FILL THE VOID - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The rich, vibrant backdrop of Tel Aviv's strict Orthodox Hasidic Haredi community yields the first great movie love story of the new millennium and a bona fide contemporary masterpiece. In release via Mongrel Media, this is a movie that's NOT TO BE MISSED. See it in a movie theatre on a big screen. In terms of its canvas, the film's humanity deserves to be experienced in the temple that is, the cinema.

Fill The Void (2012) *****
Dir. Rama Burshtein
Starring: Hadas Yaron, Yiftach Klein, Irit Sheleg, Chaim Sharir, Razia Israely, Hila Feldman, Renana Raz

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In a time when selfish personal needs are placed above those of tradition, culture and the preservation of the nuclear family unit, it's a genuine blessing to see a motion picture like Fill The Void which focuses so deeply and intensely upon a modern community steadfastly adhering to an ages-old way of life. That the film is one of the most beautifully written and delicately directed love stories in at least a decade - probably longer - is a testament to the great poetic qualities of filmmaker Rama Burshtein.

Like all great films, its surface is relatively simple, but as such, yields complexities and layers that augment this already enriching family drama. Shira (Hadas Yaron) is 18 years old and her family, members of the strict Orthodox Haredi community, has endeavoured to put together a perfect match for her husband-to-be and when she catches a glimpse of the bright, handsome young man selected to be her eventual life partner, she's thrilled beyond belief.

To add to her joy, it is Purim and her father, the venerable Rabbi Aharon (Chaim Sharir) is granting audience with family, friends and community in his patriarchal domicile - paying tribute by requesting their greatest needs and the good Rabbi granting them the practical means of attaining it. Shira's gorgeously radiant sister Esther (Renana Raz) is pregnant and her handsome, kind-hearted husband Yochay (Yiftach Klein) are in attendance for the festivities. Their undying love for each other is movingly and privately reaffirmed within the crowded family home.

The only spanner in the works appears to be the unmarried Frieda (Hila Feldman) who loves the family dearly, but also harbours jealousy and resentment that she is still without a match and terrified she will become an old maid. This, however, is not enough to spoil this time of celebration, prayer and song. Happiness abounds.

Sadly, into this bliss, tragedy of the most unexpected and devastating kind strikes. The family is faced with an emptiness and sorrow that is exacerbated by the conundrum of what to do about all the marriage plans in the works that have been seriously thrown out of whack by the calamitous events that have befallen them. And it is young, hopeful Shira who is faced with the greatest challenge of all - to maintain family purity, lineage and the very ties that bind - all of which are potentially convenient for everyone but herself and most of all, with the very real possibility that all her hopes and dreams will be forever altered, if not completely shattered.

Fill The Void becomes one of the most universal and moving of all love stories - rooted as it is in the notion of a greater good - sacrifice.

Burshtein's screenplay is both literate and passionate. She's provided herself with a first-rate template to direct a film of great power. Like the conservative community she trains her lens upon, she forces herself to stay within their world as closely as possible with mostly interior scenes, often in closeup and with a look that is warm, sumptuous, gorgeously composed and lit - all reflective of an insular world that beats on in spite of an outside secular and modern world. Her pacing is meticulous in its fluidity or rather, she seems in such complete control of the slow, deliberate nature of how life unfolds that we never feel like she's self-indulgently plodding along to maintain "reality", but instead creates a slow, delicate series of ebbs and flows that build to a crescendo of passion and emotion.

It is one of the few contemporary pieces of cinema that soars in ways the medium, at its core, has the potential to do when its exploited artistically in ways it seldom is - a medium that is more often squandered instead of being nurtured and valued for the great gifts it can bestow upon mankind.

Burshtein has created what might be one of our few modern masterpieces. Not a frame seems out of place, not a line of dialogue seems false, not a single performance achieves less than the miraculous.

Fill The Void does indeed fill a void. It's a movie we desperately need in these times - a film that explores both the pitfalls and joys of tradition, but at the same time, exposing how tradition can indeed be a beautiful part of existence when it is mediated and tempered by those, like the character of Shira, who allow the indomitability of her intellect, reason and spirit to seek what is ultimately her own happiness and fulfilment - one that is as inclusive of herself as it is of those around her.

