references that are American. Dean not so successfully defends this decision when he says that he was interested in creating a kind of border town never-never-land instead of proudly setting the film in Regina and Moosejaw where the movie is CLEARLY shot - albeit with American flags and all sorts of other American ephemera.

Nope. I don't buy it, kid.

Besides, he's not going to bite the hand that feeds him (albeit at feed-trough levels commensurate with that of Biafra). This quaking, quivering stance filmmakers take above the 49th parallel is very much a Canadian trait. I have no proof other than intuition, but I'm convinced where the infusion of American cultural references came from and it wasn't the filmmakers. Dean and Ziffle present so much on their commentary that reflects the thought and artistry they did put into so much of the film, that the aforementioned cultural explanations pale miserably in comparison. (You can read my expanded thoughts on the Canadian cultural elements in my review below.)

In addition to the aforementioned, the home entertainment version of Wolfcop includes a fun series of scenes left on the cutting room floor - they're damn fine, but feel like they didn't need to be in the movie in the first place. One element in particular is the funny scene where the sexy, funny police woman finds a huge skin-shed penis and dangles it whilst quipping. It's ultimately not as funny or shocking as the scene in the movie where she does the same thing with the blood-drenched facial skin. The penis gag would only have worked if it had been structured into the narrative using the law of "odd numbers". To have the action only twice with different items wouldn't have worked. The film would have need three such instances. That the final product has one kick-ass hilarious shocker is perfect.

The DVD/BluRay of WoldCop is well worth buying. The package is well produced and the transfer captures the superb lighting, cinematography, production design, effects (all natural) and overall look of the film (save for those moments when budget and exigencies of production don't allow the film to hit a higher percentage in this regard).

Some might suggest I doth protest to much - that WolfCop has been successfully sold worldwide (by the genuinely visionary Canadian company Raven Banner), that the franchise will continue and the Dean and his team NOW have their futures mapped out for them.

Big Deal! All the aforementioned could have been true even IF the film was awful (which, it most certainly isn't). At the end of the day, the film could have achieved all the success and then some if it had been far, far better (which, it most certainly could have been).

And now, here's a slight rewrite of my original review of the film itself:

THE FILM, REVIEWED:


The world (at least my world) is full of B-movies with GREAT titles that don't deliver what I want them to deliver. Take, for instance, Zoltan: Hound of Dracula. Indeed, the movie serves up a hound, it's named Zoltan and yes, belongs to Dracula. So far, so good, mais non?

NON!!!

It's missing what I genuinely expected from its great title - a good movie. Sadly, the list of great titles that yielded bad movies is longer than the schwance of the giant Jack had to kill. WolfCop suffers a similar fate, but adds insult to my injury since it's got a lovely high concept within its magnificent title. In fact, the split second I heard that a WolfCop was on its way, I began to salivate like an eager Australian canis lupus dingo running across the outback from a campers' tent, a newborn clenched in its jaws and soon to be a tender, flavourful meal of succulent flesh, warm, sweet blood and delectable globs of baby fat.

Alas, all the slobber was for nought. WolfCop turns out to be not very good at all. Even worse is that it's not even a pile of crap. If it were truly awful, abysmal beyond all belief, I might be able to forgive and accept it for the dross it is - you know, kind of like Sharknado. Unfortunately, WolfCop's soul-crushing mediocrity, aimed squarely and unimaginatively at mere ephemeral marketplace needs, deserves no forgiveness. None! I realize this isn't an especially charitable stance for a former Altar Boy to be taking, but somehow, I'm certain my Lord Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter would accept my unforgiving inclinations, especially since He (via Lee Demarbre, the mad genius of Ottawa) delivered a terrific movie on all fronts whilst WolfCop delivers a great title, a few meagre pleasures and major-league disappointment.

The plot, such as it is, involves Lou Garou (Leo Fafard), his name being ludicrously close to loup-garou the French word for "werewolf". Lou is an alcoholic deputy in Woodhaven, a less-than-bucolic rural cesspool. His recent nightmares turn out to be real. At first, a wave of missing pets suggests some mysterious manner of foul play, but in no time at all, the carnage begins to escalate. Lou, it seems, has been afflicted with the curse of the werewolf. With the help of Willie (Jonathan Cherry) his conspiracy theorist and gun store proprietor buddy, Lou begins to investigate his, uh, problem and eventually uncovers an ages-old conspiracy which might actually lead directly to the town's corrupt Mayor Bradley (Corine Conley).

The Chief (Aidan Devine) of the local Sheriff's office has just about had it with Lou's drunken hijinx and exerts pressure on our hapless hero to investigate the mysterious murders - a bit of a problem, since Lou discovers his werewolf side is responsible. Luckily, none of the human victims are innocents, but are instead scumbags connected to the local gang of criminals. Still, murder is murder and it needs to be investigated and Lou's colleague Tina (Amy Matysio), the prim, proper and perpetual winner of the "Deputy of the Month" award also has her nose to the investigation grindstone. Amidst all the dark chicanery swirling around Woodhaven, Lou is quickly becoming the object of attraction for the comely local barmaid Jessica (Sarah Lind). Romance, as any horror fan will attest, is oft-impeded by lycanthropy.

All of the above swirls tidily - too tidily as the predictability factor is notched up too "high" - and we're treated to a mad night of crime-busting, mad passionate sex, the usual double-crosses from the obviously expected places and alliances formed from the least expected (though equally obvious) places.

There's a lot wrong with the movie, but it gets a few things right. First and foremost, the special makeup effects are out of this world. Eschewing digital enhancements, the werewolf look is achieved via real makeup and prosthetics. This is not only cool, but the movie kicks major butt during the transformation scenes. WolfCop has a lot of competition in the transformation department - most notably from The Howling, An American Werewolf in London and even the original Universal Pictures'The Wolf Man. If anything's missing, it's the underlying emotional resonance of the horrendously painful transformation sequences. This is not the fault of actor Leo Fafard, nor the F/X artists, but Dean's ho-hum screenplay.

The performances are uniformly fine. Fafard is a handsome, square-jawed hero with considerable humanity in his eyes and he works overtime to bring a semblance of believability to his role. Aidan Devine proves, yet again, why he's one of the best actors in Canada. Though he's saddled with a stock and underwritten role, he infuses it with his laconically sardonic qualities and one sits there wondering and hoping when he might get a few star-making turns that launch him into a genuine character lead not unlike that of a 70s anti-hero type such as rendered by Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider or hell, even Warren Oates. Amy Matysio makes for an intense deputy as Tina and I love how she sports a tightly-wound, semi-pole-up-the-butt crime fighter look, but lurking deep within is that hot babe itching to be free of her protective shell and let her hair down like the stereotypical and proverbial small town librarian type who's the sexiest minx this side of Bedford Falls. Matysio is also a terrific comedy actress and she delivers one of the funniest moments I've seen in any film in quite some time. All I wish to reveal is that it involves blood-dripping human flesh.

The man who comes close to stealing the show, though, is Jonathan Cherry. His conspiracy-theorist whack-job is broad, to say the least, but in all the right ways. He not only elicits huge laughs with the handful of good bits the script offers, but he even manages to bring a smile and/or a chuckle with some of the more egregiously on-the-nose humour. He's a great sidekick for Lou and I sincerely hope he's back for the film's already-announced sequels.

So, you're probably wondering why I'm bothering to kvetch about the movie. Well, let me tell you why. First and foremost, it's really disappointing that the film is set in some generic North American small-town. Given that the film is shot in two of Canada's cheesiest, sleaziest backwards cities, Regina and Moose Jaw, one wonders why the movie is simply not set there - in Canada! Canada is not only exotic to foreign markets, but can be really damn funny. It's a major cop-out to have seemingly bent to the boneheaded notion that Americans (especially) don't respond to anything that's not American. The major missed opportunity here is that in the province of Saskatchewan, the regional law-enforcers are the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Come on! Mounties are known all over the world and they're hilarious. Why, oh why, oh why the filmmakers didn't think to just set the damn thing in Moose Jaw (that's funny, too) and better yet, adorn Fafard, Devine and Matysio in faux-Mountie garb, is simply beyond me.

The prairies have long been home to one of the most beloved cinematic forces in WORLD CINEMA, the prairie post-modernist new wave of Canada (a perfectly-apt term coined by critic Geoff Pevere). In Winnipeg, this spawned the likes of John Paizs (Crime Wave, Springtime in Greenland, The Obsession of Billy Botski and Top of the Food Chain aka Invasion!) and Guy Maddin (Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Careful, My Winnipeg) and most recently, the astonishingly brilliant Astron-6 collective (Father's Day, Manborg and the upcoming The Editor).

Regina too has spawned a similar movement with the legendary Brian Stockton leading the charge (The 24 Store, which is essentially a much more intelligent and funny Clerks before Clerks existed and crossed with Slacker before Slacker existed, The Blob Thing shorts, his CFC short nod to George Romero The Weight of the World and his thoroughly whacked Wheat Soup that he co-directed with Gerald Saul). Other astounding prairie post-modernists from the Regina scene include former University of Regina professor (now at Concordia in Montreal) Richard Kerr (his The Last Days of Contrition is still one of the most powerful political head trips ever made in Canada) and Brett Bell who shocked the world with his stunningly hilarious and savage short Tears of a Clown: The Maredrew Tragedy, a film that totally beat Bobcat Goldthwait to the crazy clown sweepstakes when the comedian eventually made (the jaw-dropping) Shakes The Clown AFTER Bell's strychnine-laced gumdrop of sickness.

WolfCop had so much potential to mine this territory in its OWN way. One of the things that makes for great cinema (that can also be commercial) is to embrace one's regional culture in the telling of a story. God knows the SCTV nut-cases did this and even Americans did not shy away from the artistic bounty of the "regions". George Romero's greatest work was ALWAYS rooted in Pittsburgh, John Waters work was synonymous with Baltimore and Barry Levinson's finest films had Buffalo written all over them.

I LOVE GENRE PICTURES and know them like the back of my hand, but watching Dean's film made me so crestfallen over the fact that much of WolfCop felt stock and generic. On occasion, the clearly talented filmmaker seems to deliver just the right flourishes that the prairie legacy and its contemporaries are imbued with (the aforementioned hilarity involving Matysio's blood dripping flesh shenanigans being a perfect example), but by hiding the world he missed so many opportunities to make the screenplay, characters and narrative so much better.

On the flip side, the generic setting does seem to lean more towards America. We don't have Sheriffs in the traditional sense in Canada and though the supremely funny idea in WolfCop of a store devoted to Liquor AND Donuts could well be more of an American thing, it frankly feels far more rooted in the whacked Canadian prairie post-modernist tradition. Again, Regina and Moose Jaw are totally fucked places. Why not a liquor-donut store there? (*NOTE* I'm from Winnipeg. It's as big a hole as Regina or Moose Jaw and has just as many weird-ass locations. If WolfCop had been shot there instead, I would have been equally disappointed that the 'Peg's utter pathetic qualities weren't exploited.)

Canada - especially in rural or suburban settings - has also spawned some of the most sickeningly aberrant criminal behaviour in the world (Bernardo-Homolka, Dennis Melvin Howe, the pig-farming prostitute killer, the bus-riding cannibal, the cross-dressing Canadian Forces rapist-killer, etc. etc. etc.) and the notion that some kind of redneck Satanic league that spawns werwolves is totally Canadian - almost perversely and sweetly so. (God knows Astron-6 has been able to blend the tropes of genre with the country's revolting history of carnage.)

Alas, what we get instead is a stereotypical attempt at satirizing small-town American culture with a parade of homeless alcoholics puking and spitting up all over the place. One series of quick shots of homeless drunks on the streets of the film's fake locale was nasty without being funny, though it was clearly supposed to register laughs. I felt more embarrassed and even ashamed for the actors having to play these bit parts. Homeless alcoholics are not funny when they're treated with derision as they are here. (Does anyone still remember the Toronto Film Festival promos from that idiotic insurance company that made fun of poor people living in trailers? Disgusting.) And I'm not saying disgusting CAN'T be funny, either. Just look at how brilliantly the Astron-6 collective tackled this in Father's Day.

WolfCop's low budget also seemed to render a potentially great action-packed, blood-soaked set piece involving our werewolf cop and the gang of criminals into a totally cheapjack, flat-on-its-face sequence. Endless closeups with no wider or medium establishers turn one of the major climactic moments of the movie into a geographically-challenged and lame sequence that disappoints big-time. I'm blaming the budget only because Dean's compositions and shot-lists generally feel on the money and the cinematography and aforementioned makeup effects are well above and beyond the call of duty. As such, I actually might be blaming the film's producers for not moving mountains to make sure this sequence kicked major ass. On the other hand, if Dean didn't plan for a series of wider shots to ensure a spatial sense, then he's the one who erred.

What we've got here is a great idea, a talented filmmaker, a terrific cast and a creative team who could well have lived up to the overall promise of the piece. Alas, the screenplay lacks punch and genuine edge. The decision to render the setting generic is clearly unwise and finally, too much stock placed in ephemeral market needs rather than trusting in the inherent insanity of the piece. I imagine and hope all the promise displayed here is not wasted on the sequel, but instead manages to take the wonderful route enjoyed by Sam Raimi when he essentially remade The Evil Dead in Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn by not holding back on ANYTHING and delivering a movie that's still a masterpiece of utter madness.

With the WolfCop franchise, I can taste it.

Let's hope Dean's allowed to get it right on the next go-round.

THE FILM CORNER RATING (THE FILM): **½ 2-and-a-half Stars
THE FILM CORNER RATING (THE DVD): *** 3 Stars

In Canada - BUY Wolfcop HERE, eh!

In USA and the rest of the WORLD - BUY Wolfcop - HERE!

In UK BUY Wolfcop HERE

Cast No Shadow (2014)
Dir. Christian Sparkes
Starring: Percy Hynes-White, Joel Thomas Hynes, Mary-Colin Chisholm

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Creepy is good, and there's more than enough creepy creeping creepily about in Christian Sparkes' creepy feature length directorial debut, the, uh, well, you know, creepy Cast No Shadow. Set against the isolated, and yes, creepy backdrop of Canada's mega-inbred capital of baby seal mass murder, the picturesque province of Newfoundland, it's a film infused with the kind of horror that was pioneered by legendary producer Val Lewton when he headed up the genre division of RKO Pictures in the 40s.

Now, don't get me wrong, movie geeks, though Sparkes' picture flirts with occasional shards of greatness, I'm not saying it holds a candle to the best Lewton work, for instance: The Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, The Seventh Victim, I Walked With a Zombie and The Body Snatcher, but it's definitely on a par with Lewton's lesser entries (for Lewton, "lesser" means pretty goddamned good) like, for instance, Isle of the Dead, Bedlam, The Leopard Man and The Ghost Ship. The bottom line is that Cast No Shadow isn't the kind of picture you're going to kick out of the sack for eating crackers, if you follow my drift.

Val Lewton, of course, pioneered the notion of finding chills in the modern world and, in fact created near-fairy-tale like shockers which plumbed the depths of what scared people the most - mental illness, religious cultism, poverty, infidelity, loneliness, ignorance and, among other transgressive assaults on humanity, superstition. Visually, his work found monsters, not so much literal monsters, but those created by the imaginations of both the characters and audiences - often nestled in pure darkness, shadows and shades of grey.

Not that I saw any direct influence and/or Lewton-esque homages in Cast No Shadow, but it's definitely dipping its Newfie toes into similar black lagoons of horror. (Thank Christ no rotting, waterlogged baby seals bent on vengeance pop out of the murky waters surrounding "The Rock", otherwise I might have genuinely needed a few trips to the water closet.)


