Calgary International Film Festival’s Presentation of
A Halába Tábcoltatott Leány (The Maiden Danced to Death)

Laszlo Zsolt (Gyula Udvaros) and Bea Melkvi (Mari) on the Banks of the Danube.

Hungarian and Slovenian folk dances are so intricate, it takes years of practice to acquire the necessary precision and dexterity before the dancers can proceed at the breakneck speed of a professional company. One misstep, one forgotten element of movement, one careless moment of distraction and a Rube Goldberg’s progression of disasters unspins. When everything goes perfectly, however, the dance leaves viewers breathless, pulses racing like the dancers themselves.

The Maiden Danced to Death, a labyrinthine tale of treachery, betrayal and revenge, written and directed by Endre Hules, is like one of those folk dances. Each detail has been placed so precisely within the story’s structure that revelations unfold with breathtaking élan — always fresh, startling, unpredictable and unveiled at the moment of greatest impact. It takes a wild spin across two of the most beautiful cities in the world, Budapest and Montréal.

Twenty years after Pista Udvaros, played by Endre Hules, has been exiled from communist Hungary, he returns with a purpose. From the moment he sets foot outside the arrivals terminal under overcast skies and commandeers a taxi from under the people who hailed it, his character is established. Pista means ‘crowned’ and Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography takes us with him over Budapest’s famous ironwork bridge and up the cliff face, where palaces, the great Cathedral and grand hotels show Udvaros overseeing vast tracts of the Danube and its surrounding flatlands — a man of far-reaching vision, who knows exactly what he wants and allows nothing to impede him.

A jubilant reunion takes place with Udvaros’ younger brother, Gyula, and sister-in-law and one-time lover, Mari, in their dance studio, a place which has fallen on hard times now that the communists are no longer in power. The sedate colour pallette and muted lighting reinforce a sense of hidebound tradition. Even the signature company dance, The Maiden Danced to Death, has not changed since Pista left.

Bea Melkvi (Mari) and Steve Court (Endres Hules) engaged in an elaborate chess match.

Court is a cypher. Is the elder of the two brother’s return a matter of celebration, or a warning of darker business to come? And what has happened to the family he left behind in Canada?

A phone call, to the senior Gyula Udvaros, their father — forced upon Court by his brother and faced with resignation and acceptance — results in an exchange of bitter words, as both brothers seemed to know it must. These personal relationships are political, and the end of the old regime leads to a new power balance, reflected in Hungary and the Balkans.

Ancient Fertility Rituals and Blood Sport

As the movie’s title indicates, folk dances contain symbols for the social orders of their creators, and may include or reflect darker, more barbaric practices stretching back through the past to tribal origins. Just as Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring addressed the oft-times brutal rituals of the ancient Slavs, the Honvéd Dance Company’s Eastern European folk dances also depict a similar element of blood sport.

The company’s lead female dancer must pass her ‘crown of flowers’ to a younger woman just as they are on the cusp of international success. Marriages serve up aridity and deceit, meeting vulnerability with hostility and bitter humiliation. Children are alienated from parents. A father is publicly beaten in front of his daughter in a scene which pivots so much between ossified tradition and liberty, the viewer must choose where their own sympathies lie and what the cost of those beliefs entail in very graphic terms: who is led off in chains? Who is set free?

“The Maiden Danced to Death” referred to a punitive measure taken against a young woman who offended the strict and narrow social codes of farming communities and villages. A girl, deemed too flirtatious and seductive, is culled from society by those she rejects. She is danced from young man to young man until she is spun out of their circle and ostracized, left exhausted, without protection, as good as dead.

Shortly into the film, we learn the full cost of Court’s exile, but until the climax, we never learn the identity of the ‘maiden’ in this particular dance; every principle and most of the supporting actors have their moment of public excoriation. We only know for certain that the dance unfolds irresistably before us.

When the brothers ask why girls allowed themselves to be subjected to this sport, Mari explains, “What could they do? When you’re asked to dance, you dance.”

Smoke and Mirrors

The techniques of mirrors and smokescreens which Hules uses to misdirect his viewers recall the mechanical wonders and Vaudevillian stagecraft imported from Prague, Budapest and those great Medieaval capitals. Mirroring starts in earnest as we track Court back to the mountain over Montréal. The city is less stately and more modern, but the scene stretching beneath him is almost identical to the landscape he surveyed from the cliffs over Budapest. Emergency sirens provide an omen of what he awaits, both in his marriage and the company he founded.