Given that this is a film about a community in which marriage is the highest and holiest aspiration for women, Burshtein might have actually crafted one of the most feminist films in recent movie history. At its most basic level, though, it's a film so full of joy, sadness, humour and romance, that it puts most films about love, family and tradition to shame.

A masterpiece? I'd say so.

"Fill The Void" is in theatrical release via Mongrel Media.

STORIES WE TELL - Review By Greg Klymkiw - KLYMKIW CHRISTMAS GIFT IDEA 2012 #10: Take anyone and everyone you love to see Sarah Polley's documentary masterpiece. It's currently playing at select indies, but given the season and all the recent accolades (including a Sundance berth), maybe Cineplex Entertainment will light a flame under their own ass and dump a few stinkers from Hollywood to bring it back on as many screens as possible across Canada.

"Under cover of her silence he pressed her arm closely to his side, and, as they stood at the hotel door, he felt that they had escaped from their lives and duties, escaped from home and friends and run away together with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure." - James Joyce, The Dead

“Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.” - William Saroyan

Stories We Tell (2012)
***** dir. Sarah Polley

"Death is not an easy thing for anyone to understand, least of all a child, but ... I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life." - William Saroyan, The Human Comedy

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Nature, nurture and the manner in which their influence upon our lives inspires common threads in the telling of tales that are in turn relayed, processed and synthesized by what we think we see and what we want to see are the ingredients which make up Sarah Polley’s latest work as a director.

Her Oscar-nominated Away From Her was a well-crafted dramatic plunge into the effect of Alzheimer’s upon a married couple. Take This Waltz blasted a few light years forward, delivering a film that’s on one hand, a wonky-plonky romantic comedy and on the other, a sad, devastating portrait of love gone awry and all the while being perhaps one of the most progressive films about female passion and sexuality made in a modern, contemporary North American (though specifically Canadian context).

Stories We Tell is something altogether different and, in fact, roots Polley ever so firmly in contemporary cinema history as someone who has generated a bonafide masterpiece. It is first and foremost a story of family – not just a family, or for that matter any family, but rather a mad, warm, brilliant passionate family who expose their lives in the kind of raw no-guts-no-glory manner that only film can allow.

Most importantly, the lives exposed are as individual as they are universal and ultimately it’s a film about all of us. It is a documentary with a compelling narrative arc, yet one that is as mysterious and provocative and profoundly moving, as you’re likely to see.

Love permeates the entire film – the kind of consuming love that we’ve all felt at one point or another. We experience love within the context of relationships most of us are familiar with: a husband and wife, a mother and child, brothers and sisters, (half and full) family and friends and yes, “illicit love” (at least within a specific context in a much different time and place).

Mostly though, Stories We Tell expresses a love that goes even beyond our recognizable experiences of love and running a gamut of emotions.

The film is often funny, to be sure. It is, after all, a film by Sarah Polley and is infused with her near-trademark sense of perverse, skewed, borderline darkly comedic, but ultimately amiable sense of humour. The great American author of Armenian heritage, William Saroyan, titled his episodic novel (and Oscar-nominated screen story) The Human Comedy – something that coursed through his entire canon and indeed is the best way to describe Polley’s approach to telling stories on film.

She exposes truth, emotion and all the while is not willing to abandon dollops of sentimental touches – the sort we can find ourselves relating to in life itself.

There is a unique sense of warmth that permeates Stories We Tell, and by so employing it, Polley doesn’t merely tug at our emotions – she slices them open, exposing raw nerve endings that would be far too painful if they were not tempered with an overall aura of unconditional love, not unlike that as described by those who have survived a near-death experience.

The emotions and deep feelings of love in Polley’s documentary are so enveloping, I personally have to admit to being reduced to a quivering, blubbering bowl of jelly each time I saw the film. Four screenings later and her movie continues to move me unconditionally – on an aesthetic level, to be sure (her astonishing blend of interviews, archival footage and dramatic recreations so real that they all blend together seamlessly), but mostly on a deeply personal and emotional level.

At the heart of the film is a courageous, vibrant woman no longer with us. Polley guides us through this woman’s influence upon all those she touched. Throughout much of the film, one is reminded of Clarence Oddbody’s great line in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life: “Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?”

