SIFF Week 4: Picks and Pans

Wednesday, June 10

7 p.m., Harvard Exit

The Fortress

One of several films about illegal immigrants in Europe at SIFF this year (see also Welcome and The Escape), this Swiss documentary scrutinizes the apparatus often called "Fortress Europe." It's a system designed to reassure Continental consciences—surely we're treating those people humanely—and yet also keep those people out. Given near-total access at one refugee facility, director Fernand Melgar treats everyone fairly (this being neutral Switzerland). Detainees from Bosnia, Kurdistan, Eritrea, Togo, and beyond are all sympathetic. If they exaggerate a little bit about the threats they face back home—well, wouldn't we do the same to get asylum? One of the Swiss magistrates says of an immigrant's tale of woe, "It's just a bit stereotypical." This is the problem: All the stories sound alike, perhaps because they are, perhaps because some refugees are exaggerating for effect, or perhaps because the whole system at "La Centre"—and in Europe as a whole—produces the same meta-narrative of immigration and exclusion. The Fortress isn't a film of outrage; this Wiseman-style doc is all about process. But unfortunately, not a particularly interesting process. As one polite, well-meaning bureaucrat complains to a superior about the detainees, "Excuse my language, but they're so damn bored here." The most dramatic thing in the film is a statistic: Of 10,000 who filed for Swiss asylum in 2007, only 1,500 were granted that status. And 2,750 are still in a system that, properly speaking, also includes us. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Also: 4 p.m. Fri., June 12.

7 p.m., SIFF Cinema

PICK: Garbage Dreams

Adham wants to get married. He's only 17, but that hardly seems to matter. He needs a wife. Weddings, it turns out, are one of the few bright spots in the otherwise difficult existence of the 60,000 Zaballeen living just outside Cairo. Each morning the Zaballeen flood the city to collect bags of trash. Their income comes from recycling nearly everything they find. But then the government privatizes some of its trash collection, and European-owned companies with large trucks and enormous bins threaten to make the Zaballeen obsolete. Garbage Dreams traces the story of Adham and his friends—the handsome and artistic Nabil and the shiftless Osama—as they try to imagine a future with no garbage. Without the trash, hopes for weddings are quickly dashed. Director Mai Iskander's documentary makes a few rookie mistakes—every time the garbage trucks show up, cue the ominous music. And at no point does the film consider how a more efficient trash system might benefit teeming, chaotic Cairo, a city of 16 million. Neither does it explain why, in a Muslim-majority country, the Zaballeen are from its tiny Christian population. Still, the film isn't mired in tragedy. Adham and his friends are shown in moments of often hilarious teen angst, coping with universal emotions. Garbage Dreams strikingly exposes a world most of us have never seen or considered. (NR) LAURA ONSTOT

9:30 p.m., Uptown

PICK: Three Blind Mice

The three Australian sailors on shore leave in Sydney are self-aware enough to make On the Town jokes, and some SIFFgoers will also be reminded of The Last Detail. In the one long night before their ship returns to active duty in the Persian Gulf, prostitutes are summoned, parents are visited, poker played, girls picked up, lives reappraised, and one Very Big Secret avoided—until it absolutely must come out. Writer-director-actor Matthew Newton plays the cleverest of the trio, a cardsharp officer with a cheeky wit; Toby Schmitz plays the (seeming) straight arrow, with a rich fiancée to please; Ewen Leslie is the enlisted man without a university degree who bears fresh, ugly scars on his body. Even if Newton excessively underlines a few big speeches, his writing gives a big cast of Aussie TV talent ample room to display their chops. (Heather Mitchell is a boozy hoot as the straight arrow's mother.) The handheld camera chases after our three troubled musketeers, who quarrel, separate, and return to the same hotel room at dawn to debate the price of military discipline. (Recall Churchill's famous description of the Royal Navy.) Thankfully, as it proceeds by its own fitful rhythm, Three Blind Mice isn't just another one of those antiwar Iraq War movies. But it makes one think about the psychological injuries of friendly fire, without an enemy in sight. (NR) BRIAN MILLER

Thursday, June 11

6:30 p.m., SIFF Cinema

PICK: Afghan Star

Slumdog Millionaire, the documentary. Deservedly a Sundance prize-winner, Havana Marking's film follows the American Idol knock-off produced in Kabul for a newly unified national television audience. Viewers from Afghanistan's major ethnic groups vote for their favorite singer by cell phone, watching from satellite dishes rigged with chicken wire. This is a case of entertainment chronicling entertainment, and Tolo TV—a post-Taliban startup with several English-speaking producers—undoubtedly shapes the narrative and grooms its stars for Afghan Star. Each finalist from the tribes represented—Pashto, Hazara, Dari—parrots the Tolo TV line about uniting the country. Claims are made for cross-ethnic voting, but these are impossible to verify. (SIM cards are bought and sold in blocks, the film acknowledges, making it possible to stuff the ballot box.) But you know what, who cares? This isn't Frontline. Rather, Marking gains remarkable access to reality TV in the Third World, dramatizing her real-life story with a quartet of funny, flawed, likeable, and ambitious young singers. It's like The Hills interwoven with life-and-death politics. Fatwas are issued against one contestant, a woman who dares to dance on stage. (Slut!) Another finalist politely applies the verbal stiletto to his male rival thusly: "You don't have a voice, but you have beauty." Afghan Star has its limitations, but it's truthful and fun. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Also: 11 a.m. Sat., June 13.