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VIFF documentaries shine a spotlight on reality

The Vancouver International Film Festival has harvested some great features for the two-week run, beginning September 25th.

The Vancouver International Film Festival has harvested some great features for the two-week run, beginning September 25th. Here are my recommendations of nonfiction offerings, based on advance screenings:

 

A Dangerous Game

A sequel to the 2011 VIFF entry, You’ve Been Trumped, in which New York mogul and reality TV fixture Donald Trump jets into the UK on a gust of hot air and swirled hair to launch a luxury golf course on one of Scotland’s last untouched nature resorts, while heaping abuse on villagers protesting the damage to their properties and local wildlife.

 

With a bigger budget and better production values, director Alex Baxter examines the hidden costs of a game in which money doesn’t just talk, it shrieks. After recording a referendum launched by the residents of Dubrovnik against a luxury golf course planned for a UNESCO World Heritage site, Baxter returns to Scotland, where Trump agrees to meet with him for a comically condescending interview. Will The Donald get approval for a second course in Scotland just by waving his money wand again? A standout feature for doc fiends, whether or not you whack dimpled balls across manicured greens.

 

 

 

Walking Under Water

While 10-year old Sari oversees a chugging air compressor on a rickety boat, his father Alexan dives undersea with a rubber tube in his mouth, to hunt fish on coral reefs. Caught between the worlds of subsistence living and marine resort employment, young Sari gets advice from his father and uncle (“Promise me you’ll never dynamite fish,” says the latter, indicating the stump of his right arm).

 

The schedules of the water-dwelling Badjoa people of Southeast Asia are timed by the sun, moon, and tides, not the megahertz speeds of First World technology - all reflected in the film’s leisurely pace. A porthole onto a cinematically lush underwater world and a people you’ve likely never heard of before.

 

 

Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers for Democracy

There are places on the globe where drawing and publishing funny pictures of strongmen and their cronies is about as risky as snapping selfies with ISIS. That doesn’t stop artists from Beijing to Burkina Faso from blackening newspapers and pamphlets with caricatures and captions. Watch for the warm reunion of two long-time friends: an Israeli cartoonist who can’t stand the ultra-right Likud party and a Palestinian cartoonist who can’t stand Hamas.

 

 

Pristine Coast

A two hour salt-water enema for supporters and promoters of Pacific Coast aquaculture. Pristine Coast unravels the hidden history of BC fish farms and presents hard-to-dismiss evidence from marine biologists that the permeable net pens of foreign-owned firms have been spreading parasites and diseases to wild fish stocks for years, compromising the coastal marine ecology as a whole.

 

Food Chains

The most difficult thing is knowing how little you mean to the people who employ you,” says a migrant farm worker in this profile of the unheralded folks who put food on people’s plates. Food Chains tracks the efforts of Florida’s Coalition of Immokalee Workers to mobilize and pressure the four biggest supermarket chains in the US to double the labourers’ meager pay through a singularly unthreatening demand: pay a penny more per pound of tomatoes.

 

The Price We Pay

Director Harold Crooks peeks into the financial black holes that banksters, bureaucrats, and politicians have co-engineered for the world’s sunniest climes, to benefit tax-avoiding corporations. An estimated 21 trillion dollars has flowed into the Cayman Islands, Jersey Islands, the Bahamas, and other tax havens, untaxed and untouched by the citizens of failed states, petrostates, and every shade of democracy.

 

Crooks has made a superb companion piece to Charles Ferguson’s 2010 evisceration of Wall Street, Inside Job, which also had insiders hang themselves with their own words (“I think the problem is that many politicians have the illusion that they really run their country, when actually they run their country within the confines the global financial system places on them,” says one financial insider in The Price We Pay).

 

The film doesn’t present a hopeless case, however. Even business titans like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates support the so-called Robin Hood Tax, which would put on an incremental tax on the nonproductive flow of money to tax havens, returning money to state coffers while disincentivizing the bigwigs’ shell games.

 

mwiseguise@yahoo.com

 

www.geoffolson.com