Tagged: Cape Breton Island Film Series
Bomber LeBlanc’s last act of defiance
Mary Cecilia “Bomber” LeBlanc, shown above with L’Arche assistant Mavis Mungai of Kenya at the 2007 Cape Breton Island Film Series party for l’Arche Cape Breton, died peacefully Thursday morning in her home at The Vineyard, a L’Arche residence in Orangedale, surrounded by friends and caregivers.
Death came six days before her 60th birthday, and, incredibly, hours before a provincial health bureaucrats were to meet to begin planning her involuntary removal from l’Arche, over protests of family, friends, and caregivers.
Mary was a small woman with a steely will and an outsized capacity for getting her own way—and then leading a chorus of laughter about the outcome. Deaf from birth and without speech, she was orphaned at age three and spent 30 years in institutional care before finding a new life at l’Arche, where she lived for the last 27 years.
In her eulogy at Sunday’s funeral, l’Arche Community Leader Jenn Power* described Mary as “a silent woman who spoke volumes.”
[C]learly, somewhere along the line, she made a decision: that she would not let the circumstances of her life define or limit her; that she would stand up to those who tried to keep her down and say, albeit without words, “You’re not the boss of me.” In the disability world today, there is so much emphasis on self-advocacy. Truly, Bomber was a self-advocate before her time….
Mary’s death was her final act of defiance. For some months now, we have been in discussions with the Department of Community Services about whether Mary’s needs would be better met in a nursing home. Her family and her community were strong advocates for supporting Mary in her home at The Vineyard. And yet, the process was moving forward. On Thursday, November 4th, Mary’s case was being heard, and it seemed obvious that she would be placed on a waiting list for nursing home care. Instead, on Thursday, Mary died — the first thing in her life she ever did in a hurry. A pretty powerful act of self-determination.
To the officials involved, this is, I am sure, a complex issue, replete with rules, protocols, standards, evaluations, criteria, and, no doubt, budgetary considerations. Yet the meeting that would decide Mary’s fate allowed for no participation by her family, her guardian, her community, or her friends—let alone by Mary herself.
Here is an issue where Health Minister Maureen MacDonald could show leadership by deliberating on some fundamental questions: Must every death be medicalized? Do Nova Scotians have the right to choose to die at home among those who love and care for them—even, and perhaps especially, Nova Scotians with disabilities?
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* Disclosure: As regular readers know, Jenn Power is my daughter-in-law; my son Silas, Jenn’s husband, also works at l’Arche Cape Breton.
TIFF is big, but this is bigger
My favorite film series opens its fall season tonight with this year’s surprise winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar: The Secret In Their Eyes, a movie that crosses genres: part thriller, love story, comedy, and political drama. Showtime: 7 p.m., at the Empire Theatre, 325 Prince Street, Sydney. Previews from WhatsGoinOn and The Post. Check out the links:
Oh yeah, that other film festival starts today, too.
Viral loneliness – update
Tanya Davis
Sandbar Music of Charlottetown, PEI, has released a soundtrack MP3 of the hit YouTube video, How To Be Alone.
Tanya Davis wrote and performed the poetry and music at the heart of the piece; Andrea Dorfman directed the film, which had been viewed just over 600 times when featured here July 30. (Find a partial account of its viral progress toward the current 1.4 million hits here.)
It’s plain that, aside from one crankypants Globe and Mail reviewer, lots of people want to hear music and poetry like Davis’s, and see moving pictures like Dorfman’s. The traditional distribution paradigm had little use for such artists, but in the Internet age, they — and we — have a chance to encounter one another. Once we were lonely, but now we have the long tail.
Sandbar Music, “the little music company that could,” is an interesting outfit that’s trying to nudge that process along, giving artists like Davis a way to —forgive the phrase — monetize their work.
Andrea Dorfman
You can download the How To Be Alone MP3 for just 99¢, and I urge you to do so. As Davis points out, “That’s less than a dollar.”
