by Travis Mackenzie Hoover
BOLLYWOOD BOUND
***/****
directed by Nisha Pahuja
Bollywood Bound is a perfectly decent film about aspiring actors working in Bombay that would be even better without the cutesy editorializing of director Nisha Pahuja. There's a wealth of interesting information in this examination of Canadian expatriates trying to make it in Hindi filmmaking; Pointing out that Bollywood provides a place for East Indian descendants that Hollywood won't provide, it shows the various cultural distortions that several actors faced regarding India, Indian culture, and themselves. Previously known to their white schoolmates as "the Indian kids," they suddenly find themselves equally marginalized as "the Canadian actors," and discover that the pure "Indianness" they fought to protect in Canada is largely non-existent.
The film's major stumbling block is Pahuja's use of film clips. As she comically rhymes them with actions in her own footage it's apparent that she doesn't seem to respect either the films she's referencing or her subjects' passion for them. But as she follows both struggling actors trying to get ahead and the hugely famous VJ who shows that success is possible, her film offers a fascinating glimpse of ambition and disappointment at the crossroads of two cultures.
RUNAWAY (2001)
***/****
directed by Kim Longinotto, Ziba Mir-Hossein
The directors of Divorce Iranian Style come back with another exploration of women in Iranian institutional life. This time they examine five residents of a shelter for runaway girls, watching silently as the wheels of the system grind on. The women who run the shelter are hell-bent on sending the children home: they swiftly interrogate their charges and expose their pretences, then often prod them into choosing their not-always-happy homes over the streets. Things are a great deal more informal than they are in North America, and more coercive as the social workers try to get to the bottom of things; their initial meeting with a girl is basically to see how dishonest she's being, and then wear her down with questioning.
The film belongs to the girls, however, as it is they who decide whether they want the shelter or to return to their families. Some of the problems are not so huge, such as the bad student who fears her parents' wrath, but others are more troubled–the intense religious girl, for instance, who sort of ministers to the others and who seems to have nowhere else to go. There is also a desperate confrontation between a girl, the social workers, and an incredulous abusive family that desperately wants her back–the back and forth in the scene is as tense as the movie gets. (As the girl says, it's the first time they ever seemed to love her.) In short, it's a fascinating and disquieting film on a part of Iranian life normally concealed from us.