On the surface we're handed the simple, but compelling tale of Jude (Percy Hynes-White), a young boy living in a squalid shack masquerading as a home with Angus (Joel Thomas Hynes) his mean, abusive single Dad. Jude whiles away his time exploring the forests and craggy shorelines, mostly alone, but sometimes accompanied by a fair-weather friend or two.

What seems to really scare Jude to his bone marrow are the things which lurk in the dark woods and caves of his not-so idyllic rural environs. There are, you see, witches and trolls galumphing about. Given that the picture's set in Newfoundland, this isn't at all hard to swallow. The beatings Jude suffers at the hands of his Dad or the town bullies (future baby seal hunters, no doubt) seem like kid's stuff to our young protagonist. His waking moments alone in the woods, as well as his life-like dreams are fraught with grotesque creatures of the night.

To most of the local citizenry, including a smug, annoying constable, Jude's just plain apple-don't-fall-too-far-from-the-tree bad, not unlike, for example, his nasty Pappy. If truth be told, when the lad isn't tripping out in the wilderness or his secret lair of magic and make-believe in the crawlspace below the rickety, old family home, he is indeed up to all manner of "no-good". He is, more often than not, lashing out at the redneck bullies who make his life miserable by bashing his slender frame to a pulp. In a particularly satisfying moment, Jude even makes use of a pair of brass knuckles that he's stolen. (If anything, I personally hoped he'd be using them more than once.)

When Dad is inevitably hauled off to the hoosegow, Jude is rightly terrified that he'll be snapped up by the Child and Family Services creeps (which, we all know, don't do a whole lot of good other than shoving at-risk kids into even more vile at-risk situations). He runs off deeper into the maw of the neighbourhood and hangs out at the home of Alfreda (Mary-Colin Chisholm) a craggy, creepily-friendly and highly literate hermit who once was the region's trusted midwife, but now lives in lonely exile within her ramshackle shack - a kind of inbred Newfie Miss Havisham.

Here, for a time, Jude finds solace.

Alas, the secrets of the night, the deep, dark tragedies best forgotten (or better yet, repressed), begin to rear their ugly heads as horrifically as those of the trolls and witches populating the dense corners of the terrible beauty surrounding all who live in this alternately bucolic heaven on earth and roiling, ever-churning pit of hell.

Life in rural Newfoundland is no tray of tea and crumpets, let me tell you.


Though Cast No Shadow has a few misses which negate its hits, the picture has one of the best scripts in a Canadian film in some time. Written by Joel Thomas Hynes, the film's co-star (and real-life father of the film's child-star), it's a script that keeps you constantly guessing. Everytime you're about to wade into familiar waters, Hynes tosses in a big stone which causes the kind of ripples that keep you in a state of never quite knowing where you're going or what you're looking at. When a picture veers in directions I don't expect it to, I always get a nice tingle of happy gooseflesh since this is a rare treat in the movies these days.

I loved the tone, pacing and overall trajectory of the film's style and narrative. I especially appreciated that the movie seems to not be targeted at any specific demographic, confounding all notions and formulas one is normally inspired to yawn over. Whether or not Sparkes and/or Hynes were influenced by the aforementioned Val Lewton seems less important to me than the fact that their picture is mucking about in a similar sandbox.

As a director, Sparkes approaches the material simply and cleanly, as well as garnering phenomenal performances from his entire cast. I have only two major nitpicks. Firstly, the "monster" elements can't really live up to the picture's low budget. I wish he'd gone for even more shadow, more darkness and more fleeting glimpses of the troll than he does. (His witch "action" is far more successfully rendered.)

I do understand why he (or whatever boneheads in the creative process that he was forced to listen to) might have avoided going the distance in this fashion, but I think it would have been more in keeping with the overall mise-en-scene.

And speaking of "going the distance", my second nitpick is that the movie seems a few hairs short of upping the ante on the more violent and yes, even blood-soaked-potential that's inherent in the picture. It tries a bit too earnestly to be tasteful when there are a couple of perfect instances for the movie to have been pitched into the Cronenberg territory of unsavoury viscera.

This is not a contradiction of my first nitpick, either. The fantastical elements rightly needed to be a bit more muted in the realm of darkness and shadow, but the realistic elements of the film's true "horrors" are practically begging to be unleashed. (Even my 14-year-old daughter, who loved the film and related strongly to the character of Jude, felt the movie needed to up the ante on a few of the deep-rooted elements inherent in the story.) That all said, I noted that the credit-crawl included a few of the usual Telefilm Canada-like suspects attached to so many Canuckian endeavours, so I'm happy to place far more blame in that direction than the filmmakers themselves.

One of the nice things about Cast No Shadow is that it manages to exceed, in terms of overall quality, originality and genuinely muted horror, a similar recent release, the ludicrously overrated Aussie film The Babadook. Jennifer Kent's limp psychological chiller, is hampered by a clunky on-its-sleeve feminist bent, an underwhelming screenplay (predictably tarred and feathered with a big old brush of been-there-done-that) and annoyingly adorned with the kind of preciousness that gets pseuds (of all persuasions) hot and bothered that they're seeing something resembling an art film dabbling in the off-the-well-worn-genre-path.

Ugh! There's nothing original about The Babadook and the only and truly horrific thing about it was how the movie features a child who is nerve-gratingly annoying and then, tables turned, a Mom who is even more aggravating than her son. (Throw in an annoying dog and the film's Trinity of Cumbersome Afflictions became even more egregious.)

Not so with Cast No Shadow. You never really know where it's headed. When it does get there, you kick yourself a bit for not predicting it, but it feels good to stuff a few boots in your own ass on that count because you know, deep-down that you've been served up a cool picture from a writer and director who have all the potential in the world to eventually knock you flat.

It's a cinematic cold cock I look forward to with baited breath.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half Stars

Cast No Shadow is currently in limited theatrical release via MCE. The picture opens April 3 in Toronto, Halifax and St. John's with a bevy of attached special events:

TORONTO – Carlton Cinema
April 3 – post screening Q+A w/ actor Joel Thomas Hynes, actor-writer Percy Hynes White and producer Chris Agoston
April 4 – post screening Q+A w/ director Christian Sparkes, actor Joel Thomas Hynes, actor-writer Percy Hynes White and producer Chris Agoston

HALIFAX – Scotiabank Theatre
April 3 – post screening Q+A w/ actor Mary-Colin Chisholm
April 5 – post screening Q+A w/ director Christian Sparkes

ST. JOHN’S – Cinema Mount Pearl
April 3 – post screening Q+A w/ director Christian Sparkes, Allison White

Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me (2014)
Dir. James Keach
Starring: Glen Campbell, Kim Campbell, Ashley Campbell, Cal Campbell, Shannon Campbell, Jay Leno, John Carter Cash, Sheryl Crow, Steve Martin, Paul McCartney, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Bruce Springsteen

There's always the debate in one's mind with documentary cinema as to the balance and/or separation between "artistry" and "subject matter". Some films within the genre work in spite of less-than-exemplary artistic/stylistic vision when the subject matter is so compelling that it supersedes all aesthetic considerations. Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me could almost fall squarely into this critical rumination, but the fact that it is a fairly straightforward document of extraordinary events, still allows it worthy consideration as solid, if not genuinely great filmmaking. The fact that director James Keach expertly focuses upon the task at hand is hardly a reason to dismiss the picture as art of a very high order. Besides, not every documentary film can, should and/or will be Malik Bandjellou's Searching for Sugar Man. Keach's powerful and poignant work, in spite (or because) of its veracity, delivers the goods and then some.

It doesn't get more harrowing, touching, uplifting and yes, even downright entertaining than this. When the legendary country and western star Glen Campbell was diagnosed with the extreme progression of dementia known as Alzheimer's Disease (wherein memories eventually fade to less-than-zero), he not only recorded new material, but embarked upon what would, even under normal circumstances be a gruelling Farewell Concert Tour. He also agreed to allow actor-director James Keach unfettered access to virtually every aspect of this undertaking and, in fact, his life. The desire was, on one hand, for Campbell to surround himself with family, friends and colleagues to do what he loved doing best, and on the other, to provide an important document of the effects of the disease so that the film, album and tour could be an important tool in creating far more support for the research necessary to attack this horrendous disease.

The resulting film will not only appeal to Campbell's multitude of fans, but anyone and everyone who has either suffered with the debilitating effects of the disease upon loved ones, but the general populace at large. The film succeeds more than admirably in all these respects; it's a tremendous concert picture and behind-the-scenes look at mounting this challenging event in the face of a horrendous affliction.

Utilizing concert footage, new interviews, sequences at home and in clinics, plus a choice selection of archival footage, Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me succeeds as one of the best documentaries about the creative process ever made.

We see intimate sequences with Campbell and his gorgeous, devoted wife Kim, watching home movie footage in which he continually expresses confusion as to what and whom he's watching while she patiently reminds him of what these key events in his personal and professional life are. There is an astonishing visit to Washington, D.C. wherein Campbell and his smart, total-babe and mega-talented daughter present a plea for more federal funding of Alzheimer's research. There are two very sweet interviews - one with Steve Martin recounting his experiences as a junior writer on the hit TV variety series "The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour" and the other with Bruce Springsteen, not only extolling Campbell's artistic virtues, but revealing his own personal experiences with seeing close loved ones being afflicted with Alzheimer's. One of the most alternately moving and hilarious moments is when Paul McCartney visits Campbell backstage to tell him how much he loves him while Campbell looks at the former Beatle with a bemusedly blank expression as in, "Who is this guy, again?" and essentially, though very politely regarding McCartney, as if he were some anonymous member of the singer's humungous public fan base.


It's the music, however, that soars and even more extraordinary are the words of shock from any number of leading doctors in the field of Alzheimer's as they express how someone at Campbell's juncture in the disease should not be so skilled and downright brilliant when he's on stage performing live. Campbell transforms from the addled, befuddled old man backstage and at home into a graceful senior practitioner of musicianship when facing adoring audiences. Campbell does prove to be "un-rehearsable", a bit too chatty and occasionally confused when the cue cards for lyrics are not where he expects them to be. Not that these matter to the live audiences captured on film, nor for that matter to us as we're watching the movie - they all seem an integral part of Campbell's appeal, showmanship and unwavering joy in performing.

And damn! Sometimes it's easy to forget what an astounding guitar player, entertainer and songwriter Campbell was and, certainly during the time of the film's shooting, still is. Campbell even displays a common tic amongst Alzheimer's patients when they're feeding on positive sensory vibes and once it's identified as such, we're even more moved and transported to a kind of grace when we see it as he performs. (One of the most astonishing and heartrending scenes has Campbell on guitar performing "Duelling Banjos" with his brilliant, radiant daughter Ashley on banjo - star Daddy and star-in-the-making Daughter - it's pure movie magic.)

Yes, this is a straightforward document, but as such, it's an ideal and skilful approach to material which needs no stylistic directorial flourishes, but rather showcases a filmmaker intent upon capturing rare truths. My hat is off to James Keach for his unerring, unwavering eye.

What a wonderful picture. I'm so glad it exists and look forward to seeing it again and again.

So too, will you.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me is a VSC release currently playing at The Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto, to be followed by added playdates across Canada including the VanCity Theatre in Vancouver.

Greg Klymkiw and Tony Burgess share pulls from a jug of Peninsula shine and discuss writing, aliens and EJECTA, the latest screenplay from the writer of PONTYPOOL, SEPTIC MAN & HELLMOUTH Read on by clicking HERE

Greg Klymkiw Interviews the legendary director JOHN BOORMAN about QUEEN AND COUNTRY, the sequel to his much-beloved Hope and Glory at Electric Sheep Magazine. Read it by clicking HERE

In anticipation of the upcoming 2015 Toronto Hot Docs International Festival of Documentary Cinema, herewith is a review of one of my favourite horror mock-docs.


The Last Exorcism (2010)
dir. Daniel Stamm
Starring: Patrick Fabian, Ashley Bell, Iris Bahr, Louis Herthum, Caleb Landry Jones and Tony Bentley

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I suppose we have to thank The Blair Witch Project for all the mock-doc shaky-cam thrillers of the past 15 years. I don't even like it much. The movie had a vague visceral effectiveness upon a first viewing, but the real test for all these pictures is how they hold up on repeated viewings. Blair Witch doesn't hold up to that kind of scrutiny at all.

Much like other one-trick-pony efforts such as Christopher "One Idea" Nolan's Memento or the reprehensible pile of filth Man Bites Dog, the aforementioned titles live and then die a miserable death because so much of them rest on the shoulders of their gimmick. In fact, a much better film in this genre, might well be the patriarch of them all, Jim McBride's utterly haunting and creepy David Holzman's Diary which, after over forty years still has the power to blow an audience away as it has way more going for it than its conceit (though its central figure is indeed the walking, talking embodiment of conceit).

My personal favourites of the recent forays into this form of telling creepy stories are Bobcat Goldthwait's magnificent Bigfoot chiller Willow Creek and Oren Peli's stunning Paranormal Activity. Both pictures are rooted in humanity against extraordinary backdrops and bear up under repeated scrutiny.

And now we have, from producer Eli (The Bear Jew) Roth, a very effective horror picture directed by Daniel Stamm which, presents its nerve jangling tale of demonic possession with a reasonable degree of intelligence and style. It's also held up nicely to repeated viewings.


The Last Exorcism is an apparent documentary about preacher Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), famous and popular man o' God who began his career (much like the real-life Marjoe Gortner) as a child evangelist and worked his way up to being a lower drawer Jimmy Swaggart. Cotton supplements his earnings as an exorcist, which is where he's really made his mark, but recent events have tested his faith and he invites documentary filmmaker Iris Reisen (Iris Bahr) to enter his life - warts and all.

Cotton receives numerous requests to perform exorcisms, but his belief in their effectiveness has more to do with the healing powers he wields through his performance. He goes so far as to rig the exorcisms with simple, but really compelling special effects. He randomly picks an exorcism request off a pile of letters on his desk and off the crew goes to watch him do his stuff. His hope is to expose himself, to expose all exorcists, to expose his own lack of faith. He doesn't believe in the devil and he doesn't believe the exorcism has any special Heavenly significance. He believes in his skill to heal, but due to some recent tragedies where other holy men have committed exorcisms that have traumatized the "possessed" - so much so that they have actually died - he hopes to expose the absurdity and inherent danger in such practices, especially by those not as skilled as he.

He soon enters the world of the Louisiana backwoods Sweetzer family who have been plagued with livestock mutilations and very odd behaviour from 16-year-old Nell (Ashley Bell). Cotton is convinced the problem is psychological and he exorcises, with the help of his bag of tricks, the demon from the girl's soul.

Sooner than you can say "The power of Christ compels thee!" it becomes obvious that there's more to the girl than meets the eye. She's obviously suffered a severe trauma - possibly sexual abuse or... she really is possessed by a demon.

Horror ensues. And a lot of the horror in the picture is extremely effective - lots of creepy crawly stuff and numerous all-out shit-your-pants pyrotechnics. Most impressively, these are bereft of CGI and delivered by the actors.

Ashley Bell is especially astounding in a performance that is highly physical. The gymnastics of self mutilation are rendered by Ms. Bell and Ms. Bell alone. She's not only brilliant physically, but she plumbs the depths of an incredibly tortured young woman with the sort of skill that signals a great talent to keep an eye on.

Equally impressive in the acting sweepstakes is Patrick Fabian as Cotton. Bringing the right balance of showmanship, charm and sleaziness to the table and as the film progresses, a very strong sense in the character's rekindling of faith, Fabian makes us believe as readily as he makes his "patients" believe. It's to the film's credit that faith still plays an important role in the story. While critical of organized religion, it follows the intricacies of Cotton's own spiritual struggles and ultimately, places stock in this, or if you will, his belief in God.


