BurlingtonFreePress.com, VT
Aug 23 2007

Montreal film fest opens today

Published: Thursday, August 23, 2007
By Susan Green
Correspondent

When Rebecca Gilman was a student at Middlebury College in the early
1980s, she reportedly witnessed events that would be fictionalized
more than a decade later in her play "Spinning Into Butter."

Now a Chicago resident, she has co-adapted that 1999 drama for a
movie with the same title starring Sarah Jessica Parker of "Sex and
the City" fame. The actress portrays a dean of students at a small
Vermont liberal arts school grappling with a racially charged
incident on campus.

The issue of hypocrisy is a crucial subtext in "Spinning," which will
premiere at the 31st Montreal World Film Festival, which runs
today-Sept. 3.

Gilman declined to do an interview. But, in a conversation this month
with an online magazine, based in her home state of Alabama, Gilman
recalls that her professional career was launched while still a
Middlebury freshman, when she won a nationwide young playwrights’
competition with a work about Krispy Kreme employees taking revenge
against their boss.

Gilman transferred to a college in the South at the end of her junior
year. "Spinning" opened at New York City’s Lincoln Center in 2000.
The film version, which was shot in Wisconsin, debuts at the Montreal
fest on Aug. 30.

It is among some 27 U.S. features and documentaries, a number dwarfed
by the more than 400 films of varying lengths from Canada, Latin
America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceana and the Middle East. In all, 70
countries are represented at the annual festival.

"There are so many things in Montreal that may not show up here
because they don’t find U.S. distribution," says Rick Winston, a
Vermonter who has been attending the festival for almost a decade
with various friends. "Sometimes, our process is arbitrary. We pick a
country — say, Burkina Faso or Uruguay — that we’ve never seen on
film before."

He and his wife, Andrea Serota, are always keeping an eye out for
motion pictures to book at their art house, the Savoy Theater in
Montpelier. "The Montreal focus is so international," he says. "It’s
a great immersion."

Festival audiences are faced with a proverbial smorgasbord of
multiculturalism that covers subject matter for every taste.

Is romantic comedy your bag? Then perhaps "I Do: How to Get Married
and Stay Single" is a good choice. This French release, with
Charlotte Gainsbourg, concerns the complications that ensue when a
bachelor hires a woman to pretend she’s his fiancee.

For those who enjoy history, "The Lark Farm" is an epic from brothers
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani about Armenians expelled from Turkey
during World War I. To toss even more nationalities into the mix,
it’s an Italian-Bulgarian-Spanish-French co-production.

A similarly complicated collaboration is apparent in "Los Cruces …
Poblado Proximo," from Guatemala, Norway and the Netherlands, that
tracks seven Central American guerrillas who defend a village
targeted for destruction in the 1980s by government soldiers.

The closing night selection, Claude Miller’s "A Secret," centers on
an unsuspecting adolescent in France who comes across clues that his
Jewish family is tied to the Holocaust.

A certain contemporary Republican presidential wannabe may take
exception to "September Dawn," about 120 people allegedly massacred
in Utah by top Mormon leaders on Sept. 11, 1857. Jon Voight, who’ll
be on hand at the festival for a tribute, plays a bishop in this tale
of religious fanaticism.

Political thrillers abound. "Morituri" takes place in Algeria during
the civil unrest of the 1990s and follows a police inspector looking
into the suspicious disappearance of a former government official’s
daughter. "The Last Queen of the Earth" tackles the immediate
aftermath of 9/11, when an Afghan immigrant stranded in Iran tries to
reunite with his family back home.

Stories that are of-the-moment command attention. "Kabluey," with
Lisa Kudrow, is a comic take on an inept guy helping his
sister-in-law raise two unruly sons while their father serves in
Iraq. "The Insurgents" provides a grittier approach to topical
material, specifically domestic terror. Four Americans, including a
disabled Iraq vet, plan to detonate a truck bomb. "War Made Easy," a
documentary narrated by Sean Penn, examines media coverage of U.S.
military interventions going back half a century.

The coming-of-age theme shows up in "Gangster High" from South Korea.
A studious boy and his soccer-mad friends are confronted by a gang.
"Dolls" sends a group of girls in the Czech Republic off on an
adventurous trip. "The Go-Getter," an American entry with Zoey
Deschanel, is also a road movie, in this instance about a teenager
looking for his long-lost brother.

For a more mature generation, "The Last Investigation" offers a 70-
year-old retired French cop who begins snooping around after a fatal
accident at an idyllic home for senior citizens. "Irina Palm" zeroes
in on Marianne Faithfull — a singer once best known as Mick Jagger’s
girlfriend — playing a middle-aged woman who works in a sex club to
raise money for her sick grandson’s operation. Talk about "As Tears
Go By"!

A quartet of films is linked to a universal passion: music. The
Greek-German "Eduart" considers a young Albanian man who dreams of
becoming a rock star but instead winds up implicated in a murder.
"Lilacs," directed by Pavel Lounguine, profiles Russian classical
composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. "The Satanic Angels," based on a true
case, centers on 14 Moroccan kids convicted of "shaking the
foundations of Islam" for their rock ‘n’ roll repertoire, hip
clothing and long hair.

Family dysfunction is always a popular genre. "The Influence," from
Spain and Mexico, explores the life of a disoriented woman whose
children must fill in as adults. "Foster Child" traces the worries of
a temporary caregiver in the Philippines delivering an abandoned baby
to adoptive parents at a plush Manila hotel.

And then there are the films that simply defy categorization, such as
"Puffball" from the United Kingdom, with Miranda Richardson and
Donald Sutherland. Directed by the legendary Nicolas Roeg ("Don’t
Look Now" and "Walkabout"), the saga involves an architect who moves
to a remote Irish valley, discovers she’s pregnant and learns that
her neighbors may be witches planning evil deeds.

This sounds a bit like "Rosemary’s Baby," but most savvy cineastes
are willing to embark on any vicarious Montreal journey into the
mystic.