Firefighter Kuwait

moot or hooey?
Since 1976, when the emir dissolved the National Assembly, there has been no elective body.

Adam's video

moot or hooey?
Adam is planning a tour with his new album, that will include Vancouver BC.

65_RedRoses brings heart to VIFF

(photo credit: Bill Markvoort. The day Eva's pager went off)

I spoke with director Philip Lyall about his moving film 65_RedRoses.

MH: Could you tell me a little about yourself.

PL: I graduated from the film production program at UBC. It was there that I met our second director/producer, Nimisha Mukerji, with whom I did this project.
We hit it off right away and knew that we worked well together. We wanted to make movies outside the program. We both did a few shorts in our third and fourth years that did quite well, and they went to the Toronto Student Showcase.

We knew that we wanted to make films, but when we graduated we both took on jobs in the film industry as production assistants and producer assistants. While working, we were going “oh my god, we have to make something” because you can work on a big Hollywood show, but you're just going to be hired help. You can't really work up that way. So we thought, we've gotta do our own film .

We had a teacher, John Zaritsky, who is an Oscar winner, who was our documentary professor. He's done a lot of great films and he encouraged us to find a documentary “because there are great stories in your back yard”.

I graduated from university and my friend Eva Markvoort, the subject of the film, I knew from first year because I originally thought I wanted to be an actor, and was in theatre at the University of Victoria with her.

At that time we became very close, then I left and transferred to UBC.
We kind of fell out of touch a little. But when I graduated she gave me a call and told me she was at St. Paul's waiting for a double lung transplant. And I'm going “what?” it just blew my mind.

Because from the outside she's a beautiful girl and she didn't look sick at all to me. She never acted like she was sick. I knew she had cystic fibrosis, but didn't know the extent of how bad that disease really was. I didn't know much about it. And so in that moment a light bulb went off and I thought “that's it. this is a great story. This girl is waiting for someone to die in order for her to live”.

I knew nothing about organ donation. I wasn't even an organ donor at the time and so I brought Nimisha and we met with her and from that moment we realized we wanted to do a documentary on her.

MH: So you're an organ donor now.

PL: (laughs) Of course. Right away, once I knew she was on the list I said “oh my god, I'm signing up right now” who knows if I won't get in a car crash, or something will happen to me, you know. I can save a life not even knowing it. You pass away but all your organs are perfectly intact so why not save four or five people's lives with the parts of your body.

MH: Could you like to tell us a bit more about your film?

PL: Yes, it's called 65_RedRoses, and the reason behind that title is, when you're little and you have cystic fibrosis, kids can't pronounce it so parents tell them to say 65 roses, and red is Eva Markvoort's favorite color.

65_RedRoses is Eva's online name that she uses to connect with other girls and boys that have cystic fibrosis or have gone through transplants. It's an online community, kind of like Facebook or MySpace, where they can connect and talk about their fear, waiting for transplants, or about cystic fibrosis.

The reason why they talk online, is that when Eva was waiting for a transplant, she couldn't be around other people with cystic fibrosis, or people who had transplants, because of the fear of spreading super-bugs, infecting each other.

Because they're so sick, if she got a bug from someone else, she's be taken off the transplant list. She would no longer qualify for a transplant.
She was isolated and she could only talk to friends and family and people who were healthy. We can be supportive but we don't truly understand her situation. People who do, are people with CF or who've have transplants, so that world she started to gear into when she waited for a transplant.

That was basically the arc of our story. Finding a few girls online that she's best friends with. You'll go the distance to tell each girl's story. Girls that are best friends that have never met in person. Eva's plight, going through transplant, and these two girls who are in different stages of transplant as well.

One girl is Meg, from Portland, who was addicted to pain killers, and doesn't want a transplant, and she's not going to be able to get one because she isn't compliant with her medication.
And there's the other girl Tina, from Pennsylvania, who already had a transplant and now is in chronic rejection and might need another transplant. The three different faces of cystic fibrosis.

