Movies offer cause for pause

The Documentary Media Society's annual DOXA Documentary Film + Video Festival begins next week and features 36 films from Canada and around the world, over six days, at two local theatres, the Vogue and the Pacific Cinémathèque. Two films in particular will be of interest to the Jewish community, the festival opener, The Take, and Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel.

Argentinian collapse

Remember the good ol' days? When governments were builders, sponsors of national projects? Remember the golden years of Argentina's Juan Perón, when everyone had a job, an education and a future? Wait a second ... the dictator Perón? Yup. That paragon of virtue is one of the heroes in The Take, a documentary by Jewish Canadians Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein.

Written by Klein and directed by Lewis, the film provides a critique of macroeconomic policies in Argentina, with accounts from unemployed workers and their families, and discussion of what led to the country's economic collapse. Well, sort of.

After opening the movie with some wonderfully filmed shots of the dilapidated factories of current day Argentina, and welcoming viewers to "the globalized ghost town" that is Argentina, The Take shifts its focus to the 1950s and the heydeys of Perón, who built up the country and created the strongest middle class in Latin America with his made-in-Argentina factory economy model and his public works projects. Skip to the 1990s and the "man who sold Argentina," then-president Carlos Menem – the cause, according to Klein and Lewis, along with the International Monetary Fund, business owners and capitalism in general, of Argentina's horrible economic collapse in 2001.

For some people, it may not seem a big deal to omit some 40 years of history from a documentary, but in speaking of Argentina's economic situation, those 40 years are pretty darn important. Those decades were, at various times, rife with unrest (coups, riots, terrorism and the like), a lack of innovation in the closed economy, few profits, the accumulation of a massive debt, skyrocketing inflation, little investor confidence, etc. While the IMF policies combined with Menem's own horrible fiscal policies definitely made the situation worse, they did not cause it.

All that aside though, when Klein and Lewis get off their anti-globalization soap box long enough to tell the story of the unemployed Argentinian workers who are taking over the abandoned factories at which they once worked - with the slogan "Occupy, resist, produce!" – The Take is actually very interesting and emotional. Rather than being apart from the capitalist system, which is how they are portrayed by Klein and Lewis, these workers actually show the resilience of that system; how a group of people can join together, form a co-operative, restart a business and begin earning enough to feed and clothe themselves and their families. Their struggle is not yet over – now that the businesses (including factories, schools and clinics) are up and running again, many owners want them back. But for now, it's the underdog who has triumphed and who can't feel good about that?

The Take's screening at the DOXA opening gala will be the film's B.C. première, and Lewis and Klein will be in attendance. The gala is Tuesday, May 25. It is co-presented by the Tides Foundation and Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society. It starts at 8 p.m. and takes place at the Vogue.

– Cynthia Ramsay

Journey with an agenda

There are several sobering moments in Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel. In the summer of 2002, filmmakers, directors/editors Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi travelled from the south to the north along the 1947 United Nations Partition Line. Along the way, they interviewed Jewish Israelis, Arab Israelis and Palestinians about their lives, their feelings about and memories of Partition, as well as their thoughts on the possibility for peace. Route 181 is more than four hours long and requires some patience. That said, it begins with great promise.

Sivan and Khleifi make no appointments to interview their subjects, instead questioning people at their most casual – outside their homes, at an army checkpoint, on a hike or at work. This provides the viewer with a more candid glimpse into the diverse sentiments of Israelis and Palestinians in the region. As the film progresses though, it becomes apparent that the filmmakers have an agenda on this journey. While at first the interviewers have little interaction with the interviewees, by the end of the film the interviewers are asking some fairly pointed, leading questions, even sometimes demanding that their subjects answer them in certain ways.

This reality is abundantly clear in the last interview of the film. The filmmakers insist that an elderly Moroccan-Isaeli man turn to the camera and say that he misses Morocco in Arabic. His Tunisian-born wife continues by saying that Israel has been a mistake and she wishes that she had never left Tunisia. This interview ensures that viewers will walk away from this film with an uneasy feeling in their guts.

Many of the Israelis interviewed relate their disappointments with their lives in Israel, as well as a tenuous desire to make the situation better. Many of them insist that they wished they had stayed in Morocco, Yemen, Tunisia or Iraq, which plays well to a particular audience who are looking for evidence of the brutality and uselessness of Israeli/Jewish "colonialism."

This film is meant for a particular audience – one that wants to see Israel as a failed experiment and, more, a failure because of Jewish tyranny. This does not mean that this is a film to avoid, but viewers should be conscious that Sivan and Khleifi are filmmakers making a film, choosing what is included and excluded. There are so many missing stories in this film and it behooves the viewers to be ever-conscious of these omissions.

Route 181 screens Friday, May 28, 2 p.m., at Pacific Cinémathèque.

– Basya Laye

Among the festival's other highlights are the choices for great documentary innovation of three local, independent curators/filmmakers, Alex MacKenzie, Ann Marie Fleming and Arlene Ami. MacKenzie's performance program, The Exhibitionists, explores the myth of documentary objectivity in hip-hop and in dance, on May 29. Fleming's feature choice, Sherman's March by Ross McElwee, looks at the topical exploration of personal meets political in filmmaking, and Ami takes viewers to the frontlines of activist filmmaking, featuring Canadian documentarians with Fourth World War – both of these films screen on May 27. The festival closes May 30 with Screaming Men, a documentary about the Finnish choir of the same name, as they travel across Europe and throughout Japan on a concert tour.

DOXA tickets are $20 at Bibliophile Books (2012 Commercial Dr.) and Videomatica (1855 West 4th Ave.), or at Ticketmaster, 604-280-4444 or www.ticketmaster.ca. There are $10 tickets

for people with low incomes, which are available at the DOXA office only: 604-646-3200. For more information, visit www.doxafestival.ca.

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