Much is made of pacts with the devil, an archaic trope favoured by Eastern Europe pre-dating Goethe. Binding agreements, Machiavellan negotiations, masked identities — both onstage and behind the scenes — feature throughout the film, and it seems as though the plot will unfold with the usual cost of Faustian bargain, but this underestimates Hules’ skill as a storyteller. The true role of the contract is so unexpected as to leave the viewer nonplussed.

When Court tells Mari, “I’m just a ghost,” it seems as though ruin and desolation are inevitable, but Hules’ pulls out another astonishing surprise — one which shows the vibrancy and relevance of folk dancing to our modern age, just when it seems the craft no longer reflects our modern world.

From the Calgary International Film Festival, the film now proceeds to France.

A Halába Tábcoltatott Leány (The Maiden Danced to Death)

A joint Hungarian, Canadian and Slovenian production written and directed by Endre Hules.

Photography: Vilmos Zsigmond

Cast :
Endre Hules: Pista Udvaros/Steve Court
Bea Melkvi: Mari Udvaros
Laszlo Zsolt: Gyula Udvaros, Jr.
Boris Cavazza: Gyula Udvaros, Sr.
Deborah Kara Unger: Lynne Court
Stephen McHattie: Ernie Hatchet

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By Simone Keiran and Aidie Keiran-Arney

A collective theme runs through the short movies crafted by young filmmakers for the 2011 Youth by Youth Film Competition, an annual feature of the Calgary International Film Festival: the problems they perceive are apocalyptic in nature, overwhelming in scope, and hopes are fragile and tenuous. Even at the elementary school level, they are anxious to reach out and overcome the experience of alienation between people. The most innocuous and lighthearted of the films had philosophical inquiry at their core, not to mention crushing social critiques and violent explosions. These young filmmakers have wrestled and wrangled the monstrous scale of these problems into scenes and stories small enough to fit through the camera iris. The results were surprisingly elegant.

The choices of storytelling techniques and imagery used enough creative and intelligent variety that Cathy McKee, director of the Reel Fun Film Festival and a judge, mentioned it right off the hop: “Everyone always says that making a choice is difficult, but this year, we really mean it! It was so hard to choose, we decided to include some honourable mentions.”

Young Filmmakers Highlight the Heavy Lifting Ahead for Today’s Youth

In Integral Theory, Nannak Sobhil, writer and co-director, and Jasha Makan, co-director, combine the theme of alienation and the investigation of what constitutes an alternate dimension, both, into a very cerebral exploration of consciousness itself.

The disaffection, boredom and loneliness which Iklan Kuan’s lead character experiences prompt him to undertake dangerous risks in order to re-create, in physical form, the ‘Fourth Dimensional’ state of disconnection he perceives in his friends when they sign off from the ‘Second Dimensional’ virtual reality. The use of his physical body as the guinea pig in an experiment involving comas resonates closely with David Gilbert’s 2004 novel, The Normals, where another over-educated and alienated young man strives to overcome his existential futility and unemployment problems by hiring his body out to test experimental-phased pharmaceuticals. Sobhil and Makan quietly dispatch what, at first, seemed to be an open-ended resolution with a shocking and provocative declaration.

Along a similar vein, there was the lesser realized speculative sci-fi piece, The Scissors about a special pair of the things capable of snipping wormholes between dimensions. The visuals wavered between a few oddly framed images to highly saturated scenes and original illustrations. I wasn’t sure if the director intended for the lead character to be an unreliable narrator by the certain inconsistencies which arose between his actions and his sermons, but that was the final effect. Although, at times, the delivery bordered on pedantic, the filmmaker approached the subject with imagination and flair.

This was followed by the sombre post-apocalyptic prose-poem, The Plant. A traveller in tattered clothing wanders through sepia-tinted badlands, struggling to foster hope in the washed-out landscape. The extreme contrasts of light and dark values and shimmering, solarized edges say more about life in extremis, where light is too brilliant and harsh, and darkness too solid. The camera work in this piece was breathtaking.

Black Snow, about the 1917 Halifax Harbour explosion, was a three-part composite documentary, that involved a full classroom of cast and crew: the first scenes being re-enactments from the collision, which set off the catastrophic chain of events; the second involved a news report style recitation of facts, interspersed with images of the modern-day harbour, the park, schools and artifacts; the third involved a musical ballad performed by a Halifax elementary school student superimposed over period clips and stills which evoked the history of the region. The various pieces linked modern and early 20th century Halifax together, to show how much the city was shaped by this event. This was the piece that won the elementary level prize.

