Great start to Kamloops Film Festival but Oil Sands Karaoke has trouble finding its focus

ARTS/ ENTERTAINMENT  (REVIEW) — The 18th annual Kamloops Film Festival got off to a raucous karaoke start Thursday night, complete with red carpet, lots of speeches, and karaoke music.

The film society literally rolled out the red carpet for those attending the opening film for the weeklong festival, and plenty took advantage of the chances to have their pictures taken on it.

The Paramount theatre was sold out for Oil Sands Karaoke, a documentary about five tar sands (oops, make that oil sands) wokers who enter a karaoke contest at a Fort McMurray bar.

A Canadian film is a great way to kick off the festival, tickets for which have become a hot item as it’s grown over the years.

But Oil Sands Karaoke is a puzzling movie, unable to decide what it’s really about. It’s more than just a fun movie about a karaoke contest, to be sure. At times it’s about using karaoke as a way of expressing long-harboured ambitions and, in some cases, dealing with underlying trauma.

But the juxtaposition with life in the oil patch, while an intriguing premise, doesn’t quite work. Is it about struggling with boredom in Fort McMurray, or isn’t it?

Karaoke or the oil patch?

The best parts of Oil Sands Karaoke are the insights into why those people are there in the first place, when we gain an understanding of what motivates them to be in what, for many of us, is a rather mysterious part of the world.

The film does provide some pretty strong visuals of the vastness of the extraction fields but, just as it can’t priorize its subject matter, it can’t decide what its position is on the environmental question.

Maybe director Charles Wilkinson (who attended the opening) wanted to remain neutral, but it weakens the movie.

As Wilkinson said Thursday night, “It was in many ways a difficult thing to make.”

Maybe he needed to work harder on the message. He does give us some stunning scenes of equipment plying the patch and exhaust stacks belching into the northern sky, plus some defensive comments by the workers.

“Everyone hates Fort McMurray,” says one.

But if that’s true, we’re no more enlightened by the end of the film as to why.

And, by the way, it would have helped the grittiness of Oil Sands Karaoke if at least some of it had been filmed in winter so we could get a sense of the bone-chilling conditions those who have worked there — and a lot of Kamloops people have — talk about.

But then it would make for a dull film festival if everyone thought every film was a good one.

The Kamloops Film Festival runs through March 15. Advance tickets are available at Moviemart at 444 St. Paul St., the TRUSU desk at the Campus Activity Centre, and the Paramount Theatre onVictoria Street.