MH: In your film, Eva is waiting for her pager to go off. Can you tell us a little bit about this moment?

PL: That's when we knew we had a movie. I can't believe we captured her pager going off. The thing for us was that we were so scared. We had to shoot so much before the pager went off because we were so worried that it could go off tomorrow, and we hadn't even got her back story yet.
We followed her for about eight or nine months before her pager went off.

In that moment, when we got her when it went off, I think we realized how time was running out. How she needed it now. It couldn't have come any later. It was the perfect timing for her pager to go off, because she was seven weeks in the hospital, she was so sick.
She had 31% lung capacity and we knew when we captured this high drama moment, of her getting on the phone and knowing that these lungs were coming in, it was a really intense, happy, joyous, scary, experience.

I was shooting that scene because we couldn't get our cameraman that day. We were just going to causally shoot with her throughout the day so I just brought our own mini DV camera. I was filming and Nimisha was boom operating, and we're shooting this incredible moment and it was a really crazy experience.

MH: Well, I was going to ask you what your most memorable moment of making this film was, but I'm guessing it'll be related to that experience.

PL: It had to be the pager going off. I mean the transplant was really intense too, but I think that in terms of it coming out of nowhere, the excitement of this pager going off and her running into her house, that whole scene was the most intense for us.
The transplant was pretty life changing. To see the medical system work. To watch something. To see her lungs come out and new lungs go in her, and start to fill up with air That was the craziest thing I've ever seen.

MH: That was incredible footage.

PL: And we were right in the room. We saw the whole thing. It was very spiritual. A very spiritual experience to sit there and watch a doctor perform a surgery like this. A life changing surgery.

MH: Can you tell us anything about the progress of the three girls in the film?

PL: Tina is doing quite well. Her chronic rejection reversed and her lung capacity has gone up. She's married and she lives in Pittsburgh. She's doing pretty well. She lives with her new husband and she's happy. I think she's in a happy place.

Meg left her boyfriend in the movie. She left him and moved in with a new guy who's pretty sketchy. Not a good influence on her.
She's not close to her family. She's kind of been on her own. She did move home for a bit but I think she got kicked out again. We're not really sure what happened. She's in hospital right now sick, but she will be coming up for the premier at VIFF. She'll be up here with her mom.

Eva has been doing well, but recently she got her first bout of chronic rejection. It's very common. Everyone gets chronic rejection at some point. It's just unavoidable. So right now she isn't doing so well, so she's looking at different options that will make her reverse out of the chronic rejection.

MH: What would you like people to take away from your film?

PL: Our film isn't a medical documentary, it's a film about friendship. In the end it's really about strong women coming together and supporting each other. But I think that what we want you to take away from this is for you to sign your organ donor card. I want every person who comes to see this film to say I want to become an organ donor.

This is who you can save. There are a lot of young people who are just trying to start their lives. I think that that's really inspiring. Also, you have to take responsibility and do it for yourself because if something happens to you and you're brain dead, you don't want your family to be confronted by the doctors asking whether they want their son or daughter to be an organ donor. You're almost doing a favor for your family, that they won't have to answer those questions.

MH: Are there any plans in the future for a sequel? Perhaps a continuation of these girls' lives.

PL: Wow, I can't believe no one's ever asked that question. I don't know. If there were to be a continuation, it would be Meg because she's the one who is fighting. She embarrassed by her disease and can't stand the way she's living. With Eva and Tina they took responsibility for their lives and they confronted CF with confidence. They embraced who they were and all the terrible things. I think with Meg, she'd be an interesting one to follow in the end. We haven't thought about doing it, but if we did, definitely a side story with Meg Moore.

MH: I know that when I watched the film, that's what I wanted to know. Where these girls were now.

PL: Meg is the one. We want to see her connect with her family again. I don't know, find worth in herself. Because you can see Meg is really, really insecure, but she's young and she's really sad and has a really depressed outlook on the world. She has no support system and you need that. She has nothing and she's so smart and she's actually got this strong spirit but she doesn't really have a lot of people out there to support her. She would be interesting to follow.

