Toronto International Film Festival 2011
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The Forgiveness of Blood — A Hammer to Nail Review
(The Forgiveness of Blood is being distributed by Sundance Selects and comes to theaters on February 24, 2012. It world premiered at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival. NOTE: This review was first posted at Hammer to Nail in conjunction with its screening at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.) The future of American independent filmmaking may not lie in America at all. In recent years, a number of filmmakers have turned their eyes away from the complexities of 21st century American life and toward the world beyond our national borders. The decision to engage another culture through filmmaking, to […]
by Tom Hall on Feb 23, 2012 -
FILMMAKER PHOTOGRAPHER HENNY GARFUNKEL IN TORONTO
Reading Filmmaker online is great and all, but one thing you don’t get — in addition to about 60% of the content — is the full impact of Henny Garfunkel’s original photography. For the Fall issue, we have quite bit of her work, including the David Cronenberg cover, another Cronenberg shot inside, and full-page portraits of Jessica Chastain, Jeff Nichols, Michael Shannon, Todd Rohal, Dee Rees, Sean Durkin & Elizabeth Olson, Steve McQueen and Asghar Farhadi. The issue is on newsstands now, and you can see Garfunkle at work in Toronto, where many of these photographs were taken, in this […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 1, 2011 -
YORGOS LANTHIMOS’ “ALPS” GOES TO KINO LORBER
Kino Lorber has acquired U.S. rights to Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Alps, the follow-up to his Oscar-nominated cult hit Dogtooth. According to indieWIRE, the film will be released in the spring of 2012. Kino also released Dogtooth in the States. The fourth feature by Lathimos, Alps follows an unusual group who offers grieving family members the opportunity to have their troupe reenact and continue the lives of deceased loved ones. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won Best Screenplay, and the Toronto International Film Festival. It will screen next at AFI Fest in L.A. If we […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Oct 17, 2011 -
NYFF: WEST MEMPHIS 3 ON HAND FOR UNVEILING OF NEW “PARADISE LOST 3” ENDING
You probably know by now that the West Memphis 3 (Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr. and Jason Baldwin) were released from prison after giving an Alford plea — a guilty plea but not admitting to the act and asserting innocence — in August. At the time directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky were locking up their third film on the WM3, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, when they heard the news of the surprise development and raced down to Arkansas. Unable to put the footage of the three being freed in the film before screening it at the Toronto International Film […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Oct 11, 2011 -
“CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN” IS ALWAYS A GLASS MOSTLY EMPTY: ON “THE IDES OF MARCH”
Note: the following piece contains spoilers. One time in my fleeting youth, I encountered George Clooney in the Warner Brothers screening room on 53rd Street after a National Board of Review screening of Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German. This is before I had, despite my ongoing poverty and lack of renown, spent ample time around movie stars and the merely sort-of famous at sundry locations, both foreign and domestic, becoming relatively at ease in their strange company. I still often felt not unlike the protagonist of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, as he follows William Holden through a blustery New Orleans afternoon, sensing some […]
by Brandon Harris on Oct 6, 2011 -
TORONTO 2011: “WAVELENGTHS” PART II
The adventurous Wavelengths experimental film programs at the Toronto International Film Festival, curated first by Susan Oxtoby and then, in recent years, by Andréa Picard, are a true festival highlight. 2011 was exemplary in this regard, its five experimental programs marked by a diverse range of aesthetics and artistic projects. An eerie mood pervades the smart, surprising Sea Series #10 by John Price, one of the only films in the 2011 Wavelengths experimental program at the Toronto International Film Festival explicitly inspired by world events. An intertitle explains that the film was made “10,190 km from Fukushima” on May 21, 2011, two months after the deadly Japanese […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 20, 2011 -
TORONTO: WHIT STILLMAN DISCUSSES “DAMSELS IN DISTRESS”
Via The Guardian, here’s a talk with Whit Stillman and clips from his new film, Damsels in Distress.
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 19, 2011 -
TORONTO PHOTOS AND NOTES, #2
For several people I talked to, my favorite film at Cannes became their favorite film at Toronto. Oslo, August 31 is Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his inspiring hit film, Reprise. That movie, a tale of youth and best friends and literature and longing and rock and roll, was smart, sophisticated and with an emotional arc like a great mix tape. It was also somewhat dazzling in its montage, using split-screen, freeze frames and a European post-punk soundtrack to make its story of young Norwegian literati one that felt like young adulthood everywhere. After several years working on a larger-scale American […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 17, 2011 -
TORONTO 2011: “WAVELENGTHS” PART I
For fans of experimental film, 2011 has been a year of heavy losses. Yet even as we mourn the deaths of pioneer filmmakers including Jordan Belson, George Kuchar, George Landow (aka Owen Land), and Adolphas Mekas, the 2011 Wavelengths programs at the Toronto International Film Festival indicated that experimental film is alive and well… and living in Canada. Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber Disclosure is a site-specific live projection performance that was a highlight of this year’s festival. In the projection booth, Brooklyn-based artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder distilled a found 35mm commercial film print into rich, gorgeous beams of light that danced on […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 17, 2011 -
TORONTO PHOTOS AND NOTES, #1
The IFP organized a screening series at TIFF this year for RBC, the Royal Bank of Canada, at the Thompson Hotel. The event turned into a four-night run of Ryan O’Nan’s festival selection, The Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best, which knocked out the crowd each night. As I moderated the Q&A’s, I can attest: this film plays. The movie was selected for the IFP’s Narrative Lab just this past summer, and it happily surprised all of us by finishing so quickly and making it to Toronto. The Brooklyn Brothers is a totally winning tale of a makeshift band on a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 16, 2011
