Alice and I have each come up with our own schedule for Day 3. This has us seeing two films together and two films on our own. Alice’s first film is Shooting Beauty and mine is Cloud 9. It is a rare movie that deals with love among the elderly and much rarer still one that shows it with all of the beauty, awkwardness, passion, and power of its physicality on full display, but this is the subject of Cloud 9. Inge (Ursula Werner) begins an affair with Karl (Horst Westphal) and falls in love. In the full bloom of romance, she feels guilty about her betrayal of her husband Werner (Horst Rehberg). What should she do? Her daughter Petra (Steffi Kühnert) counsels her to enjoy her secret romance, but make sure she keeps it secret. She doesn’t, but the serendipity of our screening has a technical malfunction right at the moment that this seems to be happening. When the screening resumes, however she has explained her relationship with her new lover has already happened. We, the audience—this audience, doesn’t know whether we have missed a few crucial seconds of the movie or not. Perhaps the director has left this scene—how she explains her new-found passion to the man she still loves and has loved for 30 years—to our imagination. However much she still has feelings for Werner and desires to share this latest discovery of her life, the revelation has ramifications that she had not foreseen. This is a very sensitive and powerful story about love.

The Necessities of Life is a terrific film with several messages. Initially, it is a history lesson about the horrific disease Tuberculosis that was a scourge on human existence culling countless thousands of men, women, and children well before their time. The film is set in the 1950’s just as the medical professionals were beginning to find effective treatments. However, the treatments of the day required prolonged hospitalization and isolation from the community at large. For an Inuit hunter like Tivii (Natar Ungalaak), this means dislocation from his home community and his family, transported from Baffin Island in northernmost Canada to Quebec City, and then immersed into hospital confinement surrounded by French-speaking medical staff and patients. Despite good prospects for eventual recovery, Tivii does poorly overwhelmed by a profound sense of isolation that is at once both physical and cultural. The task of breaking through Tivii’s sense of isolation and re-activating his will to live is foisted onto a young nurse named Carole (Éveline Gélinas). She eventually figures out that the necessities of life require more than appropriate basic medical care for dread diseases and finds what is needed for Tivii. Along the way we do, too. The film does edge into melodrama, but its heart and its perceptions allow it to earn the lumps-in-the-throat and the moistened eyes that it seeks. The film is well-acted and engaging throughout. This surely will be on the leader board for audience favorite when the festival closes.

One movie that I wouldn’t expect to be making an appearance on the leader board for audience favorite is Les Memoires des Anges (Memories of Angels). This is a montage of film created from clips of many different films. There certainly is a fascination one can experience in viewing footage from old films, seeing actors young who are now old or even ageless in the great beyond, and witnessing historical events captured on archival film. However, one has to have a way to identify and interpret these pieces of film. Are the men and women sloshing through the snow and mud of the streets of Montreal merely shoppers captured archivally on a particular day of a particular winter month during a particular distant yesteryear or was this part of a drama imagined by a scriptwriter and a director? The film poured forth clip after clip with scant dialogue and even scantier captions. After a half-hour in which I could not identify any of the films or organize the array of film clips into anything that made sense to me, I left. Certainly someone who was more connected to Montreal and could identify the places or the people or re-insert the clip into the context of the film from which it was extracted might have gained significantly more pleasure from watching this film than I did. Unfortunately, from my subsequent conversations with a few were in the same screening, my feeling of not having any hook to use in making sense of the film seems to have been shared by a number of others.

Having fled from Memories of Angels, I decided to join my wife who was watching Flame and Citron. This was a film that we had seen in Toronto during the Toronto International Film Festival. Both of us had enjoyed it quite a lot when we saw it there and it certainly held up well for a second viewing or at least for a second viewing of the last hour plus of the film.

The final film of the day was Karen Gehres’ documentary Begging Naked. This is a difficult film to watch because it tells us about the disturbing, yet compelling life that Elise Bainbridge Hill has lived and then her progressive descent into mental illness. It should be noted that this is her life primarily in her own words and pictures (she has provided artwork and old photographs of herself). There are very few people other than Elise that appear in the film. There is just one friend who offers much in the way of testimony. Elise’s story begins as an abused teen, then a teenaged runaway, then prostitute and drug addict, then a stripper, and then finally a homeless person and woman with mentally illness. She tells us about her colorful personal history for everything except her mental illness—that we witness for ourselves. This is a very powerful and affecting film but due to its singular point-of-view we are left with a myriad of questions. We accept her story pretty much on face-value supported only by a handful of snapshots of Elise and her own artistic renderings of the strip joint milieu and the other women with whom she shared it. We suddenly find ourselves dealing with a narrator who has become totally and completely unreliable as the mental illness takes over and she tells things that couldn’t possibly true. However, is what she has told us to that point actually true or is it just much more believable in that it could have happened? We then have questions about whether she is receiving any services to help her survive on the street and to help treat her mental illness. If she is, what are those services? If not, is that because nothing is available or because she has rejected such intrusions from others no matter how well-meaning they may be. In fact, through her entire life she has been on the margin of society and might have benefited from interventions to assist her. Did she fall through the safety net, did she avoid it, or was no net ever available for someone like her? Despite its limitations, this film is certainly a powerful documentary showing this woman—creative and articulate—who has forged a life on the margins of our society through a combination of choices she has made and choices that were made for her by others.