American filmmaker Michael Moore’s ”Bowling for Columbine,” a movie that plumbs the depths of violence in America, shared the People’s Choice Award at Vancouver’s International Film Festival with films by two Canadians Deborah Day’s comedy, ”Expecting,” and Nettie Wild’s ”Fix” shared the ”People’s” honors at the festival that ended Friday.
In ”Bowling for Columbine,” Moore searches from Columbine High School security camera tapes to the home of ex-actor and National Rifle Association president Charlton Heston, from the ”Anarchist’s Cookbook” recipe for home-made napalm to the murder of a six-year-old girl by another six-year-old.
The film takes a sometimes humorous, often horrifying look at America’s love affair with firearms and leaves the audience with a sense of expectation of the next breaking news of a homegrown assassin with a constitutionally protected gun.
”Expecting” focuses on a 24-hour ”labour party” in which eight diverse personalities are hastily brought together to witness and participate in an unanticipated home birth. Stephanie, the free-living expectant single mother, experiences premature labor pains after a marathon sex session and phones friends and family to rush to comfort her in her downtown loft, forming a personality mix whose players are forced to re-examine their own lives.
”Fix” is a dark 92-minute documentary telling, over a two-year period, the story of a man and of a city (Vancouver) fighting drugs and addiction. In the Asian film section of the festival, dubbed ”Tigers and Dragons,” awards went to Chinese film maker Andrew Cheng’s ”Shanghai Panic,” a portrait of a lost generation, and to South Korean Lee Chang-Dong’s ”Oasis,” which won in the human rights category. – Sapa-AFP