A standard festival story: I had plans to see a particular film at the end of TIFF 2024 day one, but my schedule had to be hastily rearranged, I had time to kill and thought I might as well see a movie I was kind of curious about. So there I sat at the P&I screening of Kenichi Ugana’s Midnight Madness world premiere The Gesuidouz, sandwiched between two independent theater bookers having a catch-up. The man on my left started reeling off every anime he’d programmed for the last two months and would be showing for the foreseeable future; the one on my right cut him off with “I think your knowledge of anime is far greater than mine and I’d love your help with that.” (Translation, I think: will you please be quiet, please.) The air was thick with unrepentant geek vibes—never my scene but I thought, “This will be good for me. This is what festivals are supposed to do: remind me of all the other parts of the ecosystem beyond my hermetic arthouse comfort zone, all of which matter to the bottom lines of theater bookers just like the ones around me, and therefore ultimately to me as well.”

I guess it was good for me, at least as a reminder of why I avoid this kind of thing, because The Gesuidouz is a very bad would-be prefab cult movie. The TIFF program capsule suggested that the film “recalls the deadpan humour and vignette structures of an Aki Kaurismäki film (Leningrad Cowboys Go America in particular).” What this means is that the movie is about a band, one of whose members has a mohawk¹—the American drummer played by Rocko Zevenbergen, whose resume includes time at Troma, which presumably was good for calling in a Lloyd Kaufman cameo (always an ominous sign). Why was the film programmed at all? A small second unit is credited to director Joseph Kahn, a TIFF regular whose Ick premiered in the same section this year, which doesn’t seem like a total coincidence. 

A wretchedly indifferent band, the Gesuidouz retreat to the countryside to try to create an indelible song before 26-year-old frontwoman Hanako (Natsuko) has her next birthday and commits suicide to join the 27 Club. The jokes are mostly on the level of e.g. having a dog called John Cage (wacky!) who eventually talks (wackier!), along with a (very) small handful of more imaginative bits designed to be snipped out for YouTube consumption. Kaurismäki’s got nothing to do with it: his films are all beautifully shot on 35mm, while this is a hideously unlit digital sketch assembly. The big recurring gag is that before starting a jam session, Hanako will shout out what she wants to the song to sound like—e.g. “like Johnny Thunders holding a devil baby in his arms while riding a rollercoaster.” This isn’t really a joke, but it is a fine way of summing up what a lot of films just like this one are: a series of cultural references dropped in putatively crazy circumstances and invariably more fun to describe in two sentences than watch at feature length. I emerged grateful to retreat back to my usual festival film turf after all. 

TIFF’s plans for reversing their downward trajectory—in prestige, premieres, ease of attendance, volume of trickle-down offerings from the year’s major festivals—remain as ominously hazy as they’ve been for a while now. In 2026, they plan to launch a full market component whose precise details are pending. (Per chief programming officer Anita Lee, “Packaging and finance is going to be a key part of the official market […] there will be a co-producing forum. There will be a project market. There will be a works-in-progress salon.”) Meantime, in one longtime attendee’s succinct verdict, “people seem to be over it”—not least the director who approached my group’s table late at night, gave us a blast on TIFF’s filler-clogged lineup and challenged us to find a single thing worth watching in the Sunday 8-am-to-noon P&I block. (We looked at that schedule after the director departed. Grim indeed!) Another industry vet described how they envisioned a lot of the foreign film booking process: find a country with money and some actors they want to fly over for the red carpet, program accordingly. The infrastructure is, to quote Kamala Harris, “weird.” The back-end seems to be disintegrating (getting tickets was a buggy, trial-and-error guessing game) and public prices are outrageous once they enter the realm of resale; scanning quickly, I saw tickets for a 9:45 pm Cloud screening that from $135 CAD to over 200—translated to USD, more than opening night of this year’s NYFF for a neck-crane seat. I heard a guy at one screening telling his friend that he didn’t understand what TIFF membership gets you: the chance to buy festival tickets a week before the general public at double the price? I’m not sure who is being serviced by these maladept processes besides Ticketmaster.