If you’re near Sydney on November 4, you can view the video on the big screen at the annual Cape Breton Island Film Series benefit for L’Arche Cape Breton. I urge you to do that, too. It will show with the feature film Babies, followed by a musical party and Lebanese buffet. We hope Dorfman and perhaps even Davis will be on hand.
You can sample and buy lots of several indie artists’ music on the Sandbar site, including a newly completed album by Davis.
Plastic bag
One of the nice discoveries in my role as manager and chief film-picker for the Cape Breton Island Film Series has been the movies of Ramin Bahrani, the Iranian-American director of dramas like Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, and Goodbye Solo. Bahrani portrays the extraordinary lives of ordinary people in a naturalistic style that is almost documentary in character. We were the only film series in Canada to show Chop Shop; by the time Goodbye Solo came out a year later, Bahrani’s movies were de rigueur on the indie circuit.
Bahrani grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Roger Ebert calls him “the new great American director.” Charlie Rose, the US Public Broadcasting Systems wonderful interviewer, talks with him here. Last September, the Venice Film Festival debuted an 18-minute Bahrani short that is an anthropomorphic account of the life of a plastic bag. In a whimsical touch, Bahrani tapped Werner Herzog, bad boy director of Grizzly Man and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, to voice the part of the bag.
Last week, Bahrani released Plastic Bag on YouTube, which gives me the chance to show it to you:
Milestone
Thursday night, the Cape Breton Island Film Series screened its 200th film, a milestone we had no thought of reaching when we began the series in January, 2003, with Bowling for Columbine. You can download a pdf list of all the films we’ve shown here, and you won’t find many turkeys. The list makes a great aide-mémoire at the video store.
Ten films I particularly liked were:
4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days
City of God
House of Sand
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Lost in Translation
Man on Wire
Rabbit Proof Fence
Shut Up and Sing
Thank You for Smoking
The Lives of Others
Hardly anyone liked:
Russian Arc
The Empire company’s head office and their fantastic staff in Sydney have been wonderful to work with. Many volunteers pitched in over the years, including Ron Keough, Terry and Lynda Casey, Sadie Richards, Ashley McKenzie, Nelson MacDonald, and many, many others. The ineffable Prof. Noreen Golfman of the MUN Cinema Series in St. John’s showed me how to do it, and held my hand through the first few months. Most rewarding of all, Cape Breton’s film-goers have been incredibly loyal and appreciative. Deep thanks all around.
Top photo: the late Ulrich Muehe in The Lives of Others; Bottom: Anamaria Marinca in 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days.
An infelicitous phrase – updated
The Harper Government’s ambivalent attitude toward immigration deserves more thoughtful consideration than I have time for this morning, but in light of yesterday’s release of a new guide for prospective Canadian Immigrants, a manual high in testosterone and shy on environmental values, I flag it here for future discussion.
An immigrant himself, Contrarian left yesterday’s Film Series benefit for L’Arche Cape Breton* thinking about the Senegalese immigrant cab driver at the centre of the featured movie — an ebullient character named Solo, brilliantly played by Souleymane Sy Savane, himself an immigrant to the US from the Ivory Coast. Solo is one of those characters you instinctively root for, a guy who makes you proud to live in a country that welcomes immigrants of all stripes.
As I left the theatre with these thoughts running through my head, I flipped on the radio to hear Immigration Minister Jason Kenney hectoring would-be immigrants about their responsibilities:
When you become a citizen, you’re not just getting a travel document into Hotel Canada. You are inheriting a set of responsibilities, of obligations as a citizen.
A travel document into Hotel Canada. Perhaps it was merely an off-note in an otherwise skillful presentation, but the minister’s infelicitous phrase was striking for its portrayal of the immigrant as other, while its vehemence conveyed deep conviction. Comments welcome.
[Updated] Dennis Falvy demurs:
If the concept of ‘other’ is bothersome, how does one approach the definition of being Canadian? Unless ‘Canadian’ means ‘citizen of the world’, there will have to be a distinction between being a Canadian, and not being a Canadian, a distinction that leads ineluctably to being the one or the ‘other’.
