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Heavy Friction: Slavery, Sex and Stolen Art at the Toronto International Film Festival

Published on September 23, 2009

By Zach Dubinsky

Under the spotlight of one of the world’s largest film festivals, controversy just wouldn’t leave two promising documentaries alone — though that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Toronto International Film Festival

The documentary showcase at the Toronto International Film Festival, which unspooled in mid-September, usually gets overshadowed by the rumpus of celebrity actors and directors in town to plug their feature movies. That seemed to be how things were headed at the event’s 2009 edition, with the likes of Penelope Cruz and Oprah Winfrey drawing paparazzi and autograph-seekers to gala screenings, and Hollywood figures lining up on either side of a simmering spat over the festival’s decision to dedicate an entire program to movies about Tel Aviv.

But several documentaries rose above the din, at least briefly, with their own scandals — and not always to their detriment.

Australian doc-makers Violeta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw set out to shoot a film about an under-reported land dispute in Western Sahara, a disputed territory in northwest Africa claimed and fought over by Morocco and the Polisario Front, an independence movement grounded in the region’s indigenous Sahrawi people. But while spending time filming in a Polisario-controlled refugee camp, they discovered what appeared to be a form of slavery operating there, apparently with the acquiescence of the camp’s bosses. Changing the focus of their film mid-shoot, the co-directors ran into stern recriminations from Polisario leaders and soon began to fear that their tapes would be seized — so they buried them in the sand, hoping to return later to retrieve them, and turned the camera on themselves and the process of making their film.

But the adversity didn’t end there for Stolen, the resulting documentary. The Polisario, avowing that it doesn’t condone slavery and needing to safeguard its image on the world stage to support its independence fight, began an international campaign against the film. It put out its own video denouncing Stolen, in which several people who Ayala and Fallshaw interviewed say they were coerced or paid by the Australian duo.

The Sahrawi group even sent one of Stolen‘s main subjects, Faitim Salam, to the doc’s premiere at the Sydney Film Festival to protest against the film. One of the translators who helped subtitle sections of the movie that are in Hassaniya Arabic said the filmmakers had distorted the meaning of key dialogue, and one of their cameramen said they made grave errors. The Australian media voiced calls for the doc to be banned from the Melbourne Film Festival, and for its government funding to be scrutinized.

“It was really tough,” Fallshaw said in Toronto of the fracas over his project. “We only finished the film on a Tuesday evening and screened it on a Thursday [in Sydney], and we only found out Faitim was coming to Australia that morning. When we were making the film we used to joke with Faitim that we’d be able to bring her to festivals to see herself on the screen and see the film, so to have a situation where she was coming to criticize the film, to criticize us and say it’s not real was really disturbing, really tough for both Violeta and I. We welcomed her to Australia and we were glad she was in the film. I was sitting just behind her, and she was laughing at herself on the screen, and she was obviously enjoying watching the film.”

Ayala agreed that the experience of having her subject show up to denounce her movie was devastating.

“You have to imagine that Faitim had never left the refugee camps. She was put on a plane for 30 hours, in a cinema for the first time in her life, probably, to watch a film about herself, her life, her reunion with her mother, but she had to protest and denounce us, and she didn’t have a choice. She didn’t come with her children.”

“When we went and met each other, I said, ‘Faitim, you know what’s going on,’ and she said to me, ‘They told me not to talk to you. I cannot talk to you.’ It was horrible,” Ayala recounted, welling with emotion. “I wish no filmmaker to ever have to be in the situation that I was. My heart was broken. It was not a little second of joy for us. But if I had a little doubt that I wasn’t doing the right thing, I wouldn’t have done it, so I knew that we had to go ahead, for all the people and for Faitim and for Faitim’s children, because this has to change.”

At a Q&A session after Stolen‘s opening in Toronto, an audience member who speaks Hassaniya confronted the Aussie filmmakers, presenting a litany of sources that call into question the accuracy of the movie’s translations and subtitles. When his tirade continued, other viewers had to implore him to stop.

“The Polisario distributed a video of everyone in the film plus some extras that basically said that we paid them or coerced them or forced them to talk about slavery,” Fallshaw said. “There was one person in the video saying that we paid him to talk about slavery. We’ve never seen him before. He doesn’t appear in any of the footage we shot.”

Ayala continued, “It’s a video on the internet that the Polisario has published, and it’s very sad. [Faitim] doesn’t look at the camera, ... also [her relative] Matala, he says that, what he says is something like, ‘They made me tell things that I shouldn’t have told them.’ He doesn’t say that we paid him, but he says that ‘I told them things that I shouldn’t.’ And his mother also talks in the video and says, ‘He didn’t know what he was talking about. He’s young, he’s silly, please forgive him.’ It’s very disturbing.”

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi

Videocracy, from Swedish-Italian filmmaker Erik Gandini, is just as disturbing, but in its own way. Gandini generated considerable buzz for his social-analysis doc Videocracy, a scathing look at how Italian culture has been distorted by the dominance of the country’s media by magnate cum Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Just days before the festival got underway, Gandini’s pic was dealt a blow at home when Italy’s largest broadcasters — government-controlled RAI and Berlusconi-owned Mediaset’s three networks — banned the documentary’s trailers from their airwaves, which account for 90 per cent of the free-to-air channels there. As with many a case of censorship, the news only fueled the film’s fortunes at the Venice Film Festival and then in Toronto.

“TV is mainly owned and controlled by Silvio Berlusconi, the one single person who more than anyone else has influenced the content of commercial television in Italy for the past 30 years,” Gandini said.

The director recalled moving from Bergamo, a town near Milan, to Sweden in the 1980s. “I still remember my astonishment when I realized that the Swedish national public service state broadcaster showed no advertising at all [and] very few undressed women dancing.”

Contrast that to his Adriatic homeland. Judging from the stark montages of images in Videocracy, TV there teems with scantily clad showgirls called veline performing 30-second dance numbers known as a stacchetto during the camera breaks on an abundance of reality shows. It’s not just the tawdriness that the movie indicts, but how the whole glitz machinery has rewired the national ethos. Young women aspire to be boob-tube babes; men want nothing more for their careers than celebrity and scandal. The country’s top TV agent, a friend of Berlusconi, waxes nostalgically about Benito Mussolini while throwing Hugh Hefneresque parties at his villa on an haut monde resort island.

As the film points out, it’s only natural that, under such conditions, the country’s minister for gender equality is a former topless model.

“For us Italians the word television no longer refers to the actual TV box,” Gandini explained. “Televisione has become so much more, a powerful and mystified entity with scary, unknown powers that have entered almost every aspect of life, dreams and, of course, politics.”

Expect to hear more about The Art of the Steal, the documentary from Philadelphia filmmaker Don Argott about the controversy behind the Barnes art collection, a massive privately accumulated trove of Impressionist masterpieces. Collector Albert Barnes stipulated in his will that his 800 canvases by Renoir, Gauguin, Matisse and others should remain in an art-school gallery in suburban Philadelphia, to be open only two days a week to the public and never to be loaned out to museums.

However, owing to financial troubles, it was decided to tour a sizable chunk of the Barnes holdings around the world in the 1990s, prompting protests outside various museums, including in Toronto. Now, the Barnes foundation has plans to relocate to a more public site in Philly proper, against the objections, and legal challenges, of several politicians and groups. Argott’s film was the first doc to be sold at the Toronto International Film Festival. After a bidding battle between four buyers, it was acquired for theatrical and video-on-demand release on the new Sundance Selects label, a joint project of the Sundance Channel and IFC Films.

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