I try to imagine the lives of everyone Polley introduces us to and how if, like in the Capra film, this vibrant, almost saint-like woman had not been born. Most of those we meet in the film wouldn’t have been born either and the rest would have lived lives with a considerable loss of riches.

And I also think deeply on the fact that this woman was born and how we see her effect upon all those whose lives she touched. Then, most importantly, I think about Clarence Oddbody’s line with respect to the child that might not have been born to this glorious woman – a child who might have been aborted. I think about how this child has touched all the lives of those in the documentary. The possibility that this child might have never been born is, within the context of the story relayed, so utterly palpable that I can’t imagine audiences not breaking down.

I can’t imagine the loss to all those people whose lives this child touched. And the world? The world would genuinely be a less rich place without this child.

THEN, it gets really personal. I think about all those in MY life who could have NOT being born – people who are very close, people (two in particular) who have indelibly made a mark on my life – people whose non-existence would have rendered my life in ways I try to repress.

And I weep. Kind of like Brando says as Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now: “I … I … I cried. I wept like some grandmother.”

Most of all, my tears are reserved for the film’s aura of unconditional love, its incredible restorative power. Sarah Polley is often referred to in Canada as a “national treasure”. She’s far more than that.

She’s a treasure to the world – period.

And so, finally, is her film.

GREG KLYMKIW'S 10 BEST FILMS AT TIFF 2012: ALL THE MOVIES I WAS ABLE TO SIT ALL THE WAY THROUGH AND LOVE WITHOUT RESERVATION AT THE TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (TIFF 2012) - By Greg Klymkiw

ALL THE MOVIES I WAS ABLE TO SIT ALL THE WAY THROUGH
DURING THE TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (TIFF 2012)
AND ACTUALLY ENJOY WITHOUT ANY RESERVATIONS WHATSOEVER

By Greg Klymkiw

In brief, here are my star ratings for the stuff I enjoyed at this year's orgy of cinema in Toronto. You can check out full reviews on a number of them here and soon, I'll be filing a full round-up of this year's festival over at the delightful UK-based "Electric Sheep - a deviant view of cinema".

So, in alphabetical order, here are:

Greg Klymkiw's 10 Best Films at TIFF 2012

ACT OF KILLING, THE - *****
BABY BLUES - **** (tied with Penance)
BEYOND THE HILLS - *****
BLACKBIRD - **** (tied with Krivina)
CAPITAL - ****
FILL THE VOID - *****
KRIVINA - **** (tied with Blackbird)
THE MASTER - ****
PARADISE: LOVE - **** (tied with Spring Breakers)
PENANCE - **** (tied with Baby Blues)
RHINO SEASON - ****
SPRING BREAKERS - **** (tied with Paradise: Love)
STORIES WE TELL - *****

Close Runners-Up (in alphabetical order):

FRANCES HA - ***
GINGER AND ROSA - ***1/2
LOVE, MARILYN - ***1/2
REBELLE (WAR WITCH) - ***1/2
ROOM 237 - ***1/2


The bottom line is this:

If I had to pick the absolute best movie at TIFF 2012 it would be a tie twixt Sarah Polley's STORIES WE TELL and Joshua Oppenheimer's THE ACT OF KILLING in the Documentary category and Cristian Mungiu's BEYOND THE HILLS and Rama Burshtein's FILL THE VOID in the Drama category.

Obviously, if anyone let me have my way, I'd be giving the Best Canadian Feature Award to Polley's STORIES WE TELL and the Best Canadian First Feature Award to Igor Drljaca's KRIVINA.

I'm exhausted.

Are you?

Tomorrow I'm going to cleanse my palate and see my lithe Ukrainian princess Milla Jovovich kick some zombie ass in RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION even though it's bound to be utterly dreadful.

STORIES WE TELL - TIFF 2012 - Review By Greg Klymkiw

"Under cover of her silence he pressed her arm closely to his side, and, as they stood at the hotel door, he felt that they had escaped from their lives and duties, escaped from home and friends and run away together with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure." - James Joyce, The Dead

“Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.” - William Saroyan

Stories We Tell (2012)
***** dir. Sarah Polley

"Death is not an easy thing for anyone to understand, least of all a child, but ... I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life." - William Saroyan, The Human Comedy

Review By
Greg Klymkiw


Nature, nurture and the manner in which their influence upon our lives inspires common threads in the telling of tales that are in turn relayed, processed and synthesized by what we think we see and what we want to see are the ingredients which make up Sarah Polley’s latest work as a director.

