“Victory, for those born rich, is easy. The rest of us, we have to fight,” says Isabella’s father, talking about finding ways to buy young Isabella’s ballet shoes and tights, in Only When I Dance, released on DVD by Film Movement on December 7, 2010. Isabella and Irlan are two promising dance students of color in a dance school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, run by Mariza, a former dancer who now wants to help others as she was once helped. They live in a poor section of Rio and their only hope is to try to gain membership in a foreign ballet troupe in order to succeed.

British filmmaker Beadie Finzi felt happy to be making a documentary about a pivotal year in the life of one boy (Irlan) and one girl (Isabella), “a fairy tale in a fairy tale city without having it seem like one huge cliche” filled with their aspirations and hard work in ballet instead of a film about what tourists see in Rio or the gang violence there. Each has poor parents who have had to sacrifice and borrow money from loan sharks to start them on their way to trying to having professional careers in ballet. Both the children and their families have the dream of leaving their neighborhoods where bullet shots ring out every day even as you’re hanging up the laundry outside and people die from these shots, but classical
ballet, no matter what your talent, is usually the domain of the white and the privileged.

A competition in New York City, the Youth America Grand Prix, has Irlan and Isabella attempting to win places to represent Brazil. As they’re going to school and then taking dance classes for the rest of each day, Mazilla sees these two as the most likely to win if they continue their focusing and strenuous practicing, Irlan as the most promising for his age (17) and Isabella as the best black classical female ballet student. Irlan’s mother says, “It’s in our blood, deep down Brazillians know how to dance,” and she and her husband met through dancing. But out of 120 candidates, only 25 will be chosen. After competing and three students are chosen from their school, including Irlan and Isabella, there’s the problem of money for the trip, primarily each person’s expensive airfare, hotel accommodations, and the competition fee. Having won first place, Irlan gets a scholarship, but Isabella’s family try to take out loans and painstakingly save for her trip fees, including her mother, who goes back to work for six months to qualify for a loan. Isabella is told that she has to lose weight although she is already dieting as much as she can; her body form just isn’t classically thin and she’s also pulled a muscle in her leg that makes it painful for her to land after jumps. On top of that she’s told by the doctor that she has an allergic dermatitus reaction on her skin caused by stress and anxiety.

Meantime Irlan goes to another competition, the Prix de Lausanne in Switzerland (where he also sees flakes of snow for the first time). There he dances the story of Nijinsky’s life and a juror says that she cried after seeing his entire giving of himself in a beautiful dance effort. Seven scholarships are given, and Irlan wins one of them and is told he will have a beautiful career.

How do Irlan and Isabella fare in New York City? The tension mounts and Isabella stays up all night on the plane just to see the lovely lights of New York when they land, a moment that she says she will remember forever. Director Beadie Finzi tells us that the year spent on this documentary was with two wonderful people that anyone would want to know and that she will continue contacting them and following their progress for the rest of their lives. What could have been a problem, the inherent language barrier, was easily solved through using her assistant producer as a translator.

Only When I Dance reminds us of being young and hopeful and thinking that every crisis can be surmounted through faith and diligence. Finzi has made the film pleasant and easy to watch, as if we were viewing two of our own friends! Highly recommended for those who love to be inspired.

Grade: A
Total Running Time: 78 minutes
Directed by Beadie Finzi
British documentary film made in Brazil in Portuguese with English subtitles
With Irlan Santos and Isabella Coracy
Official Selection of the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival
Bonus Features:
Only When I Dance Featurette
Only When I Dance Production Featurette
Film Movement’s monthly movie short, Lil’ A, directed byKatharina Sophie Brauer, Germany, 11 minutes

Only When I Dance DVD Review is a post from: Movie Room Reviews

Nurse. Fighter. Boy, released by Film Movement on 11-10-10, is a celebration of the seeds of life left in a nurse, Jude (played by Karen LeBlanc), who so much wanted to conceive her young boy that she braved sickle cell anemia to do it (as did Director Charles Officer’s sister in real life). It is also about Silence (Clark Johnson), an illegal fighter whose past life has left him too filled and affected by brutality and longing for the healing art of teaching students in a gym, and a boy, Ciel (Daniel J. Gordon), who as his mother’s (Jude’s) son believes in magic and tells us “My mother said that magic lives everywhere” and “the people you love never go away.” The title also symbolizes three aspects of all of our lives, in nursing (nurturing and healing), fighting (for survival), and the innocence of being young and unjaded (the boy Ciel).

