Friday I left work early to get started on a SIFF-full weekend which started at Pacific Place for Gromozeka. A bleak, Russian film, Gromozeka weaves together the sort-of midlife crises of three school chums who sing together about the “bird of happiness” who is coming for them, but not today. One is a philandering surgeon, another is an impotent policeman, and the last is a widowed cab driver with a wayward daughter. Part funny, part sad, Gromozeka may be worth checking out on DVD in the near future.
Afterwards, I made a mad dash to SIFF Cinema for the documentary Project Nim. While the previous film was a fictional portrayal of human misery, this film is a factual account of how miserably awful humans can be. Nim was a chimp born in 1972 and taken from his mother at two weeks old to live with a human family to study whether chimpanzees can be taught to communicate like humans. The film is put together with archival footage, photographs, and contemporary interviews with some of the humans involved in Nim’s livelihood over the course of his life. These people were not evil or anything, but some of them acted with such arrogance and disregard for consequence, that it can be a bit sickening to witness at times. And some of them acted with compassion that maybe compensated for the others. That’s a question that probably can’t be answered. Project Nim is coming to a theatre near you.