Toronto International Film Festival
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Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo is now available on DVD through Factory 25. Visit the film’s official website to learn more. NOTE: This review was first published at Hammer to Nail in conjunction with the film’s theatrical release at Film Forum on May 12, 2010.) The knowledge that Jessica Oreck is an entomologist at the Museum of Natural History in New York City who has never previously made a film might cause one to worry that Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo will be an unavoidably stiff and grueling piece of video academia. Worry not, skeptic. Oreck’s wildly precocious exploration of Japan’s ongoing […]
by Michael Tully on May 19, 2011 -
AN AMERICAN FILMMAKER IN SCOTLAND, OR THE 2011 DEAD BY DAWN FILM FESTIVAL
I’d never heard of the Dead By Dawn Film Festival until I applied. When our short film, Kitty Kitty (pictured above), got accepted, I was pleasantly surprised but then came the big decision: do I travel all the way to Scotland for it or stay home? From their website, the festival looked a little small, but I’d been told it was worth it. 90,000 hard-earned frequent-flyer miles later, I touch down in Edinburgh, Scotland. By the end of the fest, I was so impressed with it I decided to write this review and let other filmmakers know about it. Read […]
by Michael Medaglia on May 16, 2011 -
New Year’s Resolutions for Filmmakers
Are you short a New Year’s resolution? Feel free to borrow one of the ones below. 1. Amplify your voice. You have a voice. Make it bigger in 2011. Spread it wider and connect it to more people. If you are working within your own little crew, spread out. If you’ve gotten into a pattern of relying on the same agents or producers or colleagues, enlarge the perimeter of that circle. If face-to-face is your preferred medium, get out more. Do you email or text too much? Call people more. (This one was suggested by Ira Deutchman via Twitter.) If […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 1, 2011 -
TORONTO: TRAVELING WITHOUT MOVING AT ‘WAVELENGTHS’
Wavelengths, the Toronto International Film Festival program that ferries viewers deep into the world of contemporary experimental film, celebrated its tenth birthday in 2010 and received a sweet birthday gift: A completely sold out first show. Even enthusiasts who had lined up more than thirty minutes early were turned away from the 200-seat theatre at the Art Gallery of Ontario (along with your loyal scribe and similarly surprised colleagues from The Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Pacific Film Archive and the Walker Art Center). It was an auspicious start to curator Andréa Picard’s extensive program of more than thirty individual […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 19, 2010 -
TORONTO: NATHANIEL DORSKY AND WAVELENGTHS 4
“If my life coincides with the life of film, I’ll be very happy,” said Nathaniel Dorsky at the Q&A following the screening of his three short experimental films in the Wavelengths 4 program at the Toronto Film Festival. That Dorsky’s work is bound to the materiality of its medium, to the poetry of light processed by the photographic process, was something I needed reminding of the night I saw his work. It’s easy to forget about things like film at a film festival. Most of the films at Toronto were projected digitally, their origins increasingly inscrutable in this age of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 19, 2010 -
TORONTO: NATIONAL INQUIRER: ERROL MORRIS AND “TABLOID”
I admit a certain obsession with cell phone Scrabble, the band Beach House, and of course, Errol Morris. While the first two are relatively recent acquisitions, that last one has been around for a while (since Cannes 2003 to be exact, and an interview on his film The Fog of War). Morris’ goofy sense of humor remains as addictive as his philosophical and cinematic wanderings