Authors — Allan Tong
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Hot Docs: Growing Crowds Amid Shrinking Funds
“There are more people here this year, but less money.” That’s how one veteran Canadian documentarian summed up the market at Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary festival, which just wrapped in Toronto. At workshops and cocktail receptions, the chatter was as dark as the skies outside. Broadcasters here and abroad continue to slash their development and production budgets, and that’s forced doc directors to crowdfund on Indiegogo and Kickstarter to make up (part of) the shortfall, while others just leave the business. Sure, there were great films unveiled over the past 10 days at Hot Docs. Thomas Wallner’s Before The Last […]
by Allan Tong on May 5, 2014 -
Previewing Hot Docs 2014: Ukrainian Women in the Spotlight and More
Hot Docs, the largest documentary festival in North America, opens Thursday night in Toronto, and a number of films caught my eye: Return to Homs is a grim diary of the Syrian civil war filmed from the inside — a dystopic landscape of bombed-out buildings, dead children, and snipers pockmarking empty streets as civilians run like frightened rats. The winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the World Documentary section at Sundance, this is likely the most difficult film to watch at this year’s Hot Docs, but perhaps its most rewarding. On a similar note, The Condemned profiles several inmates […]
by Allan Tong on Apr 23, 2014 -
“The only place to execute some kind of power was the film set”: Agnieszka Holland on her career
Agnieszka Holland’s first taste of Hollywood was a roller coaster ride. Literally. It was 1986 and her war drama Angry Harvest was up for an Oscar. “When you’ve been nominated for a foreign Oscar in those times,” the 65-year-old Polish-born director recalled, “one of the attractions that the American Academy gave the nominees was a free trip to Disneyland.” It was an unexpected reward after toiling on a film that she and her crew made for “no money, no money,” she explained to an appreciative audience at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox earlier this week. The shoot was so difficult that Holland […]
by Allan Tong on Apr 3, 2014 -
“This Is The Guy”: Steve James, Roger Ebert and Life Itself
“Who the fuck are you?” Fueled on booze, Flamo was raging. Someone had told the cops he had stashed guns in his house, and so his mum and brother were handcuffed and led away. Craving revenge but thinking better, Flamo phoned Cobe (pronounced KOH-bay), someone he met years earlier in the county jail who was now a violence interruptor, counseling young gangbangers like Flamo to chill out and stop drawing blood in Chicago’s crime-ravaged South Side. When Cobe arrived, Flamo was stunned to find some white man filming him. Luckily, Cobe knew how to vouch for the white man to the youth he […]
by Allan Tong on Mar 26, 2014 -
Chris Tucker in Toronto: “I Don’t Do a Lot of Stuff, Because I’ve Seen Everything”
Earlier this week, Chris Tucker braved the latest polar vortex to be honored at Black History Month in Toronto, presented by the Canadian Film Centre and Poor Boy’s Game director Clément Virgo. The 41-year-old co-star (with Jackie Chan) of the hugely popular Rush Hour franchise was revered as an elder statesman by the mostly young, black audience of filmmakers, actors and fans. Though known as a rapid-fire comic on screen, Tucker this evening was alternately funny (raising the roof by dancing like Michael Jackson) and thoughtful as he reflected on his his two decades in a Hollywood where non-whites have […]
by Allan Tong on Feb 28, 2014 -
“These Movies Work Better If You’re Really Stoned:” David Cronenberg on Architecture and His Early Work
TIFF’s acclaimed Evolution exhibition — celebrating the career of hometown boy David Cronenberg — had just closed when OCAD University hosted a free discussion between him and TIFF CEO Piers Handling. For the past five months, the art school has been partnering with Toronto International on The Cronenberg Project, a multimedia exploration of the director of Dead Ringers, Crash and A History of Violence. It’s appropriate that the discussion before an audience of 325 students and VIPs centered on Cronenberg’s student years, early films and architecture. The talk began with excerpts from Stereo (1969) and Crimes of The Future (1970), […]
by Allan Tong on Jan 24, 2014 -
Gael García Bernal on Documentaries
“Let’s go back to the time when there was VHS,” says Gael García Bernal at the RIDM (Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal or the Montreal International Documentary Festival). “In those days to see a documentary in Mexico your friend would buy a movie in New York or Amsterdam or wherever [and] they would come up to you and say, ‘If you want to see this…’” Inevitably, a documentary fell into the young García Bernal’s hands. “I don’t remember which one it was, but I remember feeling there was something beyond an investigation, that it had a bigger scope, a […]
by Allan Tong on Nov 27, 2013 -
“It Found Its Way to Me Exclusively Because of the Title”: Alexander Payne on Nebraska
If Bob Nelson’s screenplay had been called Iowa, Alexander Payne would have never made Nebraska. “It found its way exclusively to me, because of the title,” said the Omaha-born director before a recent sold-out audience at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. Indeed, Nebraska could be mistaken for one of Payne’s scripts, since it shares common story elements with The Descendants, Sideways and About Schmidt: a man hits the road to find himself accompanied by a buddy, uncovers painful yet funny revelations about his past, and arrives at peace with his imperfect life. “Who am I really?” asks his heroes. In Nebraska, Bruce Dern […]
by Allan Tong on Nov 20, 2013 -
“I Am the Master of My Destiny”: Jeremy Irons Talks at TIFF’s Bell Lightbox
In 1979, Jeremy Irons was in the middle of shooting the British TV drama, Brideshead Revisited when the show’s technicians went on strike. No one knew if or when the show would continue, so Irons talked to director Karol Reisz about filming The French Lieutenant’s Woman the following March. “[Reisz] was going out on a big limb to allow the studio to use me,” Irons recalls, “because I was a nobody.” Irons would become a household name for playing a stiff upper lipped Englishman because of Brideshead , but this past weekend in Toronto he showed a funny, candid and insightful side […]
by Allan Tong on Nov 5, 2013 -
In Conversation: David Cronenberg’s D.P. Peter Suschitzky
Peter Suschitzky has photographed films for John Boorman, Ken Russell and most notably David Cronenberg, but the 72-year-old d.p. still prepares each film with the written word. “It begins with a careful reading of the screenplay,” he says in a polite English accent over the phone from London, “trying to get a feel for, subconsciously, what’s in that script.” Suschitzky is giving interviews to promote, Evolution, TIFF’s celebration of hometown boy and horror master, Cronenberg. Evolution launches Hallowe’en week at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in downtown Toronto with a multimedia exhibition of celebrating Cronenberg’s five-decade career that began long before […]
by Allan Tong on Oct 31, 2013
