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    • Poetry, 2019 >
      • Robbie Gamble
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      • Review of the movie GIFT
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      • Review of Claudine Nash's The Wild Essential
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      • Julia Lisella
      • Cynthia Atkins
      • Claudine Nash
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      • Interview with Gail Entrekin
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      • John Nelson
      • Mary Baures
      • Monette Bebow-Reinhard
      • M.J. Iuppa
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      • Jean Ryan
      • Daniel Hudon
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      • Sascha Morrell
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      • Blue Vinyl, Green Vinyl
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      • He Was Better Than I’ll Ever Be
      • A Voice in the Desert
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    • Winter 2015 Poetry >
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      • The Prisoner
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      • Convene
    • Winter 2015 Essays >
      • The Forgiveness Project
      • A Stranger on a Subway
      • A Journey to Compassion
      • The Question of Compassion
      • Reflections on a Childhood Deforested
      • Click, Click, Click
Review for the movie GIFT
by Laurette Folk
 
We live our day-to-day lives directed by money, spending our time and energy earning it so that we may attain things we need and desire. It’s so ingrained in us— this monetary system of earning and attaining—that to think otherwise seems impossible. But there are people out there who do think otherwise, and once you see their point of view, it’s inspiring.
 
Robin McKenna’s movie GIFT is one worth watching, and a must-see if you are an artist. The theme of gifting mimics Lewis Hyde’s classic The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. McKenna’s Gift portrays the gifting theme via four stories, and through these stories we learn that a gifting economy is not like a monetary economy or a barter economy, because the focus is not on materials or services; it’s on people.
 
The movie commences with Metropoliz, the first inhabited museum in history. This abandoned sausage factory-turned-pop up art museum in Rome, Italy is the brainchild of the Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (BPM), an organization that fights for the rights of people who need Roman housing. Rome is a city of high rents and vacant apartments; it has to do with how money works there, and the BPM is trying to change this. Metropoliz houses some 200 migrant families; the property itself is owned by Pietro Salini, an Italian commercial builder who has an ongoing court case against the occupants and BPM. But the BPM shrewdly organized a troop of artists to create art on and around the premises, adding value to the walls. The art, created by artists who’ve gifted their time and talent, acts as a fortress against the authorities who seek to arrest the migrants for trespassing. How? Through publicity. The more exhibits the BPM has, the more validity the museum gains, which translates to more fortification for the migrant families living there.
 
McKenna’s camera follows the children who live at Metropoliz, how they interact with the artists and the art, how it tempts their eager imaginations. The camera captures a celebratory air to what is, for the children a most precarious situation.
 
The second story includes an exhibit by the artist Lee Mingwei in Auckland, New Zealand where opera singers dress in vibrant kimono-like dresses and offer songs to the patrons of a museum. The camera shows the awkwardness of a gift declined, but also the catharsis and gratitude of recipients as they listen to a divine voice—a voice heard ordinarily by hundreds—sing privately for them.
 
Mingwei believes his ideas “come look for [him]”; it’s his job to create a space to receive them “and bring them into the physical world.” The idea of an artist being a channel is one that many artists hold and is indicative of another element of gifting: faith. One must have faith that the ideas will come, that one can express them, and that they will be received.
 
In McKenna’s third story, an Indigenous chief of a Pacific Northwest tribe called the Kwakwaka'wakw displays just that: faith. As the most respected man of the tribe, chief Marcus Alfred believes it is his duty to give the most during a "feast of giving" or "potlatch." He donates time, creative energy, and money to the celebration and hopes it will be successfully received. In this segment, the camera captures the carving of a totem pole by Alfred and his father and tells the story not only of faith, but of doubt: “It’s scary when you’re flat broke. You get to a place where you wonder if you’ve finally made a mistake.” Here, former chief Wayne Alfred explains the philosophy of living life as an artist; you must have faith that what you expend in the name of creativity will be replenished, but at the same time, it's terrifying.

It's common knowledge that gifting is inherent to Indigenous beliefs; to the Indigenous people, the land and its resources were gifts from a preternatural force, so they in turn practiced gifting with one another “until [their] pockets were hanging out.” One has the sense in watching this that with every act of gifting, came spiritual satiation, a type of ecstasy. It was the white man, with his ideas on bartering and money, who just didn’t get it.
 
McKenna’s fourth story is about a young woman who builds a bee car and gifts honey and honey products as well as bee car rides to the participants at Burning Man. One of the main tenets of Burning Man is gifting and, like the story on Native Americans, it only seems logical that it be a part of this movie. But the Burning Man element not only underscores the theme of the film, it presents a mystical visual feast, a dreamlike vision, a mirage in the heat of the Nevada desert—perhaps a metaphor for the act of gifting itself, because it can never truly exist in our society.
 
Overall, McKenna’s camera is non-intrusive and in typical documentary style, a witness to the lives of the people in the film. At times, however, I felt the need for a unifying narrator, one who could pull in a bit more background information and inform the viewer just who was talking and the context of what was being said. But perhaps that would detract from the film’s mystique, which is apropos for a topic so foreign to most of us.
 
 
Robin McKenna is director, producer and writer of GIFT, a feature-length documentary and crossmedia project inspired by Lewis Hyde’s classic bestseller The Gift.  Recently she directed a short film with actress Geneviève Bujold, produced by the NFB for the Governor General’s Awards. She is currently making Thanadoula, a short animated documentary fairytale about a real-life “death doula,” in co-production with the National Film Board of Canada and Medicine, a feature-length documentary about ayahuasca, medicine and healing. You can read more about GIFT and Robin McKenna at  http://gaudetefilms.com
 
GIFT is available through GOODDOCS and Gathr.

The website for the movie is here.

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