Documentary turns out to be quite a ‘Gift’ itself

MOVIE REVIEW

“GIFT”

Not Rated. At Kendall Square Cinema.

Grade: B+

In spite of some narrative shortcomings and a rocky start (Where are we? Who are these people?), writer-director Robin McKenna’s “Gift,” a film based on the 1983 best-seller “The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World” by Lewis Hyde, wins you over by its determination to win you over.

The documentary is set in several places: Rome, where we meet artists trying to help immigrants find a home in an empty factory; Alert Bay, British Columbia, where a disconsolate indigenous artist fights to finish artifacts for his tribe’s opulent annual potlatch, one of them a towering pole; Nevada, where a charming bee aficionado arrives at Burning Man with a bee-mobile dubbed Beezus Christ Super Car and a load of mead and honey; and Auckland and Boston, where singers ask museum-goers if they would like “the gift of song.”

“Gift” features captions explaining the gift-giving culture to us, and while I might argue with the idea that art is made without money in mind (for goodness sake, in one scene an artist even makes origami out of a five-dollar bill), I can try to understand what Hyde and McKenna are trying to say. One of the artists featured in the film is Taiwan-born Lee Mingwei, who creates “participatory art.” In a Mingwei gallery show, the artist asks visitors to take a flower to give away to a stranger. In a sequence in B.C., $6,000 worth of flour is delivered to the tribal meeting place to prepare for the potlatch. Curator Giorgio de Finis helps artists transform a former sausage factory in a suburb of Rome into a gallery-cum-home for immigrant families. The artists donate their work hoping to make the housing dubbed Metropoliz into a genuine self-sufficient gallery. Watching the children play among the artworks is one of the film’s pleasures. Another is listening to Marcus Alfred, an indigenous Kwakwaka’wakw sculptor moan like Job as he carves enormous faces and figures for his pole, racing against time and hoping to make his ancestors, including a dancing grandfather, happy.

Best of all is the finale in which the singers decked out in elaborate robes sing to those who accepted their gift, including an older woman on crutches and a toddler. If you don’t wipe away a tear, I’ll be surprised. One of the lessons of “Gift” is that art is powerful, and by the end you will undoubtedly agree.

(“Gift” contains no objectionable material.)

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2BYJJVu