No wind. Weird feeling. Our national wellbeing is not keeping up to the constant rise in GDP. So there was that nervous sensation, not knowing how the police would react, would they be violent? It turned out to be totally peaceful with a friendly police escort and no bad incidents whatsoever⦠but you never know. First is a movie, which played at TIFF, about people confronting personal change and relationships, and trying to avoid a collapse.
Restoration Dir: Joseph Madmony. Anton Henry David , a young man and almost a drifter is looking for work in a run-down section of Tel Aviv. He stumbles into an old-school furniture-restoring shop and gets hired immediately by the grizzled and grumpy old carpenter Fidelman Sasson Gabai. But the childless co-owner of the place dies the next day, and leaves his half not to the carpenter, but to his son. But musical Anton, who has family troubles of his own vows to learn the trade and tries to find the golden egg that will save the store.
If he can only locate the missing piece of a rare antique piano, it will change from a piece of junk to a treasure worth enough money to keep the place open, and evade the impending doom. Anton becomes almost a surrogate son to the carpenter⦠almost. This movie had great acting from the two main characters. Though drab-looking, Restoration is a bitter-sweet examination of love, duty, families, allegiances, death and inheritance. Next, a movie, which played at Hotdocs, about a man, his family, and his supporters who take drastic moves to confront what he thinks is a coming disaster.
Wiebo Ludwig is a devout Christian who lives in a remote, isolated colony with his fellow religious settlers in BC, near Alberta. Goats started having frequent stillbirths, and, when a woman also miscarried, they realized their watershed had been contaminated by natural gas wells built right at the edge of their property.
He was later arrested, tried, and jailed for bombs he had set off at wells and pipelines in that energy-rich Alberta area. This movie follows filmmaker David York who was allowed to film inside their compound. Is Wiebo a religious nut or a devoted social activist? There are run-ins with outwardly conciliatory execs from Encana; pointless, intimidating, and relentless police raids of their homes to test things like how many ball point there are on one floor, and how many cassette tapes are on another; and their increasingly fractious relationship with the nearby town, where they have found themselves local pariahs following the unexplained shooting death of young woman on their property.
