Toronto International Film Festival 2015
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“I Never Show the Script to the Actors”: Kazik Radwanski on How Heavy This Hammer
With his second feature, How Heavy This Hammer, Toronto-based filmmaker Kazik Radwanski tackles the trope of the seemingly soulless main-child with a formal intensity that is at once casual and rigorous, and all the more unnerving as a result. Erwin (Erwin Van Cotthem) is unable to find anything of value in his life beyond the mental and emotional respite of fantasy computer games and the brutish diversions of rugby matches. His wife and two sons are nothing more than grating obligations, whose needs nearly drive him to the brink of an all out crisis. Radwanski renders these quotidian frustrations – […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Feb 17, 2016 -
Toronto, Camden and Venice
TORONTO by Scott Macaulay High Rise has long been considered one of the J.G. Ballard’s most “adaptable” books, with the author’s dispassionate meditations on disassociation, inner and outer space, and the psychologies and paraphilias unleashed by 20th-century life encased within the sturdy confines of a modern apartment building and a class-based tale of survival. Nonetheless, High Rise has taken decades to reach the screen, despite the attachments of numerous directors, including Vincenzo Natali, Bruce Robinson and, revealed producer Jeremy Thomas at a talk at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, interest from Nicolas Roeg. Premiering at the festival in Platform, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 28, 2015 -
TIFF 2015 Critic’s Notebook #5: An Old Dog’s Diary, Cemetery of Splendour and Chevalier
Ghostly echoes fill An Old Dog’s Diary (2015), a highlight of the Wavelengths experimental short programs at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. This impressionistic, documentary portrait takes as its subject F. N. Souza (1924-2002), a man anointed by The Guardian “India’s most important and most famous modern artist.” Made by Shumona Goel and Shai Heredia, each an accomplished artist in her own right (Heredia is also the founder of Experimenta, a leading Indian experimental film society), the evocative 11-minute film takes a sidelong approach to cinematic portraiture. Textural glimpses of Goa, Souza’s birthplace, are casually depicted on black-and-white Super 8 and 16mm film: the shimmer of the water in a verdant bayou; […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 29, 2015 -
Managing Rubble and the Degradation of the Building: Ben Wheatley on High-Rise
Perhaps the most divisive film at the 40th Toronto International Film Festival was in the inaugural Platform competition section. High-Rise was originally published by author J.G. Ballard in 1975; now, English filmmaker Ben Wheatley (Sightseers) has brought to the big screen the tale of Dr. Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a new resident in a luxury apartment building who becomes entangled in a civil war between the building’s different social classes. The media interest kicked into overdrive for the social satire when Soda Pictures purchased the Canadian distribution rights. During the craziness, Filmmaker was able to sit down with Wheatley to talk about […]
by Trevor Hogg on Sep 22, 2015 -
TIFF 2015, Critic’s Notebook #4: Unexpected Pleasures from Corneliu Porumboiu, Yermek Tursunov, and Pietro Marcello
There’s a sense of disappointment in the air. At the parties, people have been whispering, maybe this year’s just not a good year. Maybe next year will be better, they forecast in hushed tones. It’s true, many of the much-hyped films were somewhat of a letdown, but the best part of a film festival is when you walk out into a theater with zero expectations and you walk out enamored by what you just saw. There have still been moments like that for me at TIFF this year. A highlight of the fest for me has been Romanian director Corneliu […]
by Whitney Mallett on Sep 20, 2015 -
TIFF 2015 Critic’s Notebook #3: Guy Maddin and Alan Zweig Offer New Notions of Being Canadian
Growing up, no two things did more to define Canadianness than Tim Horton’s commercials, with their warm and fuzzy scenes of dads bringing hot chocolate to the hockey rink, and Heritage Minutes, vignettes reenacting “proud” moments ranging from Native Americans teaching early settlers how to make maple syrup to the moment Marshall McLuhan came up with the phrase “the medium is the message.” Too often Canadian film seems aimed at riling up the same hollowed-out brand of patriotism. The cause of this is at least partly due to the fact that its funding is frequently tied up in a government-sponsored […]
by Whitney Mallett on Sep 19, 2015 -
TIFF: 5 Questions for A Flickering Truth Director Pietra Brettkelly
American independent filmmakers who moan over long-term storage bills, failed hard drives and misplaced optical tracks will receive the corrective they need to their First World Film Preservation problems by viewing Pietra Brettkelly’s new documentary, A Flickering Truth. Receiving its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, the picture follows a group of film archivists who have secretly fought to preserve Afghanistan’s storied film culture from the violence of the Taliban era. Below, Brettkelly answers questions about filming in a war-torn country, Afghan cinema and how her own archival practices have changed as a result of making this film. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 18, 2015 -
How To Complete Post-Production Quickly to Meet a Festival Deadline: The Making of Joe Begos’ The Mind’s Eye
In order to make the submission deadline for the Toronto International Film Festival, writer/director Joe Begos and producer/editor Josh Ethier had a locked cut of The Mind’s Eye seven weeks into the editing; the effort paid off as the psychokinetic thriller is getting a World Premiere as part of Midnight Madness programme. The cinematic tale features Zack Connors (Graham Skipper) attempting to use his special abilities to prevent the mysterious Dr. Slovak from descending into a psychic rage. “Joe is a visual director who shoots and operates on his own films,” explains Ethier, who has collaborated with Begos ever since […]
by Trevor Hogg on Sep 17, 2015 -
TIFF 2015 Critic’s Notebook #2: High-Rise, The Lobster and Anomalisa
Toronto seemed the perfect place for Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise to have its world premiere. The J. G. Ballard adaptation stages a class-war in an ultra-modern high-rise, and the theater where it played Sunday night is only about a mile from the luxury condo developments that tower over Toronto’s waterfront, which suggest a modern Eden in shiny glass and steel but have instead exacerbated the city’s homelessness problems and real-estate bubble. Another felicitous detail to the evening: the screening was sponsored by Visa and before you could take your seat to see Wheatley’s commentary on class and capitalism, there was a […]
by Whitney Mallett on Sep 16, 2015 -
“We Were Doing a Scene Without a Camera”: Five Questions for Mustang Director Deniz Gamze Ergüven
The story of five young sisters locked up by overprotective guardians with predictably dire consequences, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s first feature Mustang has prompted inevitable widespread comparisons to The Virgin Suicides. Despite the plot-level resemblance (Ergüven has said she’s both read the book and seen the movie but it’s not a meaningful influence), Mustang is its own distinctive debut, contextualized by a virulently patriarchal culture that barely disguises its controlling nature. After an afternoon frolic on the beach with male friends, five sisters arrive home to find themselves rigorously interrogated by their grandmother about what kind of sluttish hijinks they’ve been up to. In a scene resembling […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 15, 2015
