TIFF
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“A Movie is Not Something Where I Need to Convey a Message About How People Are Supposed to Live”: Director Kôji Fukada on A Girl Missing
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 […]
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Diana Sanchez, TIFF’s New Senior Director of Film, on Her First Year at TIFF and the Future of Film Festivals
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 […]
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“My Zombi is Not Like Other Zombis… It is Someone Between Life and Death”: Bertrand Bonello Talks Haiti, Day for Night, and his New Zombi Child
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 […]
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Frightening with Cosmic Consequences: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead on their TIFF-Premiering Synchronic
Working for the past several years as a directing tandem, filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead return to the Toronto International Film Festival with Synchronic, a film described by TIFF programmer Michael Lerman as “both suspenseful and subversive.” Following two paramedics based in New Orleans as they uncover a series of odd, drug-related deaths, Synchronic represents the next step forward for the two genre-filmmakers. Complete with two franchise-leading stars (Anthony Mackie of Avengers fame and Jamie Dornan of Fifty Shades of Grey), the film marks the directing duo’s return to TIFF after a five-year hiatus (when their gory foreign romance, […]
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“It’s About Pursuing ‘Truth’ and How Each Journalist Interprets That Word for the Rest of Us”: Yung Chang on His TIFF-Debuting This Is Not a Movie
Long a thorn in the establishment’s side, veteran foreign correspondent Robert Fisk has spent the past four-decades-plus reporting “subjectively” from frontlines the world over, most notably in the Middle East. An Arabic speaker, who interviewed Osama bin Laden three times before 9/11, Fisk has forever served “on the side of the suffering,” political implications be damned. Unsurprisingly, this has caused the Beirut-based Brit to become a controversial, if highly respected, figure, labeled both human rights advocate and terrorist sympathizer alike. Now in his seventies and still dodging bullets, both literally and figuratively, Fisk continues to file columns for The Independent […]
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TIFF 2019, Day 5: Knives Out, The Moneychanger
A passion project Rian Johnson has been mentioning since at least 2010, Knives Out will presumably be a cornerstone of some future retrospective on movies made after fulfilling the imperative to successfully execute a blockbuster, alongside Ridley Scott’s The Counselor and Colin Trevorrow’s The Book of Henry. In 2010, Johnson pegged it as “an old fashioned murder mystery, like an Agatha Christie,” and I’d be curious to read the earliest draft to compare/contrast with the final product — the world has worsened considerably since, and the present is unavoidably imprinted. This begins as a locked-room mystery, concerning the suicide (or is it murder, etc. […]
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“I Tried to Take a Look at These Things from a Distant Future”: Thomas Heise on his TIFF-Premiering Berlin Doc, Heimat is a Space in Time
Winner of the Caligari Film Prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Heimat is a Space in Time is German documentarian Thomas Heise’s absorbing look at 20th-century history in his homeland via his own family’s artifacts — most notably astonishingly intimate letters that sweep us from the rise of Nazism, to the Cold War division of the country, to life on the Stasi-controlled side of the Berlin Wall. Three generations of firsthand accounts, read in unobtrusive voiceover, are gracefully interwoven with family photos and archival images to create a nearly three-and-a-half-hour cinematic epic — one that unfolds in digestible parts like a […]
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 7: Hold the Dark, The Factory
It gives me no pleasure to slag on Jeremy Saulnier’s Hold the Dark; his previous two films, Blue Ruin and Green Room, were good bleak fun, laconic in general, tersely amusing when dialogue emerged. But Hold the Dark has no interest in being fun; it’s much more interested in being taken Seriously, as a Serious Movie, and that’s a very bad trade. I have not read William Giraldi’s source novel, but I conferred with someone who has, who confirmed that many of this movie’s bad ideas — primarily, a heavy metaphorical and literal emphasis on the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan — are organic to […]
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“Silent Solidarity” and Portraying Sexual Violence on Screen: Jayisha Patel on Her TIFF Short Circle
London-based director Jayisha Patel has amassed an impressive resume in a remarkably short period of time. Since 2014 Patel’s documentary shorts have screened LAFF, SXSW, NYFF, the Berlin International Film Festival and beyond, racking up numerous awards along the way. Her latest VR project — Notes to My Father, the world’s first live-action 360-degree documentary on sex trafficking, commissioned by Oculus — premiered at Sundance. Her most recent short, the Berlinale-premiering Circle, a sensitive portrait of an adolescent rape survivor caught in the endless loop of India’s gender-based violence, made its Toronto debut this week. Currently an artist in residence […]
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TIFF 2018 Critic’s Notebook 6: Maya, A Million Little Pieces
Mia Hansen-Løve is on my shortest list of favorite working filmmakers; after the extremely strong opening one-two of All is Forgiven and The Father of My Children, Goodbye First Love and Eden were whiffs. She came back strong with Things to Come, and now there’s Maya, almost certainly destined to be the most poorly-received of her films to date, in part for reasons that I’ll get into below. It appears, talking to a lot of colleagues, that they simply didn’t think the film was very good, but I liked it a lot: Maya‘s got unexpectedly strange energy, does a number of things Hansen-Løve hasn’t done before […]
