Orhon’s new film Slums: Cities of Tomorrow takes the viewer on a worldwide journey that goes from Bangalore, India, to Sao Paulo, Brazil, to “Tent City” in Lakewood, New Jersey, and even comes all the way home to Quebec. The beautiful shots from city to city capture the vast landscapes of countries such as India and Brazil. Aerial views of houses draped with makeshift roofs fill the screen, while images of these slums overshadowed by concrete jungles and massive skyscrapers add depth and contrast to the film’s aesthetics. These scenes are interspersed with interesting anecdotes and personal stories, which, while they make the film relatable on an individual level, are often cut too short. Instead, Orhon replaces these lived experiences with an excess of interviews with ‘experts’ who provide their academic opinion on why slums don’t deserve a bad reputation.

Three of these experts, UQAM professor Nicolas Reeves, author Jeremy Seabrook, and investigative journalist Robert Neuwirth, claim that slums – or “squatting communities,” as they are more often referred to in the film – are an urban and architectural phenomenon throughout the world. They define squatting communities as neighbourhoods born not out of a historical construction but out of necessity, as residents are faced with factors they are not able to control. Governments, they explain, are attempting to eradicate squatting communities; but, as is evident in the film’s footage of squatting communities around the world, these neighbourhoods are not going away anytime soon – they are instead growing into bustling urban centres with the potential to create long-lasting communities. The three argue that governments should improve lives and provide basic services in these communities instead of trying to evict them from the land they’ve unofficially claimed.

Although they are affected by harsh economic times, Slums demonstrates how the residents of these squatting communities learn to live with what scarce resources they have. Each of the film’s selected settings are home to vibrant neighbourhoods with a strong sense of community. One of the residents of the tent city in Lakewood, NJ, nicely sums up this feature of the squatting communities, stating, “Even if you’re homeless, you can still make a home out of nothing.” The inhabitants of these squatting communities live in a sort of “collective activity,” as Seabrook puts it, constantly living and working together, sharing the land, and taking ownership of it as a collective.

Slums goes beyond investigating the misconceptions of squatting communities, to also critique the modern city and the individuals that inhabit it. Seabrook compares cities to slums unfavourably, arguing, “Individuals [in cities] take more than they require and absorb all natural resources leaving nothing behind […] what a sad epitaph.” He points out that in slums there is a sort of “restoration of social hope,” the idea that a new sort of society can be born, one where communities are actively engaged with each other in terms of urban and architectural development and the sharing of resources.

While the documentary has some valuable content, rough editing between community scenes and interviews results in a trajectory that is often jumpy and overzealous. Orhon tries to provide the viewer with a global perspective, but Slums ultimately suffers from an excess of storylines. The scattered nature of the personal stories makes the film hard to follow, while the interviews often come across as awkward and stiff.

Despite Slums’ heavy reliance on ‘experts,’ and lack of storytelling depth, Orhon does succeed in challenging stereotypes of poverty and economic theory. Slums suggests that maybe the answer to unaffordable housing is not cheaply built, low-cost high rises. In fact, the residents in this film seem to be handling the issue much better than most governments do – heads of state may want to check it out.

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This hard-hitting, Oscar-nominated documentary opens with Fox receiving a letter in the mail from a natural gas company offering to lease his family’s land in southeastern Pennsylvania (which he introduces with vivid language and imagery) for $100,000 to drill for natural gas. Skeptical of this offer, Fox decides to inspect the practice they use to extract the gas: “hydraulic fracturing” or “fracking,” effectively declaring himself a “gas detective.” In this practice, a mix of water and chemicals are blasted deep underground, causing a mini-earthquake which then frees up the gas. The mix, or “fracking fluid,” they use contains over 500 chemicals which, as we see throughout the documentary, can cause damage to the environment as well as people’s health.

This film focuses primarily on the people affected by fracking as opposed to big names who could’ve been easy targets such as legislators and other company bigwigs (Dick Cheney, as former CEO of Halliburton, is touched upon at the beginning, but is not the main focus of the film). It is filled with stories and testimonials from the people who have faced the hardships dealt to them by the companies drilling for natural gas on their land.

