I can still recall my red pill moment while watching Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar’s 2003 documentary The Corporation with my best friend, at the (pre-financial crisis) time an analyst at a big bank. “Corporations are people? What the hell?” I practically shouted. “Yup,” he simply responded with a weary shrug. For many clueless progressives like myself, unaware that corporate power had been spreading like the coronavirus, silently hijacking all branches of our government for decades, The Corporation was both horror film and wakeup call. The real deep-state conspiracy. Since then we’ve endured the Great Recession and our current economic calamity/health catastrophe/racial injustice awakening. […]

Having committed adultery and conceived a child out of wedlock, a couple is forced to choose between keeping secrets and family ties — or being true to love and residing in exile. Though that could be the plot of an old-fashioned romance novel (or modern-day soap opera), it’s actually the all-too-real situation the protagonists at the heart of Eva Mulvad’s documentary Love Child are forced to reckon with. Over the course of six years Mulvad (the Danish documentarian behind lighter dramatic fare such as the Grey Gardens-in-Portugal standout The Good Life, and more recently, A Cherry Tale and A Modern […]

Religious extremism and its cult-like symptoms are of intense interest to filmmaker Jorunn Myklebust Syversen, her two feature films, Hoggeren (The Three Feller) and Disco offering ample evidence of this. The two films portray cultural manipulation from the top down, with the hierarchies of religious institutions providing the confinements for their leading characters. Premiering at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Disco links professional shortcomings to a lack of belief in the holy spirit. Disco tells the story of 19-year-old Mirjam, a world champion freestyle disco dancer whose stepfather serves as pastor of the local church, Freedom. Once Mirjam’s success in […]

Since his debut feature, Human Comedy in Tokyo, in 2008, Kôji Fukada has steadily become one of the most interesting filmmakers working out of Japan in the last decade plus. Many of his features can be characterised by a protagonist or family unit’s apparent stability being upended by one event, a plot development that illustrates how easily and turbulently lives can spiral out of control. In his sophomore feature, Hospitalité (2010), this was played for laughs. In that film, a family printing business is gradually taken over by a former associate who talks his way into a job, moves into […]

In March Diana Sánchez was promoted to the newly created role of Senior Director of Film for the Toronto International Film Festival. Previously, Sanchez was the Spanish language selector for the Canadian festival. She now oversees the programming strategy for the main festival; TIFF Cinematheque; Film Circuit, the Canadian organization’s nationwide film network; and theatrical programming at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Given the size of that job, it was inevitable that she would have to relinquish her role as Artistic Director of the Panama Film Festival, the festival she helped start in 2011. Under her direction, the Panama Film Festival […]

A clear standout in Director’s Fortnight at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Bertrand Bonello’s mystifying, euphonious headfuck Zombi Child finally drifts onto North American screens this week at TIFF. Among other pleasures and singularities, Bonello’s work has long employed a meticulously curated soundtrack to bridge internal gulfs in subject matter both historical and cultural. In his House of Tolerance, set in a brothel late in the Belle Époque, the (at the time, at least) scandalously anachronistic soundtrack featured rare soul and blues records that exemplified the spirit if not the letter of what was on-screen—namely, the pained, Henry Miller-like alternations […]