Toronto International Film Festival 2020
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Dark Streaming Clouds, Virtual Platforms and Coronavirus Tests: The 2020 Year in Film Festivals
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Sorry, Mr Dickens, there was no best of times in 2020 for film festivals. Indeed, some may question whether my annual trip down memory lane is even needed in a year that saw festivals shutting doors, industry-wide job losses and movies continually postponed and then delayed yet again. But with the coronavirus pandemic an accelerant to long-simmering changes in the film industry, for film festivals 2020 may be remembered as a critical inflection point. The cancellation of festivals — or more accurately the move to digital and hybrid […]
by Kaleem Aftab on Dec 28, 2020 -
“We Are Forcing You to Experience Things You Might Not Want To…”: Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli on Their Boldly Confronting TIFF Premiere, Violation
An act of sexual violence leads to an awful retribution in Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s Violation, which premiered this past week at the Toronto International Film Festival. But were the film’s execution as simple, as blunt, as this brief synopsis might suggest, there’d be little to distinguish Violation from so many other works in the rape-revenge genre. Instead, in their debut feature Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli have radically scrambled the dramatization of cause and effect, sliding backwards and forwards in their storytelling to place a sexual assault that happens on a couple’s weekend getaway within the broader psychology of the survivor’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 17, 2020 -
“A Young Woman in a Very Harsh, Muscular Environment”: Nicole Riegel on Her Powerful and Flinty Debut, Holler
When I last spoke to Nicole Reigel for Filmmaker, it was in 2014 to profile the Jackson, Ohio native for our 25 New Faces list. After a stint in the military and then time producing her own plays for theater, Riegel had arrived in Los Angeles and quickly made a name for herself as a screenwriter, with directors such as Cary Fukunaga and Justin Lin on board for her scripts. But her ultimate goal, she revealed in the piece, was to direct — an ambition realized this year with her flinty, tremendously assured and compellingly acted debut, Holler. Selected for […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 11, 2020 -
15 Films and Events We’re Looking Forward To At the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival
For me, TIFF 2020 began yesterday with a stroll from my bedroom to the computer, coffee in hand, to check whether the promised link and password to the festival’s new digital portal had arrived. It did, I logged in, noted that the streaming platform supports AirPlay, and started a calendar of screening times, as most titles are available only in 48-hour windows. (Plus, some are geoblocked here in the States.) A far cry from my usual short flight to Billy Bishop Airport, an afternoon typing P&I screening times into my phone and then looking for a party to go to. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 10, 2020
