Socially conscious films at VIFF

KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR

The 26th annual Vancouver International Film Festival kicks off on Sept. 27 – and this year, features a number of films focusing on human rights issues.

The list includes the Austrian film It Happened Just Before and, from the United States, Strange Culture. The latter tells the story of American experimental artist Steve Kurtz, who awoke one morning in May 2004 to find his wife dead beside him. Two separate autopsies revealed that Hope Kurtz had died of a heart attack – and yet her passing, combined with the fact that Steve Kurtz had been about to unveil an installation work involving the use of (harmless) bacteria, led to his arrest by the FBI and a federal trial which is still in process today.

Kurtz was part of a group called the Critical Art Ensemble – a collective whose members specialized in "the advancement of social change through culture." For his new project, about genetically modified organisms, he had ordered culture samples from a colleague.

Law enforcement officials suspected the worst. Kurtz was charged with bioterrorism (a charge later reduced to mail fraud). Because he was unable to speak about the case on camera, director Lynn Hershman Leeson has actors Thomas Jay Ryan and Tilda Swinton as the Kurtzes, re-enacting the run-up to Steve Kurtz's arrest. Unfortunately, this decision creates a jarring effect.
Since Kurtz and his supporters are interviewed separately, in documentary fashion, there are, effectively, two Steve Kurtzes in the film – and Ryan's interpretation is monstrously irritating and affected.

Strange Culture was also, clearly, shot on a very low budget – and it shows. Visually and editorially, the film is all over the map.

Nonetheless, the issue that it raises – the subjugation of individual rights in the United States to the greater concern of the "war on terror" – makes it worth checking out.

A much more coherent film is Anja Salomonowitz's It Happened Just Before, which has the actual transcripts of women trafficked into Austria read by actors playing those who may have contributed to their ordeal: a border guard, a neighbor, a brothel worker, a diplomat and a taxi driver.

The impact of these characters, taking breaks from their "ordinary" lives to read the women's stories to camera, is striking. Salomonowitz creates an almost dreamlike effect with scenes such as the border guard tending to his pet turtle, the neighbor singing in church and the man from the brothel mopping up spilled beer, as each of them quietly reads statements like, "When I hear sirens, I think, sooner or later, they're going to get me, and this will all have been for nothing," or, "I'll make something of my life – and my daughter's life," and, later still, "I struggle. I get a slap. I keep struggling. The man says, 'You have to work off 3,000 euros. You're an illegal – you can't do anything about it.' "

Every day, hundreds of women like these are lured to western countries by the promise of a better life: more money, or a boyfriend who swears he will take care of them. Inevitably, as shown here, their lives become even more miserable than before, with little chance of escape.

It Happened Just Before shows on Friday, Sept. 28, at 9:45 p.m., and Wednesday, Oct. 10, at 1:30 p.m. Strange Culture screens on Wednesday, Oct. 3, at 8:45 p.m., Saturday, Oct 6, at 1:30 p.m., and Wednesday, Oct. 10, at 6 p.m.
For complete information, visit www.viff.org.

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