MH: Well I do hope you make the film.

65_RedRoses premiers at The Van City Theatre, Fri. Oct. 9Th, at 1:45pm
go to www.viff.org for more listings.

moot or hooey?
Eva belongs to a rowing club.

Taqwacore breaks boundaries at VIFF

(photo credit: Mia Donovan)
We spoke with director Omar Majeed about his controversial film, Taqwacore.

MH: Could I ask you a little bit about your background?

OM: I was born in Canada. My parents are Pakistani. I wasn't raised Muslim in a very strict way. My parents identified as Muslim and that was always something in the back of my mind, but we weren't an extremely observant family. I did live for about four or five years in Pakistan as a teenager. My family moved back there for a couple of years so I got to experience that culture and by extensions, a little bit more engagement with Islam because it's a very big part of that culture. I have a particular attachment to being Pakistani as well as Canadian.

MH: Could you tell us a little bit about your film background?

OM: All my life I wanted to be a filmmaker. From a really early age.
Out of film school I went into television. I lived in Toronto for a long period of my life and worked for CityTV. I started off as an editor, eventually producing, in particular, short form half hour documentaries, but I really wanted to make something a bit more narrative and cinematic.

So four years ago I moved to Montreal with my wife, and decided that it was time to pursue different job in television and I would just try to kick around an idea I had in my head about making a film about what it was like to be Muslim in the post 911 world.

That was all I had at the time. That sort of notion that I knew I wanted to do something about that because I had certain feelings about it and wanted to get something out.

After doing some research, I connected with this idea about Taqwacore. I found out about what was going on and just decided to go for it.
I really tried to do a film in the way that I envisioned it, and take a more narrative approach to it, and here we are.

MH: Could you tell us about your film Taqwacore, the whole idea and how that formed.

Yes, well, as I was mentioning, I was doing this research just trying to find out what kind of interesting Muslim voices there were because my feeling was that we weren't hearing from those kind of people. We were hearing from very, very mainstream Muslim organizations that would apologize a lot for the fundamentalists or we were hearing from the fundamentalists themselves. We weren't hearing from anyone in the middle, in the gray zone. People who lived lives in between.

That was really important to me, so I was talking to all sorts of Muslim academics, Muslim artists, people like that, and time and time again they would ask me “have you read this book, Taqwacore?
It's really interesting considering what you're taking about. It's this novel by a man who converted to Islam, became a fundamentalist for a while, pulled back from all of that, and now, has written this very rebellious and challenging novel imagining what it would be like if there was such a thing as punk Islam.”

So I was like, that sounds a bit wacky (laughs) but you know, I'm going to give it a try. I got the book off Amazon and I read it and it blew my mind. On a personal level as a Muslim I was like, wow!

First of all, the kind of references that he was making, the language was so exact both in terms of his Islamic language and his punk language. I mean he really got the right references in there and the characters were really rich, full of contradiction and complexity, and a lot of the characters and the situations in the book really spoke to me.

So based on that I decided I had to meet this guy. So I made it happen. I emailed him and asked him to meet. He agreed, he's very amiable, so we met and from that point on I was hooked because he basically told me his life story which I found very fascinating.

The ideas in the book had already gripped me and then on top of that he was telling me, in our very first meetings, that he was starting to meet people who had read his book and were telling him they were Muslim and punk. I thought to myself, wow, this guy's written this fiction, this fantasy, and now life is imitating art. And that's just fascinating to be here on the cusp of that happening. I just jumped in and was sold.

MH: What was the most challenging thing about making this film.

OM: (laughs) Working with punks. The most challenging thing? The very origins of it date back to about three and a half years. By the time I actually got Michael and all the other guys, I'm assuming you've seen the movie...

MH: oh, yes.

