Easy Lei | Trevor Anderson wanders through the fanciful landscape of The Island, part of FAVA Freshworks at Metro Cinema.
FAVA FRESHWORKS
Various directors. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Thu, Mar 5 (7pm)
The opening moments of Trevor Anderson’s short film The Island pretty much say it all: a completely flat, vast, blank expanse of snow stretching all the way to the horizon, with the tiny figure of Anderson himself, in red plaid jacket, fur hat, and sunglasses, trudging across it, the steady crunch of his boots in the snow providing the only sound for miles. (The scene was filmed in Cold Lake.) Anderson introduces himself via voiceover narration: “I’m an independent Canadian filmmaker,” he says cheerfully. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
The Island is one of nine locally produced short films FAVA will be screening at Metro Cinema tonight (Thursday) under the umbrella title FAVA Freshworks; I was able to screen three, and together they suggest that Edmonton directors are finding all sorts of ways to thrive within an underfunded Albertan artistic landscape that can make Cold Lake seem like a tropical paradise.
Which brings me back to The Island (****), which was inspired by a nasty e-mail Anderson received from an anonymous “fan” who suggested that “all you faggots” should be shipped off to an island somewhere where they could give each other AIDS and die.
Charming! But as Anderson walks through the snow, he begins to think that the idea of a tropical “homo utopia” doesn’t sound like a bad idea — and as his fantasies of super-fancy tree huts and AIDS cocktails served in coconut shells with pineapple wedges gets more and more elaborate, animation transforms his surroundings into a colourful paradise of sand, sun, and palm trees where ape masseurs are always on call and anyone who dies gets his body hucked into a volcano and worshipped as a god. Do the bananas growing on the trees look like cocks and the coconuts like balls? Do you even have to ask?
G.I.M.P. Boot Camp (***) by Melissa Brittain and Danielle Peers is also a comic response to society’s attitudes toward minorities: in this case, partially disabled people like Peers who use a wheelchair to get around but who aren’t necessarily confined to it 24 hours a day. (The film was inspired by a 2005 news item about a woman with muscular dystrophy who was named “Miss Wheelchair Wisconsin,” only to be stripped of her crown when she was photographed standing up — apparently she was just not crippled enough to suit the judges.)
Peers and Brittain bring a sly sense of humour to the topic, whether they’re skewering the condescension of able-bodied people or demonstrating how to turn a gimpy slouch into a “sexy lean,” and while some of their jokes land too broadly and the film as a whole could stand a little tightening up, it’s a winning treat.
The glossiest of these three films is Patiences (***1/2) by Peter Wunstorf, who has worked as a cinematographer on a long list of shot-in-Canada TV shows and feature films. It stars Davina Stewart in a wordless solo performance as a woman who drives to a cabin in the woods for a romantic tryst, only to be stuck there, killing time, when the man fails to appear. Wunstorf’s cinematographic preoccupations come at the expense of Stewart’s performance, but Patiences is a lovely execution of a simple idea, with a fondness for outdated technology — a phonograph, a Polaroid camera, a rotary phone — that made me feel guilty for watching it via DVD on my laptop.
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