One of the more astounding elements is that the picture not only features lots of magnificent exorcism, but in what must be a first, we also get some mega-devil-worship dolloped lovingly into the mix. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I don't recall seeing anything (or at least anything good) where we are plunged into a movie about exorcism that then pulls the delicious, tantalizing card of devil worship.

I love devil worship.

And let me guarantee you, The Last Exorcism features devil worship so profoundly disturbing that it rivals some of my favourite devil worship sequences in such classics of the genre as Hammer's The Devil Rides Out, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, and Race With The Devil.

This is one of those movies where horror aficionados can do the math on all the expertly handled moments of major-league delivery and determine the picture's ultimate worth - especiallywhen the picture is good even beyond the math.

So here's the tally: Mutilation (of animals and humans), provocative sexual overtones, lots of "in-the-name-of-Jesus" prayers and Latin incantation. One can never get enough of that. And last, but not least, one of the most harrowing devil worship sequences replete with a bloody, goo dripping deformed demon baby with blood gushing geyser-like from the nether regions of the woman trussed to the unholy altar of Satan.

Seriously. What's not to like?

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half Stars

The Last Exorcism is available on DVD and BluRay via E-One.

Exposed (2013)
Dir. Beth B
Starring: World Famous *BOB*, Julie Atlas Muz, Mat Fraser, Rose Wood, Dirty Martini, Bambi the Mermaid, Bunny Love, James Habacker, Tigger!

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I've always loved burlesque. As a healthy, young lad growing up in Winnipeg, I was surrounded by the finest in this magnificent form of entertainment thanks to a crusty old booking agent by the name of Gladys Balsillie who managed a stable of formidable talent on constant view in only the finest gentlemen's clubs of my old winter city.

Known famously as "Gladdie's Girls", these ladies were no mere strippers, but featured performers who put on super-cool shows with props, costumes, jokes, storytelling and even narrative arcs to their dances. The greatest of these ladies was the incomparable June Tracy, a ribald, full-figured octogenarian beauty who spun deliciously dirty tales through her craggy, chain-smoke-charred voice pipes. Not only could she twirl one tassel-adorned breast at a time, she oft-performed her famed bubble bath act in a claw-footed tub and then, always ended every show with a series of vigorous bows and the best exit-line ever: "Thank you, thank you, thank you," she'd belt out and then, after a perfectly-timed pause, "…Thank you, relatives!"

Beth B's wonderful film Exposed, took me back to those halcyon days and reminded me how disgusting many of the clubs have become since the implementation of lap dancing, private dancing and the addition of dark V.I.P. rooms which are little more than whorehouses. In recent years, Canada began to bring back old-fashioned burlesque, but unless you live in Toronto or Vancouver, it's awfully hard to see.

Of course, always ahead of the curve, it makes perfect sense that since the beginning of the 21st Century the creative sluices opened up for a number of New York-based performers to take burlesque into truly transgressive directions and Beth B is clearly the filmmaker for the job of immortalizing it on film. A vital part of the late-70s-early-80s New York "No Wave" of cinema (whose members included Amos Poe, Jim Jarmusch, Sarah Driver and others), she brings her eye for alternative visions as well as her well-honed craft to a film that was shot over a few years.

B's picture is a lovely cinematic alternative to this dazzling, live performance/burlesque art and focuses upon eight spectacular performers who continue to strut their stuff - not in sleazy "gentleman's clubs", but most often in (occasionally sleazy) super-cool venues where the acts are presented with all the bump-and-grind one would expect, plus the addition of genuine performance art of the highest quality. The work is satirical, political and downright cerebral. The performers are first-rate entertainers who continually confound traditional notions of sexuality, gender and body-type.

We're taken backstage, into the homes and hotels, as well as the bedrooms of these eight dancers. B's camera allows them all to present who they are as both artists and people. Then, there are the performances which are gloriously shot and cut, offering humour and food for thought, but most of all, they are just plain sexy as all get out. Not a single man, woman and transgendered performer is bereft of sex appeal and Exposed is easily one of the best showcases for this loin-stirring and noggin-inspiring work.

I loved each and every one of these people and part of this comes from who they are as human beings, but another part comes from B's point of view - she brings humanity and love to every frame of the picture so that it's also deeply and profoundly moving.


It's especially cool to see the brilliant actor/performer Mat Fraser celebrating his sheer sex appeal by "normalizing" his physically challenged thalidomide-affected arms and hands. He does this by using his natural gifts as a performer, but also by infusing his arms with all manner of sex-drenched aplomb and gymnastics. It's also cool to see his deeply loving relationship with his partner Julie Atlas Muz, and why not? He's a major hunk and she's a total babe and they're both brilliant performers in their own right.

What's not to love?

Rose Wood, an astoundingly intense transgendered performer is equally compelling - he's a tower of power in all respects and we eventually even get to see the results of his breast augmentation surgery which adds an amazing element to his act - we're talking hunka-hunka-burning-love here.

Then again, that pretty much describes the entire, glorious experience of Exposed. It's without question one hunka-hunka-burning-love of sheer cinematic joy. It might well be the definitive documentary on contemporary burlesque.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4 Stars

Exposed is available on DVD via Zeitgeist Films.

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The Thin Blue Line (1988)
Dir. Errol Morris

Review By Greg Klymkiw

There are many stupid things filmmakers have to put up with from those who hold the purse-strings. The worst, I think, is what documentary filmmakers have to go through - facing down (mostly) idiot "commissioning editors", the lofty title many dimwit broadcasters enjoy lobbing about like so many balls on the tennis courts of their respective power positions. These puffed-up pea-knuckles require - nay, DEMAND - from said filmmakers, a clear narrative structure for the documentaries; blow-by-blow treatises which guarantee, at least on paper, what the final movie will be. More often than not, these sycophantic blowhards, who purport to know what their viewers want, are looking for "sexy" nuggets which can be boiled down into bite-sized log lines not much bigger than the meagre sections of the brains they attempt to valiantly make use of.

This is what Errol Morris faced at the beginning of his life as a filmmaker. These, of course, were in the days when there was no real independent industry and the opportunities to finance documentary cinema, at least in America, was relegated to whatever pittances could be squelched out of public educational broadcasters. Even those bastions of artistic nobility required guarantees as to what they'd be getting.

The problem, of course, is you don't always know - especially in documentary film - which way the winds are going to blow when you're documenting something.

Those shifting sands might actually involve finding the story.

"Tut-tut," most commissioning editors chide, "God forbid!"

Or life itself might generate a better film than what was originally pitched.

"Impossible," the commissioning editors insist. "After all, we've had a hand in shaping your film in these early stages and we're ultimately the real artists."

Or the explorations of documentary filmmakers might even affect change.

"It's what we demand!" the commissioning editors confirm. "That's why we make sure fuckers like you do as we tell them to do before you can get a dime out of us."

And here was Errol Morris, finally deciding to chuck it all and give up making films at all. For three years, he worked as a private investigator - not bad training for ANY filmmaker, never mind those of the doc persuasion, but Morris knew he needed to make films again. The story is legendary. As he describes in one of the fantastic extras Criterion provides on the DVD, Morris hears about an utterly appalling human being employed by the State of Texas to ensure that convicted murderers get the death sentence rather than life in prison.

The jury had to be provided with proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" that the "probability" of the convicted man or woman to commit deathly acts of violence again was not only high, but pretty much a guarantee. And who could guarantee such a thing? Why, none other than Dr. James Grigson, a much-beloved psychiatrist with the monicker "Dr. Death." Morris pitched a documentary about this clown and his financiers bit upon the bait greedily.

Once in Dallas, Morris discovered something else. One of the men Dr. Death would proclaim to be a worthy recipient of the death penalty, might actually be innocent and was about to be railroaded into an electric chair by a number of not-too-bright and ambitious members of the State prosecution, law enforcement and judicial team.

This is what became The Thin Blue Line, one of the greatest American documentaries ever made. From beginning to end, you experience a complex murder mystery wherein one Randall Dale Adams, a long-haired drifter was charged and convicted of a murder he didn't commit. Utilizing all the powers of cinematic art, Morris provides us with a gorgeously shot and tautly edited story which has us on the edge of our seats and increasingly fuels our anger and frustration as we experience the endless traps set to condemn the wrong man.


Blending effective dramatic recreations, penetrating interviews, wisely selected archival news footage, Weegee-like stills and a classic, pulsating original score by Phillip Glass, The Thin Blue Line forces us as viewers to perch nervously on the edge of our seats with mouths agape. (I'll never forget first seeing the film during a Gala screening at the 1988 Toronto International Film Festival wherein, during moments of silence or quiet, you could hear a pin drop in the packed-to-the-rafters cinema unspooling the picture.) Even knowing the outcome of the events depicted, my recent viewing on the Criterion Collection home entertainment version, yielded a similar effect, but one which was enhanced by the stunning transfer and the benefit of my own age, life experience and exposure to similar contemporary miscarriages of justice.

It's an important and dazzling movie. What began as a project to appease the financial powers that be, morphed by breaking all the rules into a picture that did far more than present a telling indictment of the judicial system, but a movie that saved an innocent man's life - an innocent man who had spent 12 years in prison, most of them on death-row until one year after the film's release when the charges were dropped and he went free.

Think on this well as you watch the film. More importantly, think on the tenacity and brilliance of Errol Morris. Most of all, if you're a filmmaker, let it empower you to make films that are not merely ephemeral, but films that confound all expectations and lack of vision displayed by the powers-that-be - a film that will live now and forever.

And maybe, just maybe, save lives.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

The Criterion Collection director-approved DVD and Blue-Ray of The Thin Blue Line includes all the aforementioned virtues in addition to an HD digital restoration, supervised by director Errol Morris and producer Mark Lipson, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray, a great interview with Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing, an NBC report from 1989 that covers Randall Adams’s release from prison, a fine essay by film scholar Charles Musser and a stunningly designed new cover by Peter Mendelsund.

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Jyoti Singh (left), final words to her mother before dying: "Sorry Mummy. I gave you so much trouble. I am sorry." Mukesh Singh, convicted rapist (right): "A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy."

India's Daughter (2015)
Dir. Leslee Udwin

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In India, the official government statistics reveal that a woman is raped every twenty minutes. These are the rapes that are actually reported. Most of them aren't. The stories of suffering are silenced by culture.

There is, however, one story we all know. It can never be forgotten.

On December 16, 2012, in the city of Delhi, Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old medical student and a male friend boarded a private bus after seeing a movie. The male friend was beaten and the young woman was dragged to the back of the bus where she was gang-raped by six men and physically assaulted with a combination of punches, kicks, bites and a metal rod jammed up her vagina until it pierced through to her intestines, pulling pieces of her insides out when it was ripped from within. The couple was tossed out of the bus and left for dead. Jyoti survived for two weeks before succumbing to her deadly injuries in hospital.

India's Daughter details the events of that night, the subsequent country-wide protests demanding that violence against women stop, the investigation, trial and sentencing, plus interviews with the irredeemably ignorant defence attorneys and the straight-faced evil of one of the rapists.

Most importantly, I think, is that the film presents a face to its victim through the loving words of her parents and leaves us with her indomitable spirit which has become emblematic of much-needed reforms on every level.

It won't be easy, though, if the interviews with supposedly educated men are any indication of what must be fought.

One of the defence lawyers, A.P. Singh steadfastly stands by the idiotic statement:

“If my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital activities and disgraced herself and allowed herself to lose face and character by doing such things, I would most certainly take this sort of sister or daughter to my farmhouse, and in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight.”

Another defence lawyer, M. L. Sharma, offers this "poetic stance":

"A female is just like a flower. It gives a good looking [sic], very softness performance [sic], pleasant. But on the other hand, a man is like a thorn. Strong, tough enough. That flower always needs protection. If you put that flower in the gutter, it is spoilt. If you put that flower in a temple, it will be worshipped."

Of course, what the moron is really saying is that women must stay at home and only enter out of doors when accompanied by a parent or husband. If the woman just leaves freely, then she is a slut who must be punished by men who are naturally there to rip them open with their thorny appendages.

M. L. Sharma - Defence Lawyer and irredeemable moron.

The centrepiece of the film are the utterly grotesque interviews with one of the convicted rapists, Mukesh Singh, who spits out bilious nonsense blaming women for rape. In all earnestness he tells us how Jyoti should have quietly submitted to her "punishment" in that bus, but that her screams, cries and attempts to fight back are the reason she is dead. Even more sickening is when he suggests that a metal rod was not used upon her, but the more humanitarian alternative of a screwdriver wrapped in a hand towel. He blames her for struggling as one of the rapists shoved his arm deep in her vagina to remove the offending implement and with all seriousness, he refers to the screwdriver pulling out her intestines as an "accident".

In spite of these and other horrific statements, Udwin's film is full of so many instances of simple beauty (albeit always tinged with deep sadness). Many of these moments are courtesy of interviews with Jyoti's mother and father - describing Jyoti from birth to early adulthood. They share so many lovely stories about their child's sense of love, her generosity and most of all, her intelligence and desire to work in the medical profession. Though the family is poor, they sacrifice everything to send her to medical college and Jyoti makes it clear that when she completes her internship, she will take care of her parents forever.

It's moments when the father and mother describe tiny details of Jyoti's childhood that we're moved so profoundly: the smallness of her hands, gripping her father's finger, her gorgeous smile, always bringing joy and happiness to those around her. When we get a description of how Jyoti as a young adult pursues and overpowers a young thief only to shower him with gifts, food and money, making him promise to never steal again and to make something of himself is juxtaposed by Udwin with descriptions of India's poverty and how so many children - through sheer hunger - are forced into lives of crime by circumstance.

One seldom experiences a film which instills feelings of anger, frustration and helplessness that just as quickly transform into softness, understanding and, yes, love. This is one hour of cinema that will have you in its clutches as it exposes humanity in all its facets.

Finally, India's Daughter works as a document of a life, a horrific event and as a plea to end the madness of sexual assault and misogyny - not just in India, but throughout the world. And yes, Jyoti is as much a daughter of India as she is a human being who just tried to make a difference. We need more of her kind.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

India's Daughter is available on DVD via Women Make Movies.

Medium Cool (1969) *****
Dir. Haskell Wexler
Starring: Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Marianna Hill, Harold Blankenship

Review By Greg Klymkiw

“I hope we can use our art for love and peace.” So said cinematographer Haskell Wexler as he accepted an Oscar last April for his work on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? His seriousness and obvious sincerity startled the Academy Awards audience, long used to the standard thank yous to co-workers and producers. “I realized I might never get another chance at an audience of 60 or 70 million people. It seemed too big an opportunity to miss. What was I supposed to do – thank my gaffer and Jack Warner?”

Kevin Thomas

Los Angeles Times, 1 June 1967

A car off the highway. Metal twisted. Open door. Woman's body splayed on the asphalt. Blood gushing. A photographer attached to a movie camera hovers above - shooting - like a vulture circling its prey. One gruesome shot after another. Every conceivable angle caught on film. Real film. Real movie camera. Real cameraman - or so we think. We pray he isn't real because when he's sucked as much life out of his quarry as possible, he packs up and leaves the woman to bleed and presumably die. Alone.

The cameraman is John Cassellis. He is played by Robert Forster. Yes, we're watching a movie, but WHAT a movie! When Medium Cool was unleashed upon the movie-going public, nothing like it had ever been seen before and without question, not much (if anything) like it has been seen since.

Written, directed and photographed by Haskell Wexler, the celebrated cinematographer of such films as In The Heat Of The Night, The Thomas Crown Affair, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as well as two Oscar-winning turns for Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf and Bound For Glory, he crafted what might be the ultimate auteur film made in America. To this very day, Medium Cool is an important and influential work of the Cinema Vérité movement. It's exciting, urgent and vital - impossible to take your eyes off the screen while watching it, almost impossible to blink for fear of missing a frame and most of all, impossible to get out of your head once you've seen it.