Toronto is lovely in many ways (visit Balfour Books when in town) and a weirdly underrated food city, so I would love to keep coming back in good faith to scour for gems deeper in the lineup. This year the big pile of semi-unknown quantities yielded a winner in Fabian Stumm’s Sad Jokes, which premiered at the comparatively low-profile Munich Film Festival. A prolific actor in Germany, this is Stumm’s second feature as writer-director, and his performance has more confidence than what often happens when a director casts themselves in a part to save money. Here he plays Joseph, who is…a writer-director working on his sophomore feature. I have a lot of thoughts about why movies-about-making-movies are an increasing percentage of the festival film economy, which I’ll save for another time; just know that this starting premise doesn’t result in automatic tedium, but does allow an in-character Stumm to define the tone he’s working towards in a meeting with his skeptical producer: “My background is more naturalistic. I’d like to move in a more absurdist direction.”

Putting that idea into practice, the next scene has Joseph getting his hand stuck in a vending machine’s grate and trying to extricate himself with the aid of the person you’d least like to be around in this situation—a woman incredibly flustered by his predicament and unable to call the ambulance because she keeps getting distracted—while classical piano music provides an upscale slapstick accompaniment. Throughout, Joseph’s facial expression is more panic-stricken than he realizes; this is a portrait of the director as an inveterate people-pleaser out of financial necessity who’s not actually good at playing that game, and his proposed project gives signs of the more egocentric eccentricity bubbling under. He attends a model-drawing class led by Swedish teacher Elin (Ulrica Flach), who glances in alarm at his sketch. “I’m trying to keep it abstract, he says. “That’s…interesting,” she says. “Fun is good.” Afterwards, Joseph’s real reason for attending is revealed: for his forthcoming film, he wants Elin to sculpt a gigantic head modeled after his own. (We all have control issues.)

In truth, Sad Jokes is better at the latter part of its title than the former, minus a nervewracking second scene introducing Sonya (Haley Louis Jones), Joseph’s best friend and co-parent who’s having some kind of nervous breakdown requiring institutionalization she keeps escaping. In his review, Jonathan Romney times the shot at eight minutes, and it’s a standout of one-setup blocking that releases a bunch of information without being overly obvious about either. The film’s worst sections are other, more maudlin ones about Sonya, but the jokes are terrific, leading to standout setpieces including the post-premiere party for Joseph’s first film, where his two lead actresses, who began a relationship while shooting, get into a huge fight and a sleazy Italian who works in insurance (i.e., a financier) senses his opportunity to jump into the breach. The triangle switch between German and Italian in front of an increasingly attentive audience (including, in a cameo for the German cinema heads, Victoria director Sebastian Schipper), a masterfully staged face-off with an unexpected punchline. Throughout, Stumm demonstrates his adeptness for bringing comedy back to the arthouse, where it’s mostly sorely missed. Was I just experiencing festival fever, a key symptom of which is the desire to make discoveries where none are to actually be made? I hope not, and hope as well that TIFF can figure out its infelicities and get back to assembling more such films. 

¹ Maybe the TIFF capsules have been weird for a long time and I just haven’t been paying attention—and granted, the role of the blurb-writer is to entice by any semi-plausible means necessary rather than providing an accurate description—but the ones I looked at this year were all similarly weird. The one for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud describes his “unique style” as “Kiyoshiism,” a term that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t actually exist (at least not in English), while the one for Babygirl states that it “may evoke some comparisons to Steven Shainberg’s Secretary (TIFF ’02), but surface similarities aside, it’s something entirely its own.” OK, then why bring it up at all, knowing that this will only result in a slew of review comparisons to that earlier title that, in your own words, do this one a disservice? You know once you put that out there it’s going to be in a third of all festival reviews.↩