Jude works at night at a hospital and while she is there her son’s young friend Ruth (Ndidi Onukwulu) comes over and plays board games with Ciel and they try to explore the world of thought together. During these same nights Silence fights illegally for bets in a land where anything goes and someone is always being damaged. The owner of a local gym dies and Silence gravitates there (in the office a sign states The Fighter Decides) for a healthier and more loving interaction with youth in a legal boxing environment. Jude starts to decline as her blood cell count rises, becoming unable to do many of her nursing duties, and she runs into Silence, who immediately severes his connection with a loveless woman from the underworld in hopes of creating a life with Jude. Jude rides her bicycle past Silence’s apartment every night on her way to work and eventually they get together.

Despite her sickle cell anemia disease, Jude emanates hope; despite his harsh past, Silence believes in the future; and Ciel is learning that although there is magic life sometimes gives us harder burdens to bear. Nurse. Fighter. Boy is worthy of our attention and respect as we view people who try to make the world better despite their own wounds and hardships. Director Officer says he wanted to show “people of a different cultural background in Toronto, Canada,” and that he wanted to “humanize some black people” – and he has succeeded!

Grade: B
Canada, 93 minutes
Directed by Charles Officer
With Karen LeBlanc, Clark Johnson, Daniel J. Gordon and Ruth Ndidi Onukwulu
With Short of The Month bonus film Afterglow, directed by Lisa Blatter, Switzerland, 16 minutes

Nurse. Fighter. Boy DVD Review is a post from: Movie Room Reviews

Jaffa, the Film Movement movie released on 11-9-10, is about prejudice, fear, family, secrets and the harsh effects of long-term lying. A romance between Mali (Dana Ivgy) and Toufik (Mahmud Shalaby), a mechanic in Mali’s father’s (Moni Moshonoo’s) garage is not announced because Toufik and his father Hassan (Hussein Yassin Mahajneh), who also works there as a mechanic, are Palestinians, while Mali and her father are Jewish Israelis. A tragedy occurs and its true effects don’t begin to unfurl until ten years later.

Ossi (Ranit Elkabetz), Mali’s mother, has a strong grip on her family, so that Mali can never really develop on her own. Meir (Roy Assaf), Mali’s brother, is incorrigible and arrogant and Ossi also dislikes him. Around this relatively well-to-do family the plot revolves, with the help of the underling mechanic employees.

Yet love often crosses ethnic boundaries (we desire what we see often, as The Silence Of The Lambs tells us), and although Mali lies to Toufik after their marriage plans are unhinged by the tragedy and much time goes by (nine to ten years) before they see each other again, Mali longs to institute her own ways and personality in her own family, which changes everything.

Mali is silent and fearful throughout most of the movie while the father is authoritative and confident and the mother Ossi is self-indulgent. Meir feels as if he doesn’t belong in the family since he’s not responsible and steadfast and likes to go out a lot and drink with his friends at night. What on the outside appears to be a normal upper-middle-class contented family on the inside is a chaos and zoo of emotions, both shouted and unspoken.

The key of Jaffa is in its plot and in what can occur over long periods of time. Director Keren Yedeya wanted to create a political film but one on personal grounds rather than in riots and hard-edged proclamations. She is also interested in “high” and “low” culture and the meanings of each, which blend and blur as we watch this film.

An Official Film Selection at the Cannes, Toronto, Palm Springs, Rio de Janeiro, Hamptons, Warsaw and Warsaw Jewish Film Festivals, it is easy to see why Jaffa is so popular: it is emotionally accessible and engaging and we identify with the characters even though we may never find ourselves in their situations. I highly recommend this film!

Grade: A
Israeli film in Hebrew with English subtitles
105 minutes
Diected by Keren Yedaya
With Dana Ivgy, Mahmud Shalaby, Moni Moshonov, Hussein Yassin Mahajneh, Ranit Elkabetz and Roy Assaf
Special Feature: Short Of The Month, Lost Paradise, an Israeli film directed by Mihal Brezis and Oded Binnum, 10 minutes

Jaffa DVD Review is a post from: Movie Room Reviews

This is a movie about truth – or, rather, the lack of it when you’re little. Then everyone lives in dreams, dreams of their father’s World War II stories, dreams of having a crush on Anne Tremblay (Elizabeth Adam), dreams of possessing Playboys with which to make friends at a new school. Director Ricardo Trogo remembers his year in 6th grade in 1981 (released on DVD by Film Movement in 2009), which he culled from a journal of over 200 pages of childhood memories, with great empathy for the little boy he once was, and with apparent nostalgia.