On the surface, it might seem very simple - deceptively and cleverly so. Cassellis doesn't seem to care about much of anything unless he sees it through the lens of his camera. He loves shooting to the exclusion of all else. The only thing that matters is what he sees is what he shoots. The image is everything to him. It's not even especially important what story he's telling so long as he's telling it, so long as he's capturing his perspective on the world around him. He shoots, then hands off his negative (yes, kids - negative - ever hear of that?) to a helmeted motorcycle rider who crazily zips through the Chicago streets in the film's great opening title sequence.

The shots are in the can. What's next for him to plaster onto negative? He's like a junkie. He needs another shot. All that counts is the shot. From his eye, through the lens and bouncing back from his target and captured on unexposed stock greedily demanding a chemical bath in order to spool itself through the projection sprockets of a telecine and then, beamed over airwaves, mediated through a cathode ray screen and into the eyes, hearts and, hopefully, minds of its viewers.

His aim is true. What's done with it afterwards might not be.


Certainly Cassellis seems untroubled with his own part in journalistic exploitation and this is hammered home by his purely sexual relationship with a sex-drenched young fuck-buddy (Mariana Hill). He needs to SHOOT - film AND sperm. It's only once his life has been touched by a chance encounter with a pair of Appalachian expats in the slums of Chicago - a single mother (Verna Bloom) and her only child (Henry Blankenship) - that Cassellis opens his eyes to the insidious manner his images are being disseminated.

When he discovers that the corporate pigs running the stations and networks are furnishing his potentially incriminating footage of civil unrest to law enforcement officials (most notably, the FBI), he flies into a rage. The film builds to a harrowing climax involving a riot where his eye, so fixed on the events he's shooting, misses the plight of the people closest to him and eventually (and literally) jettisons both himself and the audience smack into a shocking conclusion.

The eyes of Cassellis remain shark-like, though the emotion fuelling his actions shifts from obsession to a form of vengeance. Nothing, however, can match the eyes of the mother and her son - especially her son - they're the battered and bruised receptacles of America's indifference and their part in Wexler's film reaches heartbreaking proportions.


The corruption and collusion of mainstream media and its relationship to both corporate interests and government are today a given fact, but in the late 60s, when Medium Cool was made, such a thing seemed unthinkable. When Wexler fashioned this film it was a shocker, but somehow in the context of today's world - our own strife amidst uncaring governments, in turn the puppets of a new world order of corporations - this picture is more important than ever. Its importance to both history and the art of cinema is virtually a given, but its importance to exposing and keeping all of us aware of contemporary political gangsterism has seldom been matched.

Films that focus upon media have never been uncommon, but only Federico Fellini in his 1960 film La Dolce Vita pre-dates Medium Cool with any significance. Via the character of Paparazzo (a name Fellini derived from Italian dialect to describe the buzzing of mosquitoes), the Maestro's masterwork is often credited with generating the etymology of paparazzi to describe the European phenomenon of photo journalists who use their lenses to capture celebrities in poses of compromise.

Certainly, Wexler's horrific opening pre-dates the death of Princess Diana and the photographers who chased and surrounded the twisted metal - shooting with abandon as life painfully drained from her. Years after Wexler's picture, writer Paddy Chayefsky and director Sidney Lumet delivered Network, the savage satire of news becoming "entertainment" and being rooted in corporate greed rather than any altruistic desire to deliver news in a traditional journalistic sense. Finally, though, Medium Cool is the yardstick to measure all cinema dealing with media and I'd argue that nothing even comes close to matching it.

America was on the precipice of massive upheaval and there was an overwhelming sense that major shit was going to hit the fan in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention - which, of course, it did. Wexler designed his film to shoot on location during this time and what he captures is probably the most powerful cinematic game of "chicken" between documentary and drama ever made.

He populates his film with a mix of great actors, non-actors and the real thing in the midst of actual events Cassellis and, by extension, Wexler's film, both capture so indelibly.


Robert Forster is the revelation here. Handsome, rugged, nicely buff - he's handed the difficult task of being often mute, bereft of real passion or caring - until, of course, it's too late - and even then, he switches into obsessive auto-pilot. Forster's performance here is one of the great performances in contemporary American cinema. Cassellis is a superbly etched character - seemingly passive, but active where it counts. His early years as a boxer (which he continues to train as) are the sort of physical skills cameramen absolutely require to get the brilliant handheld footage they need.

His motion picture debut was a couple of years earlier in John Huston's magnificently insane adaptation of Carson McCuller's novel Reflections in a Golden Eye. This was a brave way for any actor to expose himself in his first film. Playing the apple of Marlon Brando's closeted military officer's homosexual eye, Forster taunts Brando by riding a horse nude in eyeshot of the smitten military man, and in turn, obsessed over Brando's sexually frustrated wife played by Elizabeth Taylor, he repeatedly enters her bedroom nude and jerks off into her dirty panties as she dozes deeply within the Land of Nod.


Most actors today would greet such a role as a bad career move, but if they were lucky enough to have a director as visionary as Wexler, they'd go from one great role to another, as Forster did by going from Huston to Wexler. Forster, by the way, never hit the heights of stardom he should have and instead had a hugely successful film and TV career as a "working" actor until Quentin Tarantino displayed the same vision Huston and Wexler were imbued with and cast him in the world weary male romantic lead bail bondsman opposite Pam Grier in the wonderful Jackie Brown.

If anything, though, Wexler might well have handed Forster the role of a lifetime here - especially within the context of a medium like cinema that has the power to inform, entertain and effect real change. The shooter Cassellis is always alert to the possibility of those images and Forster always commands our attention to this fact with his expressive eyes. His powerful body helps him hoist that camera and aim it where his eye wants to go.


Wexler captures so many genuinely real events during his drama and it is Forster who is always at the centre of them. Whether we see riots, national guardsmen in mock training during protest march scenarios, the lives and milieu of Chicago's most racially segregated areas of Chicago - it's Casselis who is our onscreen tour guide as we see what Wexler sees via Forster - and it is ALL TOO REAL; the looks of hatred and mistrust upon the faces of those living in the neighbourhoods, the poverty stricken naked kids splashing through fire hydrant water in the blistering heat, encounters with revolutionaries in tenement slums, Wexler uses this great actor to allow us into a world of reality.

It's a mediated reality, to be sure, and this is always Wexler's aim.

But where the film, its intentions and ultimately, its impact become all too clear is the breathtaking, salient moment when Wexler trains his lens upon Cassellis and Forster so evocatively utters one of film history's great lines:

"Jesus," he says with a hint of passion that escapes from his seemingly cold, detached demeanour, "I love shooting film."

And so he does. He loves shooting film with a purity that is eventually soiled by both corporate and government evil. What then is left for a man when he discovers that his lifeblood is being perverted, subverted and sucked out of him - not for the good of man, but for the good of profits and maintaining the Status Quo? What finally is left, is that which Wexler shockingly provides us in his movie.

It's not a pretty picture.

What's truly terrifying to me and utterly disgusting (because it continues today with even more frequency and intensity) is that Wexler was strongly urged to re-cut his film as the corporate giants at Paramount were being pressured from so many levels of influence to mute and ultimately emasculate the film's power. Wexler refused. He had the power to do so. Instead, a brilliant filmmaker who had just won a fucking Oscar had his work initially manhandled and censored by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). For one brief scene of nudity and a handful of cuss words, the film was slapped with an X-rating which was effectively a kiss of death as it relegated Wexler's film to the same status of hard core pornography.

Nobody in their right mind would believe the rating was due to the aforementioned language and nudity.

Medium Cool was being censored for being too political and worse, not the capital "R" RIGHT political.

"Jesus, I love shooting film."

This is the sin more grave that those laid down in the Ten Commandments since loving to shoot film often means we must expose the evils of God and Country.

And God only knows, we can't have that now, can we?

The Criterion Collection Blu-Ray and DVD of Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool is perhaps one of the best packages the company has ever put together. Wexler's haunting images are gorgeously transferred for our edification and the entirety of this disc is bursting at the seams with a wealth of material.

There are two audio commentaries, one with historian Paul Cronin and the other with Wexler, editing consultant Paul Golding and actress Marianna Hill, as well as a new Wexler interview.

The real gems are extended excerpts from Look Out Haskell, It’s Real!, Cronin's documentary that has interviews with Wexler, Golding, Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Chicago historian and the film's intrepid consultant Studs Terkel and a myriad of others, as well as excerpts from Sooner or Later, Cronin’s documentary about Harold Blankenship, who plays Verna Bloom's son in the picture. Both of these documentaries form an important and near-epic look at a film AND a time and place when America was on the precipice of the eventual decline it's experiencing now. They both look great on this disc and present enough salient details for most viewers, though, in fairness, versions can be accessed in full unexpurgated form outside of the disc. They don't look "pretty" and suffer a bit from the editorial decisions made by Criterion, but part of me wishes they'd been presented in their whole on this disc in addition to the excerpts.

The other absolute gem is Wexler's new documentary Medium Cool Revisited which focuses on the Occupy movement’s protests during Chicago's 2012 NATO summit.

As per usual, the disc includes a trailer and a fine booklet with a new essay by film critic and programmer Thomas Beard. This is a keeper. If you care about cinema, you'll want to own this. I've only had this disc for two weeks and I've already spent hours and hours pouring over it.

IF YOU WANT TO BUY THIS MOVIE, JUST CLICK THE HANDY LINKS BELOW AND BY DOING IT DIRECTLY FROM THIS SITE YOU WILL BE CONTRIBUTING TO THE ONGOING MAINTENANCE OF THE FILM CORNER.

In anticipation of the upcoming 2015 Toronto Hot Docs International Festival of Documentary Cinema's Canadian premiere of David Felix Sutcliffe's powerful Sundance-Award-Winning feature (T)error which he co-directed with Lyric R. Cabral, The Film Corner's Countdown to Hot Docs continues with my review of Adama. Broadcast in 2011 via PBS, Sutcliffe's first film is a provocative, rage-inducing portrait of America's racist anti-terror policies perpetrated upon the innocent.

Adama (2011)
Dir. David Felix Sutcliffe

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In March of 2005, a 16-year-old honours high-school student living in Harlem was arrested and incarcerated (kidnapped and wrongfully jailed) by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (America's Schutzstaffel, more commonly known as the S.S.) under the spurious, unfounded suspicion of training with Al-Qaeda as a terrorist suicide bomber.

After being dragged from her home, family and in the middle of a successful school year (that was scuttled by this immoral action), the FBI decided they had nothing on her, so the American Government, in its racist policies masquerading as a war on terror on home turf, instead placed her under a strict curfew (replete with ankle bracelet to monitor her comings and goings) and charged her with being an illegal immigrant, in spite of the fact that she had been living in America since the age of 5 years old.

Her friend, also arrested, wasn't so lucky. She was immediately deported to Africa. Her father, was even more unlucky. He was imprisoned for 16 months and then deported to Africa. Without a sole bread-winner, the teenage daughter had to give up school completely to earn money for her mother and younger siblings. She was then flung into the harrowing experience of never knowing if she would be deported or not.

Welcome to America's War on Terror against the innocent and driven by racist racial profiling of the most heinous, egregious kind. The aforementioned events represent the tip of the iceberg that is the story of the innocent teenage girl of the film's title Adama. This terse, powerful 60-minute documentary was produced for PBS in 2011 and directed with both economy and urgency by David Felix Sutcliffe. It presents a world of Kafkaesque horror and plays out like a direct cinema thriller steeped in humanity.

We experience the terror of this young lady as she is dragged through endless immigration hearings over a period of months, all of them inconclusive and adding to the fear and paranoia of both Adama and her family. There's one set piece in particular that is on-the-edge of the seat scary as she races back to her home, fearing she'll be late for the ankle-monitored curfew (the result of which could mean re-incarceration). There's also the very real threat of other petty bureaucratic agencies investigating the lack of money in the household and considering the horrendous solution of breaking the family apart into the foster-care system. One of the most deeply moving sequences involves Adama's brother pleading to America to leave his innocent sister alone and to let his family continue as they have to live freely in America and to experience a better life.

Sutcliffe has fashioned a sickening, alarming portrait of America's delusional and just-plain mean-spirited war against people of colour in the name of protecting the country. It's not a pretty picture and for much of the film's running time, you will be outraged, frustrated and thrust into Adama's point of view.

What America has been doing and continues to do is appalling. Adama is a film that puts a very human face to the country's own acts of psychological terrorism. (And Canadians, no need to be smug, our country has been racial profiling for a long time - see my review of the powerful Hot Docs entry from last year, Amar Wala's The Secret Trial 5. And if what you see in that film and Adama is scary, just wait until Chancellor (Canadian Prime Minister) Stephen Harper enacts his grotesque anti-terror legislation which will plunge the country beyond America's bilious attack on human rights all in the name of Der Führer Harper's belief that "Jihadist terrorism is not a future possibility, it is a present reality.”


See Adama, see Sutcliffe's new documentary feature (T)error, see The Secret Trial 5. The real terrorists are our own governments. We, the people, are supposedly the government. Not so. We're mere fodder for the attack upon anyone even vaguely outside the Status Quo.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** Four Stars

Adama is available to be viewed for FREE online at Sutcliffe's Vimeo page HERE. (T)error will play at the 2015 Hot Docs (The Film Corner review coming soon).

PREAMBLE - Winnipeg's Punk Scene

So, like, some dude who works on the docks, his name is Réjean, corners you in a stall at Jilly's and says: "Suck my dick". We've all been there before. Right? Both parties are too skint to hit the V.I.P. room for some private dancing and before you can say, "Gimme summa dat luvvin, eh", you're greedily gobbling the knob of this bearded, seven-footer with a plaid shirt and hoping for a nice reach-around.

We've all been there.

Right?

So, okay, what if the same dude traps you in the shitter and growls, "Slaveto my dick!" - you're going to be, like, "The fuck, Réjean? You want me to WHAT?"

You see, from the late 70s until I-can't-remember-when, the aforementioned conversation played out in my mind whenever I drove by an old Winnipeg Garment District building in the Market Square area that featured this spray-painted graffiti prominently displayed on its grey cement wall:

Moments after I first read those words (in double-take, mind you) I knew the graffiti was that great song "SLAVE TO MY DICK" by Vancouver punk band, The Subhumans. Some moron with a can of spray paint was shit-facedly inspired to splooge the words via aerosol in a prominent location. The bonehead placed the words "slave" and "to" too fucking close together. The graffiti managed to remained for decades after it first appeared - a beacon at the entranceway to this 7-or-8 square blocks in downtown Winnipeg that had become the stomping grounds of artists, actors, filmmakers, junkies, drunks, hookers and, of course, punks.

It was a scene, know what I mean?

And for about four years, the punk scene fuelled the crazy alternative filmmaking scene at the Winnipeg Film Group. I can't think of a single person in their mid-40s-to-50s from the 'Peg who makes movies and WASN'T part of that scene.

Great 'Peg punk and new wave bands - and I mean GREAT bands - belted out the coolest sounds imaginable. Bars like the Royal Albert or, my favourite, the "Chuckles" (or to malcontent veterans, the St. Charles Hotel) featured gig upon gig with local Winnipeg Punk/NewWavers like the Popular Mechanix, Personality Crisis, Dub Rifles, Lowlife, The Stretch Marks, Discharge, The Psychiatrists, The Bristow Hoppers - the list goes on and on - and bookers (often Winnipeg band members themselves) peppered the local acts with whatever punks from Toronto, Vancouver or the USA who could get their shit together enough to play the 'Peg.

