POWER HUNGRY
VIFF: Ultraviolent Beeba Boys takes no prisoners.
Beeba Boys
Sept. 27, 6:15 p.m. and Sept. 29, 3 p.m. |
Centre for Performing Arts
Tickets and info: viff.org
Watching Beeba Boys, you could be led to believe that the streets of Vancouver are criss-crossed by fasttalking Indo-Canadian gangsters sporting snazzy tailored suits, driving the latest sports cars and brandishing shiny weapons willy nilly.
The latest film by Academy Award-nominated director Deepa Mehta paints a Scorsese-inspired and Tarantino-esque portrait of the recurring crime stories you read in the pages of this very paper or that you see in flashy sound bites on the nightly news in B.C.
Beeba Boys tells the story of Jeet Johar (played by Bollywood star Randeep Hooda), the leader of the movie’s eponymous stylish gang (meaning “the good boys”). He rules his territory with a fist full of chrome, battling with a rival gang for supremacy over the drugs and weapons trade.
During the course of the story he gets involved with a juror from his trial, Katya Drobot (played by Sarah Allen), and the movie spirals into a series of confrontations with rival gangsters and the police, with a special appearance by Paul Gross as a particularly distasteful crime associate.
If this sounds a bit familiar — say, like the tale of famed ’90s gangster Bindy Johal and his romantic interest Gillian Guess, as well as the involvement of then VPD commanding officer Kash Heed — it’s because it is.
Mehta is quick to say the parallels between Beeba Boys and the real-life events that inspired the film are many.
“It’s not inspired by just one story — Beeba Boys is an amalgamation of true events and true characters,” Mehta said. “Jeet is not inspired solely by Bindy Johal. I’m glad I’m talking to The Vancouver Sun and I can say this once and for all: This is not Bindy Johal’s story.
“It’s definitely set in Vancouver with what started in the ’80s. What I read (to inspire the film) was one of your amazing reporters Kim Bolan’s stories, which I first read in the late ’90s. Once I started researching it — she’s followed Indo-Canadian Sikh gangsters for the last 20 years — I was so shocked.
“It’s a very Vancouver story,” she added. “And in a way it’s fascinating to find something that’s so particular in Canada, actually.”
Beeba Boys is ultraviolent, hyper-vulgar, and takes no prisoners.
It’s also about being an immigrant and wanting to be accepted and respected, and it immerses the viewer into Indo-Sikh culture.
But does Beeba Boys glamorize or sensationalize a very real and very dangerous lifestyle that has been adopted by a small section of the Indo-Canadian population in the Vancouver area?
“Every gang movie has a style,” Mehta said. “You look at Casino, for example, or the films of Coppola. Everything is very stylized. It’s interesting: No white community will give the opportunity for any immigrant to be stylized. Then it becomes sensational. Why are we all right with white people being stylized and stylish, and why do we get uncomfortable when brown people are?
“The whole point of the film in many ways is, ‘How do we belong?’ ” Mehta added. “Jeet says, ‘If you want to be seen, then want to be seen.’ They want to be accepted and they aren’t respected. Crime doesn’t pay — that’s the moral of the story. But if you want to be seen, you have to commit to being seen.
“Every brotherhood has a way of expressing who they are, to show that they are a brotherhood — whether they’re gang members or they belong to a club or they work in a bank.”
Mehta, most famous for her “Elements Trilogy” — Fire (1996), Earth (1998) and Water (2005) — and for working with Salman Rushdie on Midnight’s Children (2012), said her love of gangster movies goes deep. There’s Scorsese and Coppola and Tarantino in the mix, evidently, but she also mentioned the films of Japanese director Seijun Suzuki, whose work from the 1960s helped inform the style of Beeba Boys.
“Suzuki did four really stylized yakuza films in Tokyo, which really rooted the gangs in a form which I’d never seen before.
“Every gangster story is essentially the same when you look at it: It’s about a hunger for power, to be recognized. There’s an ascendancy and a descendency. That’s every film, whether it’s Goodfellas or The Godfather or Scarface.”
Mehta’s choice to keep the story located in Vancouver for the purpose of the film was essential, she said. There was no way the story would have worked in any other city, as the settings, the people and the style of the film had everything to do with the Vancouver area.
In fact, she presented the film for members of the Indo-Canadian community here, including Kash Heed and Ujjal Dosanjh, before the film was selected to screen at the Toronto and Vancouver international film festivals.
“(Heed) said he was ‘really happy,’ ” Mehta said. “It’s difficult for a community to see even an aspect of oneself in perhaps a negative light. It’s difficult. We come to a country, we want to be embraced, we want to be loved and accepted. We don’t want anything negative said about us — that’s the first instinct of anybody: to want to belong.
“It’s important we talk about it. Everybody has a negative side. It’s not just Indo-Canadians. It’s Italian-Canadians, the Somalians, the Irish, the Hells Angels — the strongest white gang in Vancouver; it’s the Triads, the yakuza. It’s every community. As a community we hold a responsibility to our youth. Look at the grieving mothers, the orphans. We should do something about it. And if we can’t talk about it then we aren’t being responsible Canadians.”
Fractured Land Sept 27, 6 p.m. | Rio Theatre Sept 30, 4:10 p.m. | International Village
Tickets and info: viff.org
The cracks run deep in Caleb Behn’s world.
While northeastern B.C.’s oil and gas industry draws evermore natural gas from the earth with hydraulic fracturing, the young First Nations lawyer is deeply conflicted within himself.
Most of the dollars generated by fracking flow to corporations, governments and CEOs, but a few supported Behn’s family as he grew up.
His mother works in the industry, while his father is a staunch opponent. Behn himself worked with First Nations as an oil and gas officer reviewing thousands of pages of consultation documents from companies planning new natural gas fracking plays near reserves.
Despite his commitment to his land and people, in the new documentary film Fractured Land Behn finds himself defending his participation in the legal system to members of his own community, among whom distrust of the apparatus of government runs deep.
“I want to speak truth to power,” he explains. “Being a lawyer is the only way to do that.”
But even the costume required of lawyers appearing in court — he refers to his suit and tie as a “clown suit” — is a stark contrast to Behn’s indigenous tattoos and Mohawk haircut.
The landscape in which Behn lives and hunts moose is bristling with pipelines, extraction equipment and huge holding ponds containing some of the billions of litres of polluted water produced by the industry each year.
Behn explains that he learned as a child to examine the internal organs of the game he shot for tumours and signs of disease, which the locals attribute to industrial pollution.
Filmmakers Damien Gillis and Fiona Rayher followed Behn for four years, from his first appearance in public to speak about the impact of fracking, through law school and into a role as a charismatic leader for his people.
In telling Behn’s story, Gillis and Rayher reveal the story of fracking in B.C.
“Fiona and I got interested in the fracking boom five years ago and we started hearing how it was changing northeastern B.C.,” said Gillis.
“It looked like it would be a major defining issue economically and environmentally.”
In exploring the issue for their film project, they were introduced to Behn as a person who had considerable experience on the ground dealing with the industry.
“He was in law school to gain better tools to represent his people and we quickly realized that he was a compelling character who was willing to welcome us into his world, his family and his community,” said Gillis.
“These are people who work in the industry or who are struggling with the way a new kind of gas industry is affecting their land and water and traditions.”
Rather than make a traditional issue-driven environmental documentary, Gillis and Rayher chose instead to look at the world through Behn’s eyes, with all its emotional and intellectual conflict and complexity.
“In a sense we got to see Caleb grow up and become a real leader for his people,” he said.