Her Oscar-nominated Away From Her was a well-crafted dramatic plunge into the effect of Alzheimer’s upon a married couple. Take This Waltz blasted a few light years forward, delivering a film that’s on one hand, a wonky-plonky romantic comedy and on the other, a sad, devastating portrait of love gone awry and all the while being perhaps one of the most progressive films about female passion and sexuality made in a modern, contemporary North American (though specifically Canadian context).

Stories We Tell is something altogether different and, in fact, roots Polley ever so firmly in contemporary cinema history as someone who has generated a bonafide masterpiece. It is first and foremost a story of family – not just a family, or for that matter any family, but rather a mad, warm, brilliant passionate family who expose their lives in the kind of raw no-guts-no-glory manner that only film can allow.

Most importantly, the lives exposed are as individual as they are universal and ultimately it’s a film about all of us. It is a documentary with a compelling narrative arc, yet one that is as mysterious and provocative and profoundly moving, as you’re likely to see.

Love permeates the entire film – the kind of consuming love that we’ve all felt at one point or another. We experience love within the context of relationships most of us are familiar with: a husband and wife, a mother and child, brothers and sisters, (half and full) family and friends and yes, “illicit love” (at least within a specific context in a much different time and place).

Mostly though, Stories We Tell expresses a love that goes even beyond our recognizable experiences of love and running a gamut of emotions.

The film is often funny, to be sure. It is, after all, a film by Sarah Polley and is infused with her near-trademark sense of perverse, skewed, borderline darkly comedic, but ultimately amiable sense of humour. The great American author of Armenian heritage, William Saroyan, titled his episodic novel (and Oscar-nominated screen story) The Human Comedy – something that coursed through his entire canon and indeed is the best way to describe Polley’s approach to telling stories on film.

She exposes truth, emotion and all the while is not willing to abandon dollops of sentimental touches – the sort we can find ourselves relating to in life itself.

There is a unique sense of warmth that permeates Stories We Tell, and by so employing it, Polley doesn’t merely tug at our emotions – she slices them open, exposing raw nerve endings that would be far too painful if they were not tempered with an overall aura of unconditional love, not unlike that as described by those who have survived a near-death experience.

The emotions and deep feelings of love in Polley’s documentary are so enveloping, I personally have to admit to being reduced to a quivering, blubbering bowl of jelly each time I saw the film. Four screenings later and her movie continues to move me unconditionally – on an aesthetic level, to be sure (her astonishing blend of interviews, archival footage and dramatic recreations so real that they all blend together seamlessly), but mostly on a deeply personal and emotional level.

At the heart of the film is a courageous, vibrant woman no longer with us. Polley guides us through this woman’s influence upon all those she touched. Throughout much of the film, one is reminded of Clarence Oddbody’s great line in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life: “Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?”

I try to imagine the lives of everyone Polley introduces us to and how if, like in the Capra film, this vibrant, almost saint-like woman had not been born. Most of those we meet in the film wouldn’t have been born either and the rest would have lived lives with a considerable loss of riches.

And I also think deeply on the fact that this woman was born and how we see her effect upon all those whose lives she touched. Then, most importantly, I think about Clarence Oddbody’s line with respect to the child that might not have been born to this glorious woman – a child who might have been aborted. I think about how this child has touched all the lives of those in the documentary. The possibility that this child might have never been born is, within the context of the story relayed, so utterly palpable that I can’t imagine audiences not breaking down.

I can’t imagine the loss to all those people whose lives this child touched. And the world? The world would genuinely be a less rich place without this child.

THEN, it gets really personal. I think about all those in MY life who could have NOT being born – people who are very close, people (two in particular) who have indelibly made a mark on my life – people whose non-existence would have rendered my life in ways I try to repress.

And I weep. Kind of like Brando says as Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now: “I … I … I cried. I wept like some grandmother.”

Most of all, my tears are reserved for the film’s aura of unconditional love, its incredible restorative power. Sarah Polley is often referred to in Canada as a “national treasure”. She’s far more than that.

She’s a treasure to the world – period.

And so, finally, is her film.