Alienation returned in the claymation short, Be the Hero; a plea to save our oceans from impending environmental apocalypse was at the heart of another stop-motion piece, Destruction of Construction; and a fable about the folly of pride was the key of the classical drawing-based re-telling of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Fir Tree. Only the very clever and amusing stop-motion animated object short, Epic Car Race, made a complete dash away from pedagogy and angst.

A 15-Year-Old Weighs In

Since this special feature was about youth, I brought my teenager, Aidie, along to gain her feedback and discuss how the shows affected her.

“I found all the shows were very well done. My favourite was Rock, Paper, Scissors.”

This was the senior high level prizewinning entry — an amusing stop-motion cautionary tale about a sore loser and the abuse of seemingly absolute power — by Sarah Clark, with some assistance from her brother, Chad.

“I liked it because of the creativity and simplicity. The techniques which went into making the film brought out a quality which was very near perfect.”

Nathan Pronyshyn, Stage Director for Vertigo “Y” Theatre and judge, also praised Clark’s seamless animation and concise, elegant storytelling.

“I absolutely loved The Lonely Rock,” Aidie continued. “It was utterly cute, a simple story about a rock who can find no one like him. It was slightly emotional and had a lot of truth to it. In a way, we are all ‘Lonely Rocks’.”

The original Lonely Rock in question has been removed from its element, and its quest through foreign terrain for companionship of a particular sort —that of others like itself — recalls the vulnerability of the baby bird in P. D. Eastman’s classic preschool storybook, “Are You My Mother?”

Aidie’s final choice was the judge’s elementary school level honourable mention The Birthday in which construction paper cut-out explosions and clouds of smoke brilliantly conveyed a cat’s sentiments about the things it hates, “I had no idea what the creator was trying to say, but the colours were so bright and the randomness of the plot made everyone laugh.”

When it came to the sobering content, “All of the short films had a strong moral theme or warning statement about what could happen. I found that the messages were subtle enough that it didn’t feel as though the filmmakers were scolding us, or acting parental and telling us what to do. They raised a lot of interesting points for discussion.

“For my part, I prefered when information was not spoken in a flat monotone, as I lost focus and drifted off, and I also prefered the bright coloured images over the sepia tones and old photos.”

The Youth by Youth Film Competition has been an important component of the Calgary International Film Festival for several years. Films accepted into this portion of the festival must be between thirty seconds and seven minutes in length, and directed by filmmakers who are between nine and eighteen years in age. The content may be fiction or nonfiction. The competition provides an excellent venue to see the talent which is emerging in young filmmakers these days, as well as a chance to see what’s on their minds.

“When I was a kid, my friends and I would shoot films, but we had no place to show them, except a few sketchy sites,” said Andrew Phung, the show’s MC and program director. “Now, these kids are building themselves major audiences on youtube and other sites, and it shows in their films. It’s a whole new world for filmmakers.”

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THE EMBARGO COLLECTIVE, a series of seven short films by an international group of experienced filmmakers. The films are the culmination of a 2-year collaborative project developed out of the Indigenous Film & Media Arts Festival in Toronto.

The filmmakers featured in this event are Helen Haig-Brown (Tsilhqot’in, British Columbia); Zoe Leigh Hopkins (Heiltsuk/Mohawk); Lisa Jackson (Cree); Taika Waititi (Maori Te Whanau-a-Apanui, New Zealand); Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Creek, USA); Rima Tamou (Bulgunnwarra/Nga Ruahine Rangi, North Queensland, Australia) and Blackhorse Lowe (Navaho, USA).

The Embargo Collective resulted out of a challenge issued by the ImagiNATIVE film organization similar to the one documented in Lars Von Trier’s “The Five Obstructions”, where he dared his mentor to recreate a film five times, each time adhering to a different set of rules. The seven indigenous artists of The Embargo Collective were challenged by ImagiNATIVE to impose a set of limitations upon each other in order to test how essential their collective and collaborative process was to the films they produced. Their work is said to have become more intimate and profound as a result. They also developed a stronger collective sense with each other.

Friday November 19 @ 7:30 pm
CSIF Sofa Cinema
J2, 2711 Battleford Ave. SW (Currie Barracks)
Calgary, AB
Google-Map coordinates
Tickets at the CSIF Offices in advance or at the door.
www.csif.org
(403) 205-4747

Aboriginal Youth Animation Project Screening

March 20, 2010
5:00 PM
Plaza Theatre, 1133 Kensington Road, NW
FREE!

Meet the filmmakers. Reception with refreshments to follow at Quickdraw Animation Society
201, 351 – 11 Avenue, SW.