I was running a West-End movie theatre that played mostly cult films, sometimes sprinkled with live acts ("Nash the Slash VS. Eraserhead" read one of the immortal handbills). The "Scene" would come see a movie or two, blast down to the garment district, catch a punk band, then head to Walter and Megan's Lithium Cafe to belt back joe with tired hookers and their hopped-up pimps.

This happened pretty much every night for many moons.

It's funny now, how many film or media people frolicked about the punk scene. John Paizs directed the quaintly perverse cinematic equivalent to 'Peg Punk with his brilliant short film The Obsession of Billy Botski and, years later he used the great Popular Mechanix song "IceBox City" during a joyous dance sequence in his immortal feature length cult classic Crime Wave. Guy Maddin blew his inheritance from Aunt Lil (her beauty parlour became the studio set for Tales from the Gimli Hospital) on 78 recordings of fruity 20s/30s tenors from this amazing store in Minneapolis, but also collected the most amazing number of punk albums which he purchased from Winnipeg's immortal Pyramid Records.

Guy would gather everyone round to his place, quaintly adorned with his late Aunt Lil's doilies, and spin Richard Crooks singing Stephen Foster's "Old Black Joe", then switching from 78 to 33 RPM, he'd announce something a bit more "challenging" was on its way - code for: this is some good shit I got from Pyramid Records and it's going to blow you the fuck away.

In delicious contrast to "Old Black Joe", the needle gently found its groove and the room swelled with the aural explosion of Feederz crooning "Jesus Entering From The Rear". Radio producer John Copsey (he wears suits now) led a punk band that devoted themselves to worshipping the survivalist movement as preached on Winnipeg's community cable station TV show "Survival" featuring yours truly and Guy Maddin as apocalypse-welcoming rednecks.

Lead singer of several great Winnipeg punk bands was none other than heartthrob Kyle McCulloch who starred in virtually every early John Paizs and Guy Maddin film and eventually became a head writer on TV's "South Park". And lest we forget, Canada's highly esteemed journalist and political pundit in all media, Mr. Andrew Coyne, took to the stage with several other burgeoning writers from the University of Manitoba newspaper and in punk tradition, nary a one of them could actually play, but they gave their all as The Nimrods.

Happy times for many. Times that led to even happier times - for some. All were ultimately inspired by Winnipeg's punk scene, but most of all, the brilliant local artists - the musicians who made you soar higher than a kite with kickass punk/new wave music were the big motivators who instilled a more anarchic, freewheeling, devil-may-care spirit in so many of us to push the limits of our own lives and artistic pursuits. 

The music, unlike the arts inspired by it, had NO outlets of support to take the music and musicians to the next natural level. There were a few limited tapes or EPs cut, a handful of extremely indie albums, but this genuinely brilliant period of Winnipeg music - post The Guess Who and pre The Crash Test Dummies - lives in the minds, memories and movies of all those who loved it deeply and were fuelled by seeing it LIVE - night after night after blessedly blasphemous night.

It took about 30 seconds of screen time for me to feel a surge of the old excitement I used to get in my late teens and early 20s in the aforementioned Winnipeg Scene. Here I was, watching The Last Pogo Jumps Again, the alternately thrilling and depressing but ultimately powerful story of the Toronto Scene de la PUNK and it mattered not that it was Toronto. Hell, I kind of felt like I was back in Winnipeg all over again.


I embraced the crazy, scrappy, downright dangerous insanity of this terrific documentary and fully accepted its body, its blood - like an unholy sacrement drained and scourged from the everlasting soul of Sid Vicious himself who died, NOT for OUR sins, but for his own and for the rest of us who were willing to commit our own - no matter how heinous or benign. This downright wonderful picture by Brunton and Papputs is a sacrament and I accept its fuck-you-filmmaking-moxie as much as I allow its people, places and music into my very soul as if they were my very own.

On the surface - this is a movie that shouldn't work - at least not by the standards of many un-cool fuck-wads who make cultural decisions in this country at both the public and private sectors - propped up comfortably on the nests they feather atop the podiums they take their dumps-a-plenty from as if they were showering the Great Unwashed with gold. It shouldn't work, but it does. Some might say it is solely about a subject only 100 or so people might get into. They'd be wrong. Others will complain (usually without seeing it) that the movie is too long - 3 hours and 20 minutes PLUS an intermission. Again - WRONG. I saw a much longer version and then this shorter version and frankly, I wish the filmmakers stuck to the original length. In fact, they could have made it even longer for some extra-sweet fuck-you cherries on the ice cream sundae.


Some might say the movie is a mess. Yeah, it is - sort of, but brilliantly and subversively it's a documentary equivalent to the punk scene itself and that's one of the many things I admire about it.

Here's the deal, when legendary Canadian film producer Colin Brunton was a teenager, he worked as an usher at the Roxy Theatre in Toronto - a deliciously fucked joint on the East End that combined 99-cent double features of art films and art sleaze with a kick-ass music scene. This temple of all things anti-peace-love-and-prebyterianism-a-la-Toronto was the jumping off point for so many who would contribute to one of the most thrilling music in the country.

Eventually the Scene moved further west in the otherwise Presbyterian pole-up-the-ass city. Pockets of fuck-you exploded at the New Yorker Theatre, along Spadina, in Kensington and, of course, Queen Street West when it wasn't full of fuck-wit rich people pretending to be poor. And the biggest fuck-you explosion in Toronto was the exciting punk rock new wave scene.


Brunton and Papputs focus on a two year window - beginning at the Roxy and New Yorker Theatre gigs and ending with the famous Last Pogo when the Horseshoe Tavern on Queen decided to flush punk off its stages forever and a legendary concert that eventually culminated with a visit from Toronto's Finest Porkers with their night sticks and guns to boot the bands off the stage and patrons out onto the street. In reality, the window of this history is probably a wee bit larger, but what happens within the period the filmmakers choose to focus on is pretty much the trajectory that occurred not only in Toronto, but Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, Montreal - anywhere in Canada that had a vibrant punk scene, lots of devoted fans and absolutely no support from most of the mainstream media and a total fucking from the music business (like, what else is new?). The music business - virtually non-existent in Canada anyway - chose to ignore the Scene and for the one or two bands they took a passing fancy to, they basically sucked them RAW and DRY.

Uh, and like, what else is new?

NO REACH-AROUND!!!


Brunton was fully enmeshed in the whole Scene and chose to document the Last Pogo concert at the Horseshoe with a 16mm camera ('natch). This resulted in a scrappy little movie called ... come on, give it a guess ... come on, you can do it - Yesiree-Bob!!! You win the fuckin' Kewpie Doll - it was called The Last Pogo.

That was then - this is now and during the past six years the filmmakers embarked on an odyssey to interview as many members of the Scene as possible and create a document that would serve as an artistic and living testimony to a slice of Canadian popular culture that many would prefer to forget and/or even refuse to acknowledge it even (or ever) existed.

And The Last Pogo Jumps Again is a joy - a real joy. Blending new and archival interviews and footage with all the onstage and behind the scenes players, the movie tells a tale as inspiring as it is sad - but what keeps the whole thing buoyant is the mad genius on view in both the words and performances of the likes of D.O.A., The Viletones, Teenage Head and all the rest of this Scene of gloriously talented purveyors of fuck-you-and-the-horse-you-fucking-rode-in-on. Some of those interviewed keep playing, others have morphed their love of music into other areas of the music business while some have chosen to grow up and get real jobs - and it's a testament to the obsessive qualities of the filmmaking itself that it's simply impossible to NOT like anyone in the picture.

Some of the interview highlights for me were poignant moments with the late Frankie Venom of Teenage Head, the brilliant, erudite Andy Paterson of The Government and without question, the vitriol-and-venom spewing Steve Leckie from the Viletones - a poet, an artist, a gentleman curmudgeon of the highest order.


The Last Pogo Rides Again definitely feels like a Joseph-Conrad-like boat ride into some kind of Hell that always feels like a Heaven as imagined by Anton LaVey. Brunton and Papputs are the two halves of Willard on a mission that seems to have no real end. And if there is a heart of darkness on display, a Kurtz, if you will, it feels like every Status Quo fuck-wad that ignored this exciting scene.

And it's an important film.

So much of Canada's truly vibrant culture has been squashed or ignored. Here's a film that holds up a slice of it that not only created great work in and of itself, but was an inspiration and seed for so much that followed in a variety of artistic mediums.

Never mind the cornucopia of great artists, filmmakers, writers, playwrights, actors and other truly gifted iconoclasts who sprouted from Toronto's Punk Scene - they're out there, doing their thing - they know who they are and so do we. But a word about the visionary Colin Brunton: he might well be the true soul and pulse of indie filmmaking in the Toronto Scene and even to this day, one feels his visionary influence upon the first two great rock pictures directed by Bruce McDonald. Roadkill and Highway 61 feel very much like they're as much Brunton's sensibilities as they are McDonald's. What sets Brunton apart from most film producers in Canada is that he doesn't come from some bullshit rarified place - he's the real thing. He's been there. He's done that. And all his collaborations feel like they're moulded and charged by his love for film, his knowledge of ALL the rules - artistically AND practically - so he can motherfucking break them when necessary and finally, his genuine life experience which he injects into every project he undertakes.

He's all over The Last Pogo Jumps Again, but he clearly has a collaborator in Paputts that shares this crazy-ass vision. They clearly make a great team because they've made a great movie.

See it. Or die, motherfucker!

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

"The Last Pogo Jumps Again" is available on DVD and can be purchased HERE

In anticipation of the upcoming 2015 Toronto Hot Docs International Festival of Documentary Cinema, The Film Corner continues its thrill-packed countdown to said event with a review of Hip Hop, Eh, my baby cousin Joe Klymkiw's feature documentary, that, to my knowledge, never played at Hot Docs, but most definitely should have played there since every screening would have been sold right the fuck out and every theatre would have been permeated with clouds of glorious ganja.


Hip Hop, Eh (2012)
Dir. Joe Klymkiw
Starring: Maestro Fresh Wes, Tom Green, Buck 65, Kardinal Offishall, Dj Kemo, Dream Warriors, Michie Mee, Cadence Weapon, Classified, Swollen Members

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Once upon a time, a nice Ukrainian boy,
Directed a doc, about his greatest joy.
You'd think this little Hunky from Winter-peg,
Would invite Heavy Metal to swell his mighty third leg.

The thing to remember as you, lock up your daughters,
Izz'zat da 'Peg's got asbestos in its muddy, muddy waters.
Little Joe quenched his thirst from those gnarly rusty pipes,
And before he damn well knew it,
He formed super-different likes.

So off to Vancouver did our little Joe go,
Cuz he needed to groove, without all the fucking snow.
His love for Hip Hop, led to lots of cool shit
And he started spinning tunes, with some mighty true grit.

For many long years, he was on the radio,
Playing Hip Hop a-plenty in that lonely studio.
And when he met dat Nardwuar, the human serviette,
He made kick-ass music vids, smooth as anisette.

Joe did wonder, long and hard, 'bout the true identity
Of dat Maple-syrup-hip-hop and its supreme-o destiny.
So he saddled up his camera, to travel far and wide,
Shooting dope Hip Hop artists, who'd not motherfucking hide.

K'naan wiped his ass, with dat bullshit waving flag.
Even Drake took a powder, what a motherfucking drag.
It mattered not to Joe, Canuck Hip Hop's loyal Ukie Son,
So good riddance to bad rubbish, cuz he interviewed a ton.

That's exactly what he did,
in his noble Hip Hop quest.
He got a mess, of super mensches,
who fuckin' proved to be the best.
And he shot 'em and he cut 'em,
till their mighty souls did bleed,
Now you got this Hip Hop movie,
So let's all watch and smoke some weed.

Kubassa and Oxtail,
kishka flavoured with dat jerk,
Jugs of tasty maple syrup,
and a hoser's best plaid shirt.
We gotsa film that answers questions,
Bout our very own Hip Hop
Lez go tuh Stevie Harper's rec-room,
Where he grow dat mighty crop.
And believe me when I say,
We not be smoking prairie wheat.
We be partyin' with our P.M.
to that Canadian Hip Hop beat.

- Greg Klymkiw,
. The Ballad of Hip Hop Joe
. (with apologies to Hip Hop lyricists the world over)

What IS the identity of Canadian Hip Hop? The fuck if I know. In fact, other than Drake (who mega-kicks) and K'naan (whom I never hope to hear again after that fucking Waving Flag shit), I know diddly about the Dominion of Canada's Hip Hop scene.

After seeing my cousin Joe Klymkiw's movie, Hip Hop, Eh, I now know more than I knew before. And screw it - so Joe's my cousin. The fuck am I supposed to do that half my family is in the entertainment business? If I didn't enjoy the movie, I'd be a man, tell him it sucked shit and then not bother writing about it. So, I'm writing about it. FUCKING SUE ME! Go ahead, motherfucker! I'll whup your ass with a glorious chub of Ukrainian garlic sausage.


The bottom line is - cousin or no cousin - I had a rip-snorting good time watching this mega-ragged indie nose dive into a uniquely Canadian world of contemporary culture I know nada about. The style, kind of like the grassroots Canadian Hip Hop scene, is raw, loose, a bit messy and jumpy, dirty, grainy, blasted-the-fuck-right-out with wall-to-wall music and the most incessantly insane parade of talking heads I've seen in some time.

But fuck me and a month of Sundays, this movie's got one mega cool talking head after another. In fact, I have never seen so many cool people wearing baseball caps assembled in one movie.

Hip Hop, Eh is short, breezy, fun, infused with genuine passion for its subject and as one of my esteemed colleagues noted in his review, the movie does at times feel like an extended music industry panel discussion on the subject.

For me, I didn't mind. I've personally never attended any music industry panels and most certainly none that smacked me in the face with the subject of Canadian identity in our country's Hip Hop scene.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3 Stars


Like the pic above says, Hip Hop, Eh is available on VOD. For further info on Joe's ultra-cool films, visit HERE.

For the next fourteen days I will only review movies I liked, loved or that totally blew me away during the 2015 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto, Canada. Life is short. I won't bother reviewing movies that were godawful, mediocre or just plain okay. Note my picks, mark your calendars and save some precious hours, days and weeks of your life on planet Earth. Instead, spend it travelling the world via one of cinema's most vital genres.

Leaving Africa (2015)
Dir. Iiris Härmä

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Uganda is a beautiful country and so are its people, but it's been fraught with scourges like the butcher dictator Idi Amin Dada and in recent years, organized religion. The intolerance, repression and mass-manipulation continue to run rampant in the country, but there are many brave people who constantly struggle against it. Certainly, the 2013 Hot Docs presentation of Call Me Kuchu by Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall was a numbing, powerful and moving experience which detailed the country's hatred towards its LGBT community.

Leaving Africa is a new film which superbly presents its material and story with a combination of filmmaking excellence and compulsively fascinating subject matter. Friendship forged through a mutual appreciation for education is the heart that drives Iiris Härmä's truly great film. And yes, this is a film with heart.

And soul.

Finland's Riitta Kujala lived in Uganda for 27 years, bringing public health education to the country and nurturing new generations of those Ugandans who will continue this vital work. When the film begins, she is 67 years old, already past retirement and embarking upon what might be the crowning glory of her legacy and by extension, that of Finland and the Ugandans who carry-on and support her endeavours.

Riitta begins an important workshop devoted to gender equality and sexual health aimed squarely at Uganda's religious leaders. Given that so much of the country's difficulties have stemmed from the backwards idiocy perpetrated by many of God's cheerleaders in collaboration with a government too often exhaling a miasma of extreme conservatism, this is not only an action of utmost significance, but a brave one as well.