And even if one favours the concept of being a citizen of the world, the seats of power, and sources of human abuse, in the world do not accept this idea yet, and there is no apparatus to support or enforce it. I for one would prefer that my citizenship distinguished me from some of the rest of the world, and being Canadian works just fine (at least until Stephen Harper succeeds in bamboozling voters into allowing him to destroy the country).
As for testosterone playing a large part in the new citizenship manual, I presume you are referring to the part played by the military in Canadian history. The thousands of women who have served and sacrificed for Canada, especially those now serving, would no doubt find fault with your choice of words, particularly this close to Remembrance Day. Now that was an infelicitous phrase.
Miles Tompkins draws a connection between Kenney’s musings and his government’s treatment of Maher Arar:
“When you become a citizen, you’re not just getting a travel document into Hotel Canada. You are inheriting a set of responsibilities, of obligations as a citizen.” Yes, and when you are a Minister of the Crown, you also have a set of responsibilities under international treaties which are the law of the land. There is a bit of an obligation there.
(*) Ironically, L’Arche Cape Breton relies heavily on temporary foreign workers, young people who spend a year or two in the community before returning to their native lands. Their work features long hours, few days off, intense personal care of men and women with significant developmental disabilities, and the extraordinary personal growth that comes from that experience in the L’Arche context. In some cases, the work these young people do fulfills the national service obligations of their home country.
O what a party!
At Sydney’s Waterfront Pavillion Thursday night, it’s The Party Of The Year — and that’s saying something in Cape Breton!
The Cape Breton Island Film Series‘ 4th annual benefit for L’Arche Cape Breton gets under way at 7 pm at the Empire Theatre with the acclaimed indie film GOODBYE SOLO, the story of two men from completely different backgrounds who form an unlikely friendship.
At 9, the action shifts to the Joan Harriss Cruise Pavillion, next to the Big Fiddle, for live music and dancing to the Blues Merchants and Cape Breton’s best Lebanese buffet. The whole L’Arche Community will be there, and they love to party. So it’s a chance to meet a remarkable group of men and women.
Tickets, available at the door, are $10 for the film; $20 for the party; or just $25 for both. Every dollar goes to L’Arche, thanks to the generosity of AECOM, AMEC, CBCL, City Printers, Conestoga Rovers, Empire Theatre, Framework Cycle and Fitness, Ramsay’s Honda, Sampson MacDougall, Schwartz and Co., Seaside Wireless, Sydney Credit Union, Unsworth Kachafanas, VMP Group.
In Cape Breton this fall
- Carol Kennedy photo
Cape Breton’s Fall colors peak between the first and second weekends of October, and this year foliage tourists have four worthy festivals to chose from.
The Hike the Highlands festival offers 23 guided hikes in a variety of distances, difficulties, and locations around the Cabot Trail from September 11 to 20. The festival also features workshops on nature photography, GPS, and geocaching, together with various social and musical events.
The first annual inaugural Cabot Trail Writers’ Festival in North River, October 2 to 4, features readings and workshops by authors Donna Morrissey (Kit’s Law & What They Wanted), Douglas Arthur Brown (Quintet), Bill Conall (The Rock in the Water), and Susan Zettell (The Checkout Girl). The always lively and welcoming musicians who populate the St. Anne’s Loop, including Paul MacDonald, Otis Tomas, and Ed Woodsworth, will be out in force for a cabaret on the festival’s opening night.
Over nine days from October 9 to 17, the spectacularly successful Celtic Colours International Festival will stage almost 50 concerts across the island draws, together with literally hundreds of affiliated cultural workshops, seminars, and community events. Visitors from all over the world come to Cape Breton for Celtic Colours, but curiously few from mainland Nova Scotia.
Finally, modesty does not prevent us from mentioning the Cape Breton Island Film Series, which presents 13 great independent films on 13 consecutive Thursdays, starting tomorrow night and running through December 3 at the Empire Theatre, 325 Prince Street, Sydney. Highlights include The Hurt Locker (September 10), Food, Inc. (September 17), Goodbye Solo (November 12, the festival’s annual benefit for L’Arche Cape Breton), and In the Loop (December 3).