SHOW US YOUR SHORTS FILM FESTIVAL (SUYS)
March 25 – 27, 2010

3 day passes for $12 available at Bird Dog Video:
1333 – 16 Ave. SW, Calgary, AB, T3C 0Z7
(403) 398-2283

The Show Us Your Shorts Short-Film Format Festival was launched in 2009 by a fourth-year  film student at the University of Calgary after her professor suggested she volunteer at a film festival. She originally recruited classmates, Beth Sawatzky, Emma Levine, Jessica Fralick and Immanuel Nwachukwu to help out as volunteers with the Film Studies 441 class project, which investigated five international film festivals and adopted the most successful templates for jury selection and awards, marketing and legal. They also wanted to cultivate a more vibrant arts community.

The 2010 SUYS Opening Night Gala Screenings begin March 25th, 7:00 PM at The Plaza Theatre, 1133 Kensington Rd. NW, Calgary.

Famed Short Film animator, Emily Hubley’s, will premiere the Alberta debut of her feature film, The Toe Tactic [Suggested ages: 14+], presented in partnership with GIRAF (The Giant Incandescent Resonating Animation Festival) and Quick Draw Animation Society, with music by Yo La Tengo. Hubley was the artistic director for “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” 

The Toe Tactic will screen along with the 2009 Ultra Short Film Festival, which features ART BY CHANCE‘s touring show of 31 international films under 30 seconds long, introducing a new size category: x-small (less than one minute.)

Admission: $7 at the door
(3-day Festival Passes  are available for $12 pre-purchased at Bird Dog Video: 1333 – 16 Ave. SW, Calgary; (403) 398-2283.)

The SUYS Festival / EMMEDIA Open House and Official Showcase continues March 26th, 2010,  at EMMEDIA Gallery and Production Society Suite #203, 351 – 11 Ave. SW. (around back & upstairs.)

Start the evening’s festivities at the EMMEDIA Open House (5 – 7 PM), then proceed to the screening room for the 2nd Annual SUYS Showcase, where 14 international short films in varying sizes will be shown. This includes the North American Premiere of experimental Czech Republic short film, “…Kde Jsme? or …Where Are We?”, and internationally award winning Director and Cinematographer, Christopher Ball’s short film music video, “Watchmaker – Tom Fun Orchestra.” The programme is posted online at the Show Us Your Shorts website.

Admission: Free, although a $2 – $5 donation would be appreciated.

The SUYS 2010 – Festival Awards, Nominee Screenings & Closing Night Gala wraps up Saturday, March 27, from 4:00 PM – 7:00 PM at The Plaza Theatre, 1133 Kensington Rd. NW, Calgary. (This will be a licensed event, so no minors please.)

Admission: $8 at the door

The following awards will be presented:

• Best Size X-Small, Small, Medium, Large
• Best Narrative
• Best Craft
• Most Innovative
• Audience Favourite
• Grand Jury Prize “Golden Shorts”
• The SUYS 2010 Screenwriting Competition.

The winner of this last award will have their screenplay produced for Sled Island Film 2010, as part of Sled Island Festival.

Again, the programme line-up for this event can be read at the Show Us Your Shorts Festival Website.

X-Posted to Calgary Festivals.

REEL ARTISTS FILM FESTIVAL:
Journey Through the World of Visual Art

March 25th – 28th, 2010
All films are screened at the Stanford Perrott Lecture Hall
The Alberta College of Art and Design,
1407 – 14 Avenue, NW
Calgary, Alberta

Eleven documentary films about contemporary art and some of the strongest artists in it will be screened at the Reel Artists Film Festival this March. The creative nonfiction presentations will showcase the talents of Colette Urban, Yoshitomo Nara, Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, François Sullivan, Ernst Beyeler (an art dealer), Takao Tanabe, Guy Maddin, Andrea Zittel, Monika Sosnowska, Chuck Close and Antony Gormley. Eleven films will be shown over the four-day festival.

As part of the festival, the Illingworth-Kerr Gallery will host a 3-day intensive workshop, LIVE CINEMA: Real-Time Narratives with Mia Makela (SOLU), and a Scriptwriting Workshop with Noam Gonick and Joshua Wade. Both workshops seem very detailed and comprehensive for people who are interested in filmmaking.

This festival promises to be extremely rewarding, especially given that admission is free. Check out the program schedule at the Canadian Art Foundation or at Alberta College of Art + Design.

Cross-posted to Calgary Festivals and Calgary Calgary Visual Arts.