FILL THE VOID - TIFF 2012 - Review By Greg Klymkiw

Fill The Void (2012) *****
Dir. Rama Burshtein
Starring: Hadas Yaron, Yiftach Klein, Irit Sheleg, Chaim Sharir, Razia Israely, Hila Feldman, Renana Raz

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In a time when selfish personal needs are placed above those of tradition, culture and the preservation of the nuclear family unit, it's a genuine blessing to see a motion picture like Fill The Void which focuses so deeply and intensely upon a modern community steadfastly adhering to an ages-old way of life. That the film is one of the most beautifully written and delicately directed love stories in at least a decade - probably longer - is a testament to the great poetic qualities of filmmaker Rama Burshtein.

Like all great films, its surface is relatively simple, but as such, yields complexities and layers that augment this already enriching family drama. Shira (Hadas Yaron) is 18 years old and her family, members of the strict Orthodox Haredi community, has endeavoured to put together a perfect match for her husband-to-be and when she catches a glimpse of the bright, handsome young man selected to be her eventual life partner, she's thrilled beyond belief.

To add to her joy, it is Purim and her father, the venerable Rabbi Aharon (Chaim Sharir) is granting audience with family, friends and community in his patriarchal domicile - paying tribute by requesting their greatest needs and the good Rabbi granting them the practical means of attaining it. Shira's gorgeously radiant sister Esther (Renana Raz) is pregnant and her handsome, kind-hearted husband Yochay (Yiftach Klein) are in attendance for the festivities. Their undying love for each other is movingly and privately reaffirmed within the crowded family home.

The only spanner in the works appears to be the unmarried Frieda (Hila Feldman) who loves the family dearly, but also harbours jealousy and resentment that she is still without a match and terrified she will become an old maid. This, however, is not enough to spoil this time of celebration, prayer and song. Happiness abounds.

Sadly, into this bliss, tragedy of the most unexpected and devastating kind strikes. The family is faced with an emptiness and sorrow that is exacerbated by the conundrum of what to do about all the marriage plans in the works that have been seriously thrown out of whack by the calamitous events that have befallen them. And it is young, hopeful Shira who is faced with the greatest challenge of all - to maintain family purity, lineage and the very ties that bind - all of which are potentially convenient for everyone but herself and most of all, with the very real possibility that all her hopes and dreams will be forever altered, if not completely shattered.

Fill The Void becomes one of the most universal and moving of all love stories - rooted as it is in the notion of a greater good - sacrifice.

Burshtein's screenplay is both literate and passionate. She's provided herself with a first-rate template to direct a film of great power. Like the conservative community she trains her lens upon, she forces herself to stay within their world as closely as possible with mostly interior scenes, often in closeup and with a look that is warm, sumptuous, gorgeously composed and lit - all reflective of an insular world that beats on in spite of an outside secular and modern world. Her pacing is meticulous in its fluidity or rather, she seems in such complete control of the slow, deliberate nature of how life unfolds that we never feel like she's self-indulgently plodding along to maintain "reality", but instead creates a slow, delicate series of ebbs and flows that build to a crescendo of passion and emotion.

It is one of the few contemporary pieces of cinema that soars in ways the medium, at its core, has the potential to do when its exploited artistically in ways it seldom is - a medium that is more often squandered instead of being nurtured and valued for the great gifts it can bestow upon mankind.

Burshtein has created what might be one of our few modern masterpieces. Not a frame seems out of place, not a line of dialogue seems false, not a single performance achieves less than the miraculous.

Fill The Void does indeed fill a void. It's a movie we desperately need in these times - a film that explores both the pitfalls and joys of tradition, but at the same time, exposing how tradition can indeed be a beautiful part of existence when it is mediated and tempered by those, like the character of Shira, who allow the indomitability of her intellect, reason and spirit to seek what is ultimately her own happiness and fulfilment - one that is as inclusive of herself as it is of those around her.

Given that this is a film about a community in which marriage is the highest and holiest aspiration for women, Burshtein might have actually crafted one of the most feminist films in recent movie history. At its most basic level, though, it's a film so full of joy, sadness, humour and romance, that it puts most films about love, family and tradition to shame.

A masterpiece? I'd say so.

"Fill The Void" via Mongrel Media premieres at TIFF 2012.