OM: ... by the time I got Michael and all those guys involved in the thing, it had been about three years. And I think the most challenging thing with a film like this is you have very small, very astute, very media savvy subjects, people who understand the media. They're artists themselves so it's not as if we could script a lot of stuff or stage it.

As a filmmaker sometimes you kind of push and you prod to try to edge the story along in certain ways and sometimes you do that with people who are not as comfortable on camera as these guys are. Because they're performers, it took a long time to break through their distrust they have of the media and what the media could possibly do with their image and the message of what they're trying to convey. And like it or not, for a while I was considered part of that media.

First it took a long time to build trust, and even when we did that it was very hard to find very vulnerable, very real moments. The only thing you could do was to stand around. You just had to basically spend a lot of time with these guys, all of them, and be attentive and observant to capture moments that were very raw and personal. There was a lot of hanging around, waiting around, going with the flow, (laughs) a kind of Zen concentration in the end.
Sometimes I wasn't up for it, and neither was my crew, but I think that over that couple of years we got what we needed.

MH: How is your film being received so far?

OM: Last night was our world premier here at VIFF. It was surreal. This is my first feature length film. First of all, VIFF is awesome. I'm happy to go on any record and talk about how amazing VIFF is. They fly you out here, they feed you. I don't know any festival that feeds their filmmakers (laughs), so that's amazing. Everyone's really friendly and very helpful. It's incredible and I really get the vibe that the audience here is really in to going out and seeing interesting offbeat films. It doesn't seem to be about stars or industry. We're over indulgent in the industry side of things.

It was a well attended screening, which I was pleased about, but more important to me than that, was it was a screening of really thoughtful people. We had an excellent Q & A afterwards where the usual cliché questions weren't asked. I got really in depth questions from some of the Muslims in the audience, challenging me at some points, and some of the non-Muslims talked about things they found difficult or challenging as well.

You know at times I kind of felt that I really wasn't representing the punk side of things well because I was kind of pontificating. The Q & A ended up a discussion at the end, which was really nice. And it really made me feel like the film was working in terms of engaging people in ideas, which was my intent all along.

MH: What would you like people to take away from this film?

OM: That's interesting. Some people kind of challenged me yesterday asking if I was trying to make a definitive statement about Islam, was I trying to make some heavy handed point, and I totally don't think I am. I don't think that's what these guys who I portray in my film are trying to do either .

I think really in the end what Taqwacore (the book) is about, and what the film is endorsing as well, is this idea of being Muslim on your own terms, finding your own path, and that being ok. It's ok to be a complex human being. It's ok to have contradiction, we all do, let's just be up front about it and don't hide away from that.
If you don't feel like you can conform to your parents' Islam, if you don't feel comfortable with everything that's going on in the western world and the way you're getting stereotyped, don't be comfortable with it. Speak out against it where you can, express it in healthy ways like through music and through art, and through satire.

The ultimate thing for me is that Taqwacore is about a new space. It's not a movement, it's not an ideology, it's not trying to sell you something. Let's create a space here for all of us who feel like the labels don't work. I think the film is just asking for the right of that to exist.

MH: Where do you go from here? Is Michael writing another book? Are you going to make another film?

OM: Michael is one of the most prolific men I know. He's one of those people, as far as artists go, that just constantly inspires my jealousy, deep jealousy. He's younger than me, fitter than me, and has already published five or six books, and he's going to Harvard right now to study Islamic studies.
So the guy is just one of those guys that's got that kind of mind. The book, Taqwacore, is truly an incredible piece of writing. I urge people to read it. Michael's writing in general is quite vivid, and quite an amazing insight into Islam and the North American experience. And of course the bands and their music, all of whom people want to find out more about, you can find on the web site we just put up. (ww.taqwacore.com) We're trying to make that into a one stop resource.

There is one final screening of Taqwacore at the Granville 7 theatres this
Mon, Oct, 5th, at 1:15pm

moot or hooey?
there is a Taqwacore movement in Vancouver, BC