McDull

Although not as brilliant as the previous McDull films, McDull: Pork of Music still manages to tickle your funny bone while twisting a knife in your heart at the same time. An homage to "music teachers everywhere," it celebrates the power of music in kids' life with a sweetness that never gets overly sentimental. After all, the sweetness is always amply cut with the series' signature wild, free-wheeling, and frequently scatological humour. The running gag in the film is that whenever beautiful music is heard, people think they want to crap. The doctor's expert advice: you don't really want to crap, you're just feeling moved - it's the same feeling of something churning intensely in your gut! A lot of the animation is two parts grotesque, one part cute, which also protects the sweet moments from becoming syrupy. There are some amazing and lovingly drawn sequences featuring "old" Hong Kong, which makes one sympatheize with the ex-architecture student in the film who quits because he hates all the new buildings and wishes they would just all vanish. And like all McDull endings, this one is resilient but brutally frank. Things are what they are, it's just life. What's left might just be that wanting-to-crap feeling that still churns once in a while when we hear a familiar song. The screening was in a big theatre but it was not very well attended, and many non-Asian (I would venture, non-Cantonese) audiences did not stay until the end. Like much else in Hong Kong, its cinema does not sell so well anymore. How can it, when the juggernaut that is China now dominates the world's attention. My generation of Hong Kongers has seen so many changes and upheavals, yet not of the revolutionary kind. Just dull, aching changes that chip away at all collective memories until not much is left except the feelings, and those no outsiders care too much about or understand. When I hear forty-something Anglophone Montrealers talk about their youth in pre-Quiet Revolution Montreal, I often feel a very similar sense of loss. It's not "correct" to yearn for a colonial past, for a society seen as unjust or oppressed. But everyone needs memories, and there is no pain quite like living under a dictum that one must forget. At least we are lucky because, for now, we still have the cinema (although perhaps not for long). And as I listened to McDull and his friends belt out "My Braised Pork" to the tune of Pachelbel's Canon in D, I totally experienced that do-I-want-to-crap-or-am-I-feeling-moved feeling that the film portrays with such glee and abandon.

Griot

Opening night at VIFF. I had a long day at work and was tired, so wasn't even sure if I was up for the festivities. Luckily, my first film was one that delighted the senses while not making too much demand on the brain. Made by trumpeter Volker Goetze and featuring his friend and musical partner Ablaye Cissoko, "Griot" is a low-key, laconically filmed documentary that brings to life the historical role and contemporary fate of the Mande griot: oral historian, musician, negotiator, mediator, master of ceremony and so much more all rolled in one. When I was studying postcolonial West African literature and film in grad school, I frequently encountered the griot as an enigmatic and fascinating figure in the works of Ousmane Sembène, Camara Laye, Yambo Ouologuem and their contemporaries. The gentle and soft-spoken Cissoko does not play up this mythical role, either in the film or in person. He simply and movingly shows us his respect for a tradition under threat and his quiet passion for the music. The kora, in his hand, is indeed a "magical instrument" and the highlight of the screening undoubtedly was the short but sensational live performance he and Goetze gave at the end.

Loose Sounds

I made this piece for a creativity workshop and found that I loved the painstaking task of editing: piecing images and sounds together, condensing half a lifetime's feelings into a few crisp minutes. It's comforting, like shepherding found fragments of the past into a safer future where they need not become so lost.