“Acts of the Imagination” is searing portrait of immigrant society in
Vancouver, Canada. The main characters are Katya (Stephanie Hayes) and
Jaroslaw (Billy Marchenski), a young Ukrainian brother and sister who
exist at the margins of the east side of Vancouver. The other two main
characters are Seuchong (Maki Nagisa), a Korean single mother who is
Jaroslaw’s lover, and Aashir (Julian Samuel), a middle-aged Pakistani
who becomes Katya’s lover. The film moves along as a series of set
pieces involving this quartet. Originally written by screenwriter
Michael Wingate as a play, the movie retains the heavy emphasis on
dialog but is not the least bit “stagy”. Even though it was obviously
made on a shoestring, the director Carolyn Combs has a visual flair for
Vancouver’s industrial semi-slums and turns the gritty railroad bridges
and polluted river into strikingly poetic images.
Although the film is mostly about human relationships, the broader
context is the troubled politics of the 20th century and the legacy of
socialism in particular. Katya is haunted by the slaughter of Ukrainian
peasants in the early 30s as well as the murder of her parents who were
Ukrainian nationalists, so much so that her fragile psyche appears to be
cracking at the seams as she speaks frequently with her dead
mother-hence the act of the imagination that give the movie its title.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/10/13/acts-of-imagination/
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