Riitta's best friend and housemate Kata Othieno devotes herself as a chief and equal partner in all of her educational initiatives. She's as big-hearted as they come and visually, her tall, robust, full-figured beauty is a striking contrast to that of Riitta's lean, slender, wiry and seemingly steely - dare I say, "buff" - physical countenance. At age 63, Kata could still have her pick of any litter of hunky suitors, but after an often tempestuous and outright abusive life with men, she's eschewed their place in her life - she's tired of lap-doggish gents hiding their inner-most pit bull nature.

Education is her constant bedfellow and driving force.

Luckily for Riitta, she not only has a dear friend and colleague in Kata, but a family. Kata's children and grand kids are the genuinely loving progeny Riitta avoided physically bearing herself, especially having remained single her entire life.


And then, there is the work - a life's work that these two dynamic women have shared. One of the more fascinating and delightful elements of this are the workshops for the Ugandan religious leaders. They've come from all over the country and represent a variety of faiths within the purviews of Christian and Muslim persuasions. Huge drawings of female genitalia with a pointer aimed at various parts of the equation meet the (often) open-mouths of the assembled pupils.

Role playing, discourse, questions and answers relating to sexuality and gender are engagingly presented by the filmmaker in a manner that documents the undertaking itself as well as delivering ideas and information that the participants are ultimately eager to learn about. These deftly-captured-and-cut sequences also contribute greatly to film's compelling narrative. I'd even argue that some of these sequences might well provide a much-needed education to "enlightened" Western gentlemen who see the film. (For me, though, as a descendant of sensitive, open-minded, Eastern-Rite-influenced Ukrainian Cossacks, the information dispensed served merely as that which has already been bred in the, uh, shall we say, bone.)

Though much of the film feels idyllic and good humoured, the crushing reality of repression, tribalism and corruption eventually rears its ugly head - threatening to scuttle Riitta and Kata's influential ongoing legacy. Riitta feels the pull of retirement and the inevitable return to her native Finland, but if an anonymous letter to the Ugandan government, a virtual poison pen blackmail tome fraught with horrendous allegations achieves its nefarious intent, everything could be swiftly destroyed.

Riitta and Kata are going to fight this to the end, though. It might be bitter, bittersweet or uplifting, but love, friendship and dedication will persevere through whatever tempests brew up in the grand, but oft-repressed nation of Uganda.

All of this works quite splendidly as the mise-en-scene and editing are so potent that director Iiris Härmä's extraordinary film feels like one of the best independent neo-realist dramas I've seen in years - worthy, certainly, of the same pantheon occupied by the likes of the Dardennes Brothers. The difference, of course, is that we're watching a documentary and it's undeniably matched by filmmaking of the highest order, which unflinchingly impels Leaving Africa into stratospheric heights.

The Film Corner Rating: ***** Five Stars

Leaving Africa is making its International Premiere at the 2015 edition of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. Visit the Hot Docs website for dates, showtimes and tickets by clicking HERE.

This is one of purportedly hundreds of children viciously & mercilessly sexually assaulted by former Anglican Minister & Boy Scout leader Ralph Rowe.

Dir. Daniel Roher
Prd. Peter O'Brian

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I doubt you're going to see a better short film at Hot Docs 2015 than Survivors Rowe. In fact, I doubt you're going to see a better short film all year than Survivors Rowe. There's something heroic about this picture - it's terrific filmmaking to be sure, but its subjects, all grown men who share their most deeply personal reminiscences of childhood are to be exalted to the highest degree imaginable.

The other heroic element, which cannot be ignored, is the commitment of the short's Producer Peter O'Brian to have offered his expertise, passion and artistry to director Daniel Roher's fine work. O'Brian is a legend. He's a genuinely heroic figure for having produced so many of Canada's greatest motion pictures including, but not limited to The Grey Fox with the late-greats Richard Farnsworth and Jackie Burroughs in one of the great westerns of all time - period - and One Magic Christmas with the astonishing Harry Dean Stanton as one of the most evocative (and dark) guardian angels in film history in (yes) one of the great films about Christmas - period!

What is not heroic is Canada itself and the country's insidiously grotesque and hateful history with respect to our aboriginal nations, a horrifying element of which is so artfully and powerfully exposed in Roher's short film. It is one of a multitude of inhuman(e) assaults upon Canada's Native People, one that began with colonialism and frankly, continues to this very day, especially in light of the hatred and disregard expressed by Canada's Chancellor (or is it Prime Minister?) Steven Harper, the leader of our country's Nazi party (or is it, the Conservative party?).

This is Canada's Prime Minister. He and his government of intolerance continue to besmirch the flag with their continued refusal to acknowledge the ever- prolonged exploitation of Canada's Native People and the heinous crimes perpetrated against them. Colonialism, Hatred, Human Rights Violations and Apartheid will continue under this government's "leadership".

What's reflected in Survivors Rowe is at once, infuriating and on another level, infused with a sense of both healing and forgiveness - indicative of the fearlessness of its subjects and the skill with which Roher renders his film. Skillfully blending archival footage with knock-you-flat-on-your-back interviews, we're introduced to several young men - notably Joshua Frog, John Fox and Ralph Winter of Northern Ontario's Anishinaabe nation. They tell us their stories of living on isolated reservations, a strange combination of genuinely idyllic surroundings, but within the trappings of Canada's own system of apartheid. There are fond, memories, to be sure: living in the wilderness, a special bond with the natural world, skating on icy waterways, genuine play not rooted in the mind-destroying contemporary world of digital gaming and, at least initially, the dashingly dramatic arrival of Ralph Rowe, the rugged man's man who serves as a pilot, Boy Scout leader and Anglican Minister.

Rowe is not only a charismatic, almost mythic figure, but he's actually taken the time to learn Native languages and dialects to converse with elders, adults his own age and kids. What nobody knows, what nobody could ever imagine, is that Ralph Rowe is a pedophile. The on-camera testaments delivered by the film's key subjects reveal some of the most harrowing, horrific and just plain malevolent acts perpetrated by this man of the wilderness, this man of God, this monster.

One of the most extraordinary things director Daniel Roher achieves here as a filmmaker is how he fashions any great narrative's need for an antagonist. On the surface, this figure is clearly Ralph Rowe, but as the film progresses, Rowe's external position as a villain, or rather, as an antagonistic force flows into the pain, sorrow, self-loathing and self-harm faced by the victims of his crimes. Then, even more extraordinarily, the antagonistic force of Rowe, his victims' suffering and the metamorphosis of this into the aforementioned process of healing, gives way to an even greater antagonist - a seemingly perpetual cycle of abuse which, is ultimately societal and must be actively addressed far more vigorously and openly than it is.

Ralph Rowe most likely sexually assaulted over 500 Native children and was, no doubt, responsible for a huge swath of suicides amongst both children and adults (not to mention residual effects upon subsequent generations). Unfortunately, the Canadian judicial system has only tried and convicted him for what amounts to a mere handful of sex crimes. He served a meagre five years in jail, was essentially handed a deal by the Crown to leave him be no matter how many accusations continue to surface and he lives a quiet, peaceful life in Surrey, British Columbia. Neither the Anglican Church nor the Boy Scouts have ever officially apologized to the victims and yet, those victims who did not commit suicide have endured decades and, if truth be told, lifetimes of living Hell.

On a purely aesthetic level, what Roher achieves here is a film that serves as a document of the suffering, torment and misery Ralph Rowe caused, but there is a strangely magical and poetic structure to the work which takes us from idyll to horror and finally and astoundingly, but perhaps necessarily, to forgiveness.

It's impossible to shake the impact this short film has. In fact, it has the sickening shock of a merciless cold-cock, blended with an elegiac, profoundly moving sense of loss and leavened with a kind of grace that not only reflects the deep humanity of the film's subjects, but shines a light of clemency upon a monster.

What the film cannot forgive, nor can any of us (I hope and pray), is the deep-seeded hatred and racism of colonialism which continues in Canada to this very day. If an Anglican Minister and Boy Scout leader viciously sexually assaulted over 500 white children, would he still be living freely in society with the legal implication that he'll never serve more incarceration for his crimes, no matter how many continue to surface?

The answer is obvious.

This is Ralph Rowe. He is a convicted pedophile living peacefully and freely in Surrey, British Columbia. It might be helpful to have MORE recent photographs circulated.

One final note about the heroism of the film's producer Peter O'Brian: Read his moving article in the Toronto Globe and Mail about the sexual assaults he suffered as a child and eventually came to terms with as an adult. Read it HERE.

And whatever you do, don't miss Survivors Rowe.

The Film Corner Rating: ***** Five Stars

Survivors Rowe is making its World Premiere at the 2015 edition of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. Visit the Hot Docs website for dates, showtimes and tickets by clicking HERE.


How To Change The World (2015)
Dir. Jerry Rothwell

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Preamble: A few things about Robert (Bob) Hunter that contribute, for me personally, to his legendary perch in Canadian history.

"If we wait for the meek to inherit the earth, there won't be anything left to inherit" - Robert Hunter

Robert (Bob) Hunter was many things. Mostly, I just always thought he was cool. And well, you'd kind of have to be that to have accomplished so much in so short a time (he died of cancer at age 63).

As a dyed-in-the-wool Winnipegger, I especially thought it was cool, given Robert Hunter's deep concern for Canada's Aboriginal people, that he was born in the City of St. Boniface which eventually amalgamated with all the wonky neighbourhood city-states along the Red, Assiniboine and Seine Rivers of Manitoba to become - you guessed it, Winnipeg.
All this rich land, which not only became the city we all know and hate/love (plus all points north-south-east-and-west) historically belonged to the Metis Nation, but was torn from their possession by the Canadian Government's land transfer scrip system which was virtually useless except to rich white guys who knew how to push it through the complicated bureaucracy to actually cash it in. The vast majority of uprooted Metis were starving, so they sold their scrip to the rich white guys, for pennies on the dollar.

Even more interesting to me was that Hunter's birthplace in St. Boniface ended up being the one community which contributed the most to Manitoba becoming (even now) Canada's largest French-speaking region outside of Quebec. Why? Many of the displaced Metis were also targets for violence because of the 1870 Louis Riel wars against the corrupt rich white guys of Winnipeg and the eastern power-brokers who held a vicelike grip upon the government of Canada. This resulted in a huge number of Metis forcing their Native heritage underground and bringing their French heritage to the fore and living in - you guessed it, St. Boniface.

His tenure as a columnist at the Winnipeg Tribune and Vancouver Sun was before my time. I didn't even become aware of him as a journalist until I moved to Toronto in the early 90s and began watching CITY-TV (when it actually had a real personality thanks to its eventually-departed head Moses Znaimer). Here, I began to enjoy the amazingly cool, almost Hunter S. Thompson-like "environmental reporter and commentator. I was soon compelled to begin reading his books wherein I discovered that he was Bob Hunter, the heart, soul and public face of the environmental group Greenpeace.

This, for me, was virtually cooler-than-cool and when he passed away in 2005, I was genuinely saddened that we'd lost him. Thankfully, this film now exists. It's not a biographical documentary of Robert (Bob) Hunter, but in many ways, it might as well be.



And now, the Film Review proper:

There were many things about Hunter I didn't know after all these years and I'm grateful to director Jerry Rothwell for his almost-epic-like motion picture documentary How To Change The World which presents a side of this great Canadian that was not only fresh to my already-admiring eyes, but kind of jettisons Hunter into some supreme inter-stellar glowing orb of coolness.

Rothwell poured over hundreds of 16mm rolls of film that had been canned and unopened since the 1970s. Seeing, pretty much before his very eyes, the visual history of the Greenpeace organization, Rothwell consulted with Hunter's colleagues, foes, conducting fresh interviews with all of them, blending the result of Herculean research and expertly selected and edited footage from the Greenpeace Archives. (The fact that Hunter was so brilliantly media-savvy pretty much accounts for this wealth of material even existing.)

What we get is the story of a respected counter-culture columnist who aligns himself with a motley assortment of friends and colleagues (most of them of the 60s/70s "hippie" persuasion) to head out on a boat in an attempt to stop nuclear testing on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean and then, with the same bunch, to go tearing after Russian sailors butchering whales up and down the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The campaigns continued and somewhere along the way, the movement of Greenpeace was formed.

With both the existing archival footage and the new interviews, Rothwell has painted an indelible portrait - not only of the key events in the movement, but the individuals themselves - as disparate a cast of characters you could ever imagine. What makes them cool is how different they are as people, but as such, they each bring individual qualities to the movement that had a symbiotic relationship - for a time. As is the won't of anything or anyone growing beyond initial beginnings, egos as well as legitimate desires/directions begin to rear their ugly heads and minor cracks in the "vessel" become tectonic plates, yielding high-Richter-scale fractures.


In addition to the dazzling filmmaking, I was swept away onto the high seas and weed-clouded back rooms of Greenpeace thanks to the perfectly selected and abundant readings of Bob Hunter's exceptional reads. Embodying Hunter is the magnificent character actor Barry Pepper who delivers us the man's words with the kind of emotion which goes so far beyond "narration". Pepper captures the soul of Hunter impeccably. It's a brilliant performance. (If anyone does a biopic of Hunter, Pepper is the MAN!!!

The first two-thirds of the movie is compulsive viewing. The first third, focusing upon seafaring derring-do is nail-bitingly thrilling. With Bob Hunter at the helm of some totally crazy-ass dangerous antics - like some mad, dope-smoking, Sterling-Hayden lookalike - Rothwell creates a veritable action picture on the high seas with an obsessive Captain Ahab targeting not whales, but the hunters of whales. (So much of the film is charged with a great selection of period hit songs and a gorgeous original score by Lesley Barber also.)

Who'd have thought environmental activism could be as thrilling as Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin "Master and Commander" adventures? The middle section begins focusing on the leaks in the organizational battleship that became Greenpeace. Mixing in more derring-do with internal conflicts is easily as thrilling as the intrigue-elements of O'Brian's high-seas swashbucklers.

The final third of the film tends to fall by the wayside a touch. It's not Rothwell's doing, as that of - gasp - real life. There's a great deal of sadness and acrimony in this section of the film and part of me wishes that life didn't throw the kind of curve-balls that surprise your favourite batter at the plate into striking out. This is ultimately a minor quibble though, in light of the sheer force, power and entertainment value of the picture. What epics don't suffer from a sag or three? At least this one eventually builds to a note of well deserved and earned high notes and the movie finally packs a major one-two emotional punch. When this happens, tears might well be flowing amongst many and the lapses of real life will be fleeting, especially when you exit the cinema feeling, "Goddamn! That was one HELL of a good show!"

The Film Corner Rating: **** Four Stars

How To Change The World is making its Canadian Premiere at the 2015 edition of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. Visit the Hot Docs website for dates, showtimes and tickets by clicking HERE.


A Different Drummer: Celebrating Eccentrics (2014)
Dir. John Zaritzky

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Marching to the beat of one's own drum is not without merit and the title alone was enough to pique my curiosity, but then, my heart sank. During the first few minutes of A Different Drummer: Celebrating Eccentrics, I felt primed to hate it. Why wouldn't I? I detest both whimsy and standard TV-style docs - both of which seem overbearingly present within the picture's opening.

We get the digestible bite-sized thesis in which we learn how a ten-year study revealed that eccentrics are healthier, happier and indeed, manage to live longer than everybody else. We then get the de rigueur snippets of introductory interviews from what will be our wild, wooly and wacky subjects - a lot of which are all set to a frightfully jaunty musical score.

Ugh was dancing across my cerebellum and I almost flushed the sucker down the toilet bowl of unmentionables in order to slap on a different doc, but then, as if by magic, genuinely delightful movie magic began to snuggle up to me and the next ninety-or-so minutes yielded one of the happiest, funniest and moving little pictures I'd seen in awhile.