Ricardo (Jean-Carl Boucher) has an Italian father, Benito (Claudio Colangelo) and a French mother, Claudette (Sandrine Bisson), and a little sister named Nadia (Rose Adam) who’s lost her cat Caramel. The family has moved to a new, overly expensive home that they can’t afford and everything seems to hinge on money. Ricardo’s classmates all seem rich to him in their fashionable K-ways (jackets without zippers), and they’re too expensive for him to buy one. His mother keeps telling him to get a job selling and delivering newspapers like his cousin did, and his sister’s new retainer costs four thousand dollars, which sets the family way back, while at the same time their mortgage payments shoot up.

So Ricardo doesn’t know what to do. He has a crush on Anne Tremblay, who’s been assigned to help teach him longhand (since the students in his new school already know it and he had just begun studying it at the school from which he transferred). He’s positive Anne placed her hand intentionally against his on their school desk, but then she never recognizes him socially. He wants to be in the cool gang of guys at school although one boy keeps mocking him by calling him Crunchy (after a breakfast cereal). He wants his mother to be happy but she always seems harsh and miserable about money. He sees his younger sister as a nuisance and loses her when they’re out looking for her cat. He tries to con his father into giving him five dollars a week.

Director Trigo helps us remember a time of confusion and joy during which we’re all learning how to act socially, when to lie and when not to lie, and the hardest one of all – how to deal with our families. Does Ricardo succeed in winning Anne over and becoming a cool guy? Does he confess his lies, and to whom? Certainly Trigo treats his former young self with kindness, knowing that the obsessions of yesteryear mean nothing now.

A comedy about quarreling and a treat about “the truth,” 1981 is good for everyone – children struggling through their lives and elders remembering their former struggles. This film also garnered many honors, including being the official film selection at the Cinequest, Montreal, Palm Springs, Dubai, and Rome Film Festivals.

Grade: A
Running Time: 102 minutes
Canadian, in French with English subtitles
Directed by Ricardo Troy
With Jean-Claude Boucher, Elizabeth Adam, Claudio Colangelo, Sandrine Bisson, and Rose Adam
With This Month’s Short Film, a stop-action animation, Lupe And Bruno, directed by Marc Riba and Anna Solanas, Spain, 5 minutes

1981 – The Year I Became A Liar is a post from: Movie Room Reviews

Bomber, Film Movement’s October 5, 2010 DVD monthly offering, is a British/American film directed by Paul Cotter and at first appears to just be about a young man in his late 20s, Ross (Shane Taylor) trapped in a car with his mother and father who are vacationing in Europe, when he’d much rather be with his girlfriend Leslie (Sara Kessel). But the name of the film is appropriate since it’s about so much more: the guilt of a pilot in World War II, the slow deterioration of a marriage (albeit with a couple during an era when you weren’t supposed to show much emotion), and the struggles of a young man to actualize who he is while being depressed about his unemployment after having spent many years at art school.

Director Paul Cotter, with his real-life mother, father and sister, did just that: went on a spontaneous holiday to Europe (driving from country to country and not deciding where they’d go next until the last moment) where they interacted with locals. Paul Cotter writes: “….how strange it was to be an adult stuck in a car with your parents for three weeks. The roles are reversed from the holidays you had as a child. You end up doing the driving and your parents sit in the back and ask, ‘Are we there yet?’ But all the while you are still their child, and what’s worse….you tend to act like one” and “So like I say, the plan was simple, take three actors to Germany, and have them interact with real people. And that’s what I did. The result is Bomber.”

The true flavor of the movie does come out in these brief interactions with real people, some surly, some kind, some helpful, some mis-leading as Dad Alistair (Benjamin Whitrow) searches for a spot in France on a 60-year-old map he’s been carrying around. Mum Valerie (Eileen Nicols) wants only to go to a place in Warsaw where shoes are hand-made, but for some odd reason both the father and the son want to deny her this experience. And Ross keeps fretting that his girlfriend Leslie, back in Great Britain, is leaving him because she doesn’t want him on this trip plus is tired of him not bringing home any money.

The roads and landscapes of various European countries become an ever-changing character in the film as we discover them along with the “unhappy” family. All are competent actors who make me believe that they are related in many ways, which, besides blood and support, include disapproval and intolerance. Yet what occurs on the trip itself seems to draw everyone together in the end. (Dad says to Mum, “I hate you” while son Ross smiles and retorts, “Dad, that’s a start.”)

Grade: A
Running Time: 84 minutes
Directed by Paul Cotter
With Benjamin Whitrow, Shane Taylor, Eileen Nichols and Sara Kessel
Short Film Feature Of The Month: Edgar, directed by Fabian Busch, from Germany, 12 minutes

Bomber DVD Review is a post from: Movie Room Reviews