Some of the more striking of these are the the numerous accounts of people being able to light their water on fire, allegedly because of the contamination by the fracking fluid. These accounts become even more terrifying when actually shown on screen. When touched by a lighter, the water tap becomes engulfed in flame and creates a hellish scene; however, this is not the end of it. Diseased animals and livestock, constant daily headaches from bad drinking water, and a loss of smell and taste are only some of the negative health effects fracking has brought. The many consequences from of fracking, surprising to those who live nearby, prove to be a constant hindrance in their daily lives. A small number of people directly affected by fracking go to the media to expose the energy companies’ actions, but many are silenced by non-disclosure agreements they sign upon receiving the money from the lease of their land. The effects of fracking often go unnoticed by the wider public since they are mostly confined to small, rural communities.

Similar to a more famous documentarian, Michael Moore, Fox uses the many instances of the unwillingness of corporations and government officials to cooperate to drive his point home. Throughout the film, Fox is refused phone call after phone call, constantly being declined an interview or even a moment of a corporate spokesperson or executive’s time. When a corporate spokesperson finally agrees to meet Fox for an interview, he promptly and abruptly leaves the room. In a brief but shocking scene, a Colorado resident recounts a phone call she made to the Colorado Oil and Gas Commission. “Aren’t you supposed to be for the people, if not you who is for the people?” she asked, to which the Commission replied, “Nobody. Get an attorney.”

Although a few controversial facts in Fox’s film have been contested, the harrowing and grim Gasland certainly does still leave a pit in your stomach. Many American politicians tend to praise fracking as reducing the reliance on foreign oil, as well as creating jobs. Gasland exposes this tendency to put corporate interest on a pedestal at the expense of the environment and the American people who are actually affected. Though the camera work is at times a bit shaky and the script a bit sophomoric, the film makes for a very convincing case and holds its own in drawing the audience’s attention to the harsh realities of fracking.

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As the film opens we are introduced to Dahai, a poor coal miner. Dressed in a worn out trench coat, he sits on his motorcycle as the wind blows noisily by and a fire from a crashed truck burns high in the background. Tomatoes from the crashed truck fill the streets. The camera then quickly pans to Zhou San, who has just passed Dahai on his own motorcycle. Zhou San is confronted by three armed youths while still mounted. We soon realize that the three youth chose the wrong man to rob. Zhou San reaches into his coat pocket and mercilessly kills all three youths, giving them no time to flee. The violence doesn’t stop there, however, as Jia brings us back to the first character, star of possibly the strongest story within the movie.

Dahai lives in a poor mining town rampant with corruption and greed, and it seems like he is the only one who is willing to speak up about it. Despite Dahai’s perseverance and willingness to bring corrupt boss Jiao to justice, his co-workers refuse to comply. Alienated and marked as an outcast, Dahai chooses to publicly confront his boss at a welcoming party at his private jet in front of most of the village. He ends up paying a high price for his defiance with a blow to the head from a company executive.

The next three narratives, though not as strong as the first one, carry quite a punch as well. They include the story of Zhou San, a migrant worker who supports his family financially with a gun and cold blood, a massage parlor receptionist (played by the director’s wife) who is pushed too far, and finally Xiao Hui, a young teenager from the provinces who flees from a workplace accident he caused in an exploitative factory and ends up working in an upscale brothel where he appears to have found love.

A Touch of Sin is peppered with ironic statements about the current state of China. Possibly the most striking of these is the name Jia chose for the condo where Xiao Hui and the other factory workers stay: The Oasis of Prosperity. These biting touches are especially remarkable given the fact that reporting on many of the true events touched upon in the film, which has yet to be released in China, was censored by the government.

All stories are charged with violence and focus on alienated people pushed to the brink by either corruption, greed, or violence. Each narrative is set in a different Chinese region with a different standard of living. Jia arranges the four narratives so that the poorest region is shown first and the most prosperous ends the film – although this prosperity doesn’t extend to the characters themselves. Jia sometimes moves too fast in the last three narratives however and at times does not give us enough time to delve deep into the story or grab our attention.

Regardless of this, Jia’s film still delivers a message, and does so in a very entertaining and captivating way. The message can be summed up nicely by the director himself while in an interview with film critic Marsha McCreadie, “The expansion in China has been so fast there’s been no room for the system to catch up with any kind of humanity.”

A Touch of Sin (Tian Zhu Ding) is playing at Cinema du Parc (3575 Parc) until January 16.

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