Zaritzky clearly loves his subjects, but not to the film's detriment. He settles in on each glorious nutcase (a man who lives in caves, a zany inventor, a duck lady, a "joke" politician, a man who celebrates a "useless" American president and one real lollapalooza I won't spoil for you here) with sensitivity and good humour. He's never laughing at them and neither will you. Some you'll laugh with and others you might even need to shed a few droplets of ocular moisture.

At the end of the day, it has been said that I'm eccentric. As such, I luxuriated in Zaritzky's sweet, lovely ode to madness of the most glorious kind and I'd be delighted to host any one of these people in my own home.

The thesis is proven, the whimsy in the opening a minor aberration and one of the more delightful feel-good documentaries made in recent years won me over completely.

Oh, and the best news: I look forward to a long, healthy and happy life.

The Film Corner Rating: ***½ Three-and-a-half Stars

A Different Drummer is making its Toronto Premiere at the 2015 edition of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. Visit the Hot Docs website for dates, showtimes and tickets by clicking HERE.

For the next fourteen days I will only review movies I liked, loved or that totally blew me away during the 2015 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto, Canada. Life is short. I won't bother reviewing movies that were godawful, mediocre or just plain okay. Note my picks, mark your calendars and save some precious hours, days and weeks of your life on planet Earth. Instead, spend it travelling the world via one of cinema's most vital genres.

The Amina Profile (2015)
Dir. Sophie Deraspe

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Set against the turbulent backdrop of war-and-revolution in contemporary Syria we meet one hot French-Canadian babe in Montreal (Sandra Bagaria) and one hot Syrian-American babe in Damascus (Amina Arraf).

They meet online. They're young. They're in love.

They're lesbians.

Okay. That's it. Go see the movie.

Review over.

Oh, that's not fair. Here's a bit more to, uh, chew on:

Yesiree-bob, they're lesbians and they're totally into each other, wholly - in mind (what's some nice sapphic eroticism without a few healthy dollops of intellectual discourse) and in, oh yeah, baby, BODY. And let me tell ya', quicker than you can say "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi (ce soir)?", l'action de yum yum gets going and it's guaranteed to be hot and heavy.

'Nuff said.

No? Okay, check this out:

The rub, so to speak, is that they're separated by continents, culture and physical proximity, so they must create virtual worlds via text messaging and avatars to become one. Yes, it's cybersex, but no matter. This is a movie, so, via the film's director, we have mega-potential for lots of imagined, recreated hot caresses, tongue action, rug cleaning and soft, lithe, supple flesh against flesh to demonstrate for us, the unbridled passion unfurling in their respective loins - I mean, minds. Better yet, as the film progresses, they can well imagine what the real fireworks are going to be like when they finally meet.

So can we.

Yowza! Yowza! Yowza! Do I really need to keep writing?

I do? Well, okay. Don't mind if I do. Just thought you'd want to dispense with reading this review and just go see the movie (with a handy raincoat to place over your lap for any discrete digital manipulations you might wish to indulge in as the picture unspools).

So, where was I? Oh yes, so our two femmes are tres exotique and maybe, just maybe, the virtual will become a reality. There's danger, though. Sandra lives a fairly normal, comfy life in La Belle Province whilst Amina is surrounded by violence and political unrest during the Syrian uprising as its being quashed by the ruling patriarchy. Oh, and lest we forget, those of the LGBT persuasion are on the top of most Syrians' extermination lists which ups the suspense ante when brave Amina launches a blog entitled "A Gay Girl in Damascus" - a delicious blend of news, politics and ground zero reportage of the Syrian conflicts. The blog goes through the roof - journalists and news agencies from all over the world look to the "Gay Girl" for their news, until, the worst happens.

Amina tells Sandra that the secret police are on to her. It's scary stuff. She aspires to be a novelist and her blog posts and emails to her cyber-love are plenty evocative. She walks the streets of Damascus, attends rallies and protests, and at times, finds herself alone in the shadows of tiny labyrinthian walkways. All the while, she's convinced she's being followed. (The filmmaker delivers a whole lot of hazy dramatic recreations for us - a total bonus). Eventually, Amina informs Sandra that she needs to go further underground and that their communications will be sporadic and brief.

Then, nothing.

Amina completely disappears. The world is watching. Where is the Gay Girl in Damascus? Word travels through various underground and cyber channels that Amina has been kidnapped by the Syrian authorities and languishes in prison. Sandra is desperate. She launches an intense campaign to find and rescue Amina. With the help of Western activists and even American diplomatic channels (Amina is, after all, a dual American citizen), a tense, multilevelled investigation is underway. Mystery upon mystery begins to exponentially pile up and soon Sandra (and by extension, we, the audience) are ripped away like a Harlequin Romance heroine's bodice from a sex-drenched love story and plunged into a superbly complex thriller that keeps us wanting to know more.

And the more we (and Sandra know), the more we become afraid.

Very afraid.

And guess what? We're only a third of the way into the film. There's a lot more thrills and intrigue to enjoy.

AND it's all true.

Aside from the deftly directed dramatic recreations, skillfully edited with a myriad of other characters/subjects and interviews, The Amina Profile is never less than jangling, compulsive viewing. Where it goes, you'll never know until you see it. Once you do see it, as the suspenseful pieces of the puzzle slowly, creepily and shockingly fall into place, you'll find yourself registering surprise at every turn of every corner. You'll be confronted with the deep, dark mysteries of international intrigue amidst violent revolution as well as the strange, dark corners of cyberspace.

The picture's a corker. In fact, The Amina Profile might be one of the most vital contemporary films to examine how loneliness coupled with activism yields a Knossos-like journey to a shocking reality of what all of us face in parallel worlds - those in which we question and alternately, those we do not.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** Four Stars

The Amina Profile will have its Toronto Premiere at HOT DOCS 2015. For schedule and tickets, visit the Hot Docs website HERE.


All The Time In The World (2014)
Dir. Suzanne Crocker

Review By Greg Klymkiw

A happy, progressive family from Dawson City realize that the stress of modern living is wreaking havoc with their quality of life and creating barriers between honest, real communication in their home. They do what many dream about, but never do - they pack their bags with kids, cat and dog in tow and hightail it up north to the most isolated reaches of the Yukon to live for a year completely off-grid. Mom (Director, Producer and Cinematographer Suzanne Crocker) also decided to document the family's journey and given how much old settler-style toil the family endures (especially during the first third of the picture), she probably deserves some manner of SuperMom Oblation to have made a movie and carried on like Honest Abe Lincoln's Mom must have done in that old log cabin.

Happily, we don't spend too much time in the city, nor are we subjected to what must have been a seeming lifetime of rumination, then planning and finally getting everything ready that they're going to need to live on in the middle of nowhere - a place bereft of any means to communicate with the outside world. We get just enough of the aforementioned so we can get to the good stuff.

And wow! What good stuff! We get to experience the utter drudgery of carting what seems like half the contents of a storage locker warehouse from their boat up to the cabin deep in the forest, building a humungous above-ground storage facility for their food, rigging a platform to pull their boat onto dry ground for the winter and a whole whack of other necessary duties to get themselves set up.

I was especially delighted to note that the family brought along archery gear, big sharp blades and firearms. I know from experience that the wilderness can be home to bears, wolves, coyotes and perhaps, most menacing of all, inbred country cousins. My fingers were crossed. All good storytellers know you don't introduce weaponry into your yarn without making good use of them.

The film has a unique three-act structure which naturally follows the events of the family's journey, but clearly much effort and thought has been placed into evoking more than mere narrative beats. What the film provides us with is the actual tone and almost poetic nature of this lifestyle. The family have no phones, no computers, no radios, no television sets, no walks, no CBs and perhaps most importantly, no clocks of any kind. The sense of time having no meaning is something the film beautifully evokes. We get to experience genuine conversations, the simple pleasures of reading aloud, preparing all the food from scratch, chopping firewood (one of my personal favourites - NOT!) and endlessly hauling buckets of water up and down a steep, rugged hill (double NOT on this for me).


There's fun, of course: skating on rivers, ice-sledding, playing in the snow, building a huge tent which gets covered with snow (becoming a cool clubhouse/fort) and even celebrating events like Halloween and Christmas in ways unique to the isolated setting. There's also a real sense that the family is in on stuff together - the kids often present very cool ideas and contributions to their lifestyle. There's danger, too. (No, the inbred country cousins haven't shown up yet.) There's a humungous snow storm and Dad's out in the wilds on his own, thus injecting a few beats of genuine tension.

What the film does not show (or chooses not to show) is the kind of nasty, verbal sparring that can rear its ugly head when family or friends are afflicted with cabin fever. I longed, with baited-breath for some Edward Albee or Eugene O'Neill-like acrimony - Mom and Dad sloshing back several beakers of rotgut then hurling barbs of verbal abuse at each other while the children cower in the corner.

Oh well, they seem like nice people. I cannot fault them for that.

Finally, what really hits home (at least for me) is the silence and then realizing, life in the middle of nowhere is NEVER silent, but that the sounds of the natural world are not unlike a gorgeous symphony orchestra. I personally know quite a bit about living off-grid (because I indeed do) and certainly found much in the film I was able to connect with, but even I couldn't do what this family did. They're not simply off-grid for most of the picture's running time, they might as well be off the planet. Me, I need my shortwave radio to listen to crazy survivalists and evangelists barking madly into the deep night and while I'm perfectly adept at chopping wood, I much prefer getting one of the locals to dump a few cord of wood every six months or so. I do, however, enjoy stacking it.

Much to my consternation, the inbred country cousins never do show up. Damn! I harboured images of Dad blowing the grizzled, drooling psychopaths away while the kids got into the action with bows, arrows, knifes and axes. (Mom would be filming all this, of course.) I was ready to throw in the towel when the reality of this hit me. However, an unexpected visitor DOES show up and yes, the gun must be fired.

This made me happy. Then again, don't mind me. As James Cagney would always say in Raoul Walsh's Strawberry Blonde, "It's just the kind of hairpin I am."

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** Three Stars

All The Time In The World will have its Toronto Premiere at HOT DOCS 2015. For schedule and tickets, visit the Hot Docs website HERE.

For the next fourteen days I will only review movies I liked, loved or that totally blew me away during the 2015 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto, Canada. Life is short. I won't bother reviewing movies that were godawful, mediocre or just plain okay. Note my picks, mark your calendars and save some precious hours, days and weeks of your life on planet Earth. Instead, spend it travelling the world via one of cinema's most vital genres.


Grass: A Nation's Battle For Survival (1925)
Dir. Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack

Review By Greg Klymkiw

You won't see many greater documentaries in your life than this one.

When I taught filmmaking at "Uncle" Norman Jewison's Canadian Film Centre, I'd often chide my charges with their pathetic lack of life experience and how it related (or rather, not) to their desire to make movies.

"Strap these fuckers on for size," I'd bark before relaying a brief biographical snapshot of two genuine pioneers in the art of filmed documentary and dramatic cinema. "They don't make filmmakers like Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack anymore and any pathetic desires you harbour to make movies about your petty bourgeois lives in the suburbs of whatever cozy enclave you were coddled in are total shit compared to this."

You see, by their early 20s, these two young men lived lives most artists could only dream about - that is, if those purported contemporary "filmmakers" actually had the wherewithal to conjure up the sort of life experience Cooper and Schoedsack gained before making some of the greatest motion pictures of all time.


Schoedsack ran away from his comfy home in Iowa (Council Bluffs, no less) as a teenager and worked as a surveyor before getting a job as a cameraman for the legendary Mack Sennett studios. He enlisted in the signal corps and served on the bloodiest fields of battle as a cameraman in France during World War I. He did the same thing in Ukraine and helped refugees when Russia and Poland duked it out for the rich fertile breadbasket of Eastern Europe and, adding more cherries to his ice cream sundae of life experience, he did the same damn thing during the war twixt Turkey and Greece.

Merian C. Cooper also fled his idyllic American nest, enrolling in the naval academy, resigning in disgust over his belief in the superiority of air power over sea power in battle, joined the national guard and embarked on the mission to chase down Pancho Villa in Mexico, enlisted in the airforce during World War I, flew DH-4 bombers, got shot down by the Hun, suffered such horrible burns to his arms that most people would just give it up, but after serving time in one of the Kaiser's POW camps, he continued as a pilot with the Red Cross in France, then joined up with the Polish airforce to kick Russian ass, served in a Russkie POW camp, escaped the clutches of the evil commie hordes and was given the highest military honours by the Polish government.

How d'ya like them apples, losers?

Schoedsack and Cooper, both born in 1893, met in Vienna and became fast friends and partners and formed a motion picture production company which not only made groundbreaking documentaries, but as a team were responsible for one of the GREATEST motion pictures of ALL TIME, 1933's King (FUCKING) Kong.


Grass: A Nation's Battle For Survival was made in 1925. Schoedsack and Cooper teamed up with the legendary (and gorgeous) spy and journalist Marguerite Harrison to capture one of the most astounding documentary films by ANY standards. Following a Bakhtiari in Iran (then Persia), the trio stunningly captured the migration of 50,000 people and 500,000 animals to better pasture over a 20,000 foot high ICY mountain range (the tribe was mostly barefoot) and the dangerous rapids of a massive river.


You will see images in this film that are not only gorgeous, but imbued with all the properties which can be rightly described as a "terrible beauty". These are real people, real domestic farm animals, really living, really dying, really suffering and really braving every danger in order to continue actually living.

They don't make 'em like this anymore. The movies, that is, AND the movie makers.


Grass: A Nation's Battle For Survival has been restored by the legendary team of Dennis Doros and Amy Heller of Milestone Films (winners of one of the highest accolades from the New York Film Critics Circle for their Shirley Clarke restorations as well as their important life's work). The movie has probably not looked as gorgeous since its release 80 years ago and it features a stirring new Iranian musical score.

This is an absolute must-see. You can do so at Hot Docs 2015 and also via home entertainment release from Milestone Films. Try to see it on a big screen if you can. For showtimes and tickets, visit the Hot Docs website HERE.


Araya (1959)
Dir. Margot Benacerraf

Review By Greg Klymkiw

If the idea of watching sheer pain and utter drudgery in one of the most desolate corners of the earth sounds like your idea of a must-skip, think again. Araya is one of the most moving, powerful and poetic documentaries ever made.

In the late 50s, filmmaker Margot Benacerraf took her cameras to the furthest reaches of a forlorn peninsula in Venezuela to capture a day in the lives of several families who make their living as workers in a natural salt "farm". From early morning, through a blistering day and even deep into the night, we get a profoundly uplifting look at pure survival. These are people who live to work and they work harder than most of us couldn't even imagine.


Every element of their existence is work - hard, brutal, physical labour under the unrelenting rays of a sun that never ceases to beat down upon them. We experience the backbreaking toil of culling the salt, breaking it down, forming it into pyramidical shaped bricks, hauling it to get ready for shipping and then, doing it all over again. The only respite for some includes re-stitching fishing nets, casting them into the ocean and harvesting the food they need for sustenance.

We also get detailed insight into the domestic chores on the home front. This is all accompanied by haunting, astonishing black and white cinematography, moving poetic narration (as information packed as it is sweetly lilting) and heart rending music (plus meticulously captured natural sounds).

These are men, women and children. Nobody here is exempt from a life of hardship - a life born out of slavery and colonialism and continuing to this day under corporate slavery.

This is potent stuff. It might be even more valuable to us now than when the film was first released.


Acclaimed by some of the world's greatest directors (everyone from Jean Renoir to Steven Soderbergh), Araya disappeared off the radar for over half a century until its revival and restoration. Now, it can be see in all its glory on both the big screen and at home.


Araya has been made available through the restoration efforts of the legendary Dennis Doros and Amy Heller at Milestone Films. For tickets, visit the Hot Docs 2015 website HERE. The film is also available on gorgeous home video transfers vie Milestone.

Grass: A Nation's Battle For Survival (1925)
Dir. Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack

Review By Greg Klymkiw

You won't see many greater documentaries in your life than this one.

When I taught filmmaking at "Uncle" Norman Jewison's Canadian Film Centre, I'd often chide my charges with their pathetic lack of life experience and how it related (or rather, not) to their desire to make movies.

"Strap these fuckers on for size," I'd bark before relaying a brief biographical snapshot of two genuine pioneers in the art of filmed documentary and dramatic cinema. "They don't make filmmakers like Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack anymore and any pathetic desires you harbour to make movies about your petty bourgeois lives in the suburbs of whatever cozy enclave you were coddled in are total shit compared to this."

You see, by their early 20s, these two young men lived lives most artists could only dream about - that is, if those purported contemporary "filmmakers" actually had the wherewithal to conjure up the sort of life experience Cooper and Schoedsack gained before making some of the greatest motion pictures of all time.


Schoedsack ran away from his comfy home in Iowa (Council Bluffs, no less) as a teenager and worked as a surveyor before getting a job as a cameraman for the legendary Mack Sennett studios. He enlisted in the signal corps and served on the bloodiest fields of battle as a cameraman in France during World War I. He did the same thing in Ukraine and helped refugees when Russia and Poland duked it out for the rich fertile breadbasket of Eastern Europe and, adding more cherries to his ice cream sundae of life experience, he did the same damn thing during the war twixt Turkey and Greece.

Merian C. Cooper also fled his idyllic American nest, enrolling in the naval academy, resigning in disgust over his belief in the superiority of air power over sea power in battle, joined the national guard and embarked on the mission to chase down Pancho Villa in Mexico, enlisted in the airforce during World War I, flew DH-4 bombers, got shot down by the Hun, suffered such horrible burns to his arms that most people would just give it up, but after serving time in one of the Kaiser's POW camps, he continued as a pilot with the Red Cross in France, then joined up with the Polish airforce to kick Russian ass, served in a Russkie POW camp, escaped the clutches of the evil commie hordes and was given the highest military honours by the Polish government.

How d'ya like them apples, losers?

Schoedsack and Cooper, both born in 1893, met in Vienna and became fast friends and partners and formed a motion picture production company which not only made groundbreaking documentaries, but as a team were responsible for one of the GREATEST motion pictures of ALL TIME, 1933's King (FUCKING) Kong.


Grass: A Nation's Battle For Survival was made in 1925. Schoedsack and Cooper teamed up with the legendary (and gorgeous) spy and journalist Marguerite Harrison to capture one of the most astounding documentary films by ANY standards. Following a Bakhtiari in Iran (then Persia), the trio stunningly captured the migration of 50,000 people and 500,000 animals to better pasture over a 20,000 foot high ICY mountain range (the tribe was mostly barefoot) and the dangerous rapids of a massive river.


You will see images in this film that are not only gorgeous, but imbued with all the properties which can be rightly described as a "terrible beauty". These are real people, real domestic farm animals, really living, really dying, really suffering and really braving every danger in order to continue actually living.

They don't make 'em like this anymore. The movies, that is, AND the movie makers.


Grass: A Nation's Battle For Survival has been restored by the legendary team of Dennis Doros and Amy Heller of Milestone Films (winners of one of the highest accolades from the New York Film Critics Circle for their Shirley Clarke restorations as well as their important life's work). The movie has probably not looked as gorgeous since its release 80 years ago and it features a stirring new Iranian musical score.

This is an absolute must-see. You can do so at Hot Docs 2015 and also via home entertainment release from Milestone Films. Try to see it on a big screen if you can. For showtimes and tickets, visit the Hot Docs website HERE.

Araya (1959)
Dir. Margot Benacerraf

Review By Greg Klymkiw

If the idea of watching sheer pain and utter drudgery in one of the most desolate corners of the earth sounds like your idea of a must-skip, think again. Araya is one of the most moving, powerful and poetic documentaries ever made.

In the late 50s, filmmaker Margot Benacerraf took her cameras to the furthest reaches of a forlorn peninsula in Venezuela to capture a day in the lives of several families who make their living as workers in a natural salt "farm". From early morning, through a blistering day and even deep into the night, we get a profoundly uplifting look at pure survival. These are people who live to work and they work harder than most of us couldn't even imagine.


Every element of their existence is work - hard, brutal, physical labour under the unrelenting rays of a sun that never ceases to beat down upon them. We experience the backbreaking toil of culling the salt, breaking it down, forming it into pyramidical shaped bricks, hauling it to get ready for shipping and then, doing it all over again. The only respite for some includes re-stitching fishing nets, casting them into the ocean and harvesting the food they need for sustenance.

We also get detailed insight into the domestic chores on the home front. This is all accompanied by haunting, astonishing black and white cinematography, moving poetic narration (as information packed as it is sweetly lilting) and heart rending music (plus meticulously captured natural sounds).

These are men, women and children. Nobody here is exempt from a life of hardship - a life born out of slavery and colonialism and continuing to this day under corporate slavery.

This is potent stuff. It might be even more valuable to us now than when the film was first released.


Acclaimed by some of the world's greatest directors (everyone from Jean Renoir to Steven Soderbergh), Araya disappeared off the radar for over half a century until it's revival and restoration. Now, it can be see in all its glory on both the big screen and at home.


Araya has been made available through the restoration efforts of the legendary Dennis Doros and Amy Heller at Milestone Films. For tickets, visit the Hot Docs 2015 website HERE. The film is also available on gorgeous home video transfers vie Milestone.

The Amina Profile (2015)
Dir. Sophie Deraspe

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Set against the turbulent backdrop of war-and-revolution in contemporary Syria we meet one hot French-Canadian babe in Montreal (Sandra Bagaria) and one hot Syrian-American babe in Damascus (Amina Arraf).

They meet online. They're young. They're in love.

They're lesbians.

Okay. That's it. Go see the movie.

Review over.

Oh, that's not fair. Here's a bit more to, uh, chew on:

Yesiree-bob, they're lesbians and they're totally into each other, wholly - in mind (what's some nice sapphic eroticism without a few healthy dollops of intellectual discourse) and in, oh yeah, baby, BODY. And let me tell ya', quicker than you can say "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi (ce soir)?", l'action de yum yum gets going and it's guaranteed to be hot and heavy.

'Nuff said.

No? Okay, check this out:

The rub, so to speak, is that they're separated by continents, culture and physical proximity, so they must create virtual worlds via text messaging and avatars to become one. Yes, it's cybersex, but no matter. This is a movie, so, via the film's director, we have mega-potential for lots of imagined, recreated hot caresses, tongue action, rug cleaning and soft, lithe, supple flesh against flesh to demonstrate for us, the unbridled passion unfurling in their respective loins - I mean, minds. Better yet, as the film progresses, they can well imagine what the real fireworks are going to be like when they finally meet.

So can we.

Yowza! Yowza! Yowza! Do I really need to keep writing?

I do? Well, okay. Don't mind if I do. Just thought you'd want to dispense with reading this review and just go see the movie (with a handy raincoat to place over your lap for any discrete digital manipulations you might wish to indulge in as the picture unspools).

So, where was I? Oh yes, so our two femmes are tres exotique and maybe, just maybe, the virtual will become a reality. There's danger, though. Sandra lives a fairly normal, comfy life in La Belle Province whilst Amina is surrounded by violence and political unrest during the Syrian uprising as its being quashed by the ruling patriarchy. Oh, and lest we forget, those of the LGBT persuasion are on the top of most Syrians' extermination lists which ups the suspense ante when brave Amina launches a blog entitled "A Gay Girl in Damascus" - a delicious blend of news, politics and ground zero reportage of the Syrian conflicts. The blog goes through the roof - journalists and news agencies from all over the world look to the "Gay Girl" for their news, until, the worst happens.

Amina tells Sandra that the secret police are on to her. It's scary stuff. She aspires to be a novelist and her blog posts and emails to her cyber-love are plenty evocative. She walks the streets of Damascus, attends rallies and protests, and at times, finds herself alone in the shadows of tiny labyrinthian walkways. All the while, she's convinced she's being followed. (The filmmaker delivers a whole lot of hazy dramatic recreations for us - a total bonus). Eventually, Amina informs Sandra that she needs to go further underground and that their communications will be sporadic and brief.

Then, nothing.

Amina completely disappears. The world is watching. Where is the Gay Girl in Damascus? Word travels through various underground and cyber channels that Amina has been kidnapped by the Syrian authorities and languishes in prison. Sandra is desperate. She launches an intense campaign to find and rescue Amina. With the help of Western activists and even American diplomatic channels (Amina is, after all, a dual American citizen), a tense, multilevelled investigation is underway. Mystery upon mystery begins to exponentially pile up and soon Sandra (and by extension, we, the audience) are ripped away like a Harlequin Romance heroine's bodice from a sex-drenched love story and plunged into a superbly complex thriller that keeps us wanting to know more.

And the more we (and Sandra know), the more we become afraid.

Very afraid.

And guess what? We're only a third of the way into the film. There's a lot more thrills and intrigue to enjoy.

AND it's all true.

Aside from the deftly directed dramatic recreations, skillfully edited with a myriad of other characters/subjects and interviews, The Amina Profile is never less than jangling, compulsive viewing. Where it goes, you'll never know until you see it. Once you do see it, as the suspenseful pieces of the puzzle slowly, creepily and shockingly fall into place, you'll find yourself registering surprise at every turn of every corner. You'll be confronted with the deep, dark mysteries of international intrigue amidst violent revolution as well as the strange, dark corners of cyberspace.

The picture's a corker. In fact, The Amina Profile might be one of the most vital contemporary films to examine how loneliness coupled with activism yields a Knossos-like journey to a shocking reality of what all of us face in parallel worlds - those in which we question and alternately, those we do not.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** Four Stars

The Amina Profile will have its Toronto Premiere at HOT DOCS 2015. For schedule and tickets, visit the Hot Docs website HERE.

This is one of purportedly hundreds of children viciously & mercilessly sexually assaulted by former Anglican priest & Boy Scout leader Ralph Rowe.

Dir. Daniel Roher
Prd. Peter O'Brian

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I doubt you're going to see a better short film at Hot Docs 2015 than Survivors Rowe. In fact, I doubt you're going to see a better short film all year than Survivors Rowe. There's something heroic about this picture - it's terrific filmmaking to be sure, but its subjects, all grown men who share their most deeply personal reminiscences of childhood are to be exalted to the highest degree imaginable.

The other heroic element, which cannot be ignored, is the commitment of the short's Producer Peter O'Brian to have offered his expertise, passion and artistry to director Daniel Roher's fine work. O'Brian is a legend. He's a genuinely heroic figure for having produced so many of Canada's greatest motion pictures including, but not limited to The Grey Fox with the late-greats Richard Farnsworth and Jackie Burroughs in one of the great westerns of all time - period - and One Magic Christmas with the astonishing Harry Dean Stanton as one of the most evocative (and dark) guardian angels in film history in (yes) one of the great films about Christmas - period!

What is not heroic is Canada itself and the country's insidiously grotesque and hateful history with respect to our aboriginal nations, a horrifying element of which is so artfully and powerfully exposed in Roher's short film. It is one of a multitude of inhuman(e) assaults upon Canada's Native People, one that began with colonialism and frankly, continues to this very day, especially in light of the hatred and disregard expressed by Canada's Chancellor (or is it Prime Minister?) Steven Harper, the leader of our country's Nazi party (or is it, the Conservative party?).

This is Canada's Prime Minister. He and his government of intolerance continue to besmirch the flag with their continued refusal to acknowledge the ever- prolonged exploitation of Canada's Native People and the heinous crimes perpetrated against them. Colonialism, Hatred, Human Rights Violations and Apartheid will continue under this government's "leadership".

What's reflected in Survivors Rowe is at once, infuriating and on another level, infused with a sense of both healing and forgiveness - indicative of the fearlessness of its subjects and the skill with which Roher renders his film. Skillfully blending archival footage with knock-you-flat-on-your-back interviews, we're introduced to several young men - notably Joshua Frog, John Fox and Ralph Winter of Northern Ontario's Anishinaabe nation. They tell us their stories of living on isolated reservations, a strange combination of genuinely idyllic surroundings, but within the trappings of Canada's own system of apartheid. There are fond, memories, to be sure: living in the wilderness, a special bond with the natural world, skating on icy waterways, genuine play not rooted in the mind-destroying contemporary world of digital gaming and, at least initially, the dashingly dramatic arrival of Ralph Rowe, the rugged man's man who serves as a pilot, Boy Scout leader and Anglican priest.

Rowe is not only a charismatic, almost mythic figure, but he's actually taken the time to learn Native languages and dialects to converse with elders, adults his own age and kids. What nobody knows, what nobody could ever imagine, is that Ralph Rowe is a pedophile. The on-camera testaments delivered by the film's key subjects reveal some of the most harrowing, horrific and just plain malevolent acts perpetrated by this man of the wilderness, this man of God, this monster.

One of the most extraordinary things director Daniel Roher achieves here as a filmmaker is how he fashions any great narrative's need for an antagonist. On the surface, this figure is clearly Ralph Rowe, but as the film progresses, Rowe's external position as a villain, or rather, as an antagonistic force flows into the pain, sorrow, self-loathing and self-harm faced by the victims of his crimes. Then, even more extraordinarily, the antagonistic force of Rowe, his victims' suffering and the metamorphosis of this into the aforementioned process of healing, gives way to an even greater antagonist - a seemingly perpetual cycle of abuse which, is ultimately societal and must be actively addressed far more vigorously and openly than it is.

Ralph Rowe most likely sexually assaulted over 500 Native children and was, no doubt, responsible for a huge swath of suicides amongst both children and adults (not to mention residual effects upon subsequent generations). Unfortunately, the Canadian judicial system has only tried and convicted him for what amounts to a mere handful of sex crimes. He served a meagre five years in jail, was essentially handed a deal by the Crown to leave him be no matter how many accusations continue to surface and he lives a quiet, peaceful life in Surrey, British Columbia. Neither the Anglican Church nor the Boy Scouts have ever officially apologized to the victims and yet, those victims who did not commit suicide have endured decades and, if truth be told, lifetimes of living Hell.

On a purely aesthetic level, what Roher achieves here is a film that serves as a document of the suffering, torment and misery Ralph Rowe caused, but there is a strangely magical and poetic structure to the work which takes us from idyll to horror and finally and astoundingly, but perhaps necessarily, to forgiveness.

It's impossible to shake the impact this short film has. In fact, it has the sickening shock of a merciless cold-cock, blended with an elegiac, profoundly moving sense of loss and leavened with a kind of grace that not only reflects the deep humanity of the film's subjects, but shines a light of clemency upon a monster.

What the film cannot forgive, nor can any of us (I hope and pray), is the deep-seeded hatred and racism of colonialism which continues in Canada to this very day. If an Anglican priest and Boy Scout leader viciously sexually assaulted over 500 white children, would he still be living freely in society with the legal implication that he'll never serve more incarceration for his crimes, no matter how many continue to surface?

The answer is obvious.

This is Ralph Rowe. He is a convicted pedophile living peacefully and freely in Surrey, British Columbia. It might be helpful to have MORE recent photographs circulated.

One final note about the heroism of the film's producer Peter O'Brian: Read his moving article in the Toronto Globe and Mail about the sexual assaults he suffered as a child and eventually came to terms with as an adult. Read it HERE.

And whatever you do, don't miss Survivors Rowe.

The Film Corner Rating: ***** Five Stars

Survivors Rowe is making its World Premiere at the 2015 edition of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. Visit the Hot Docs website for dates, showtimes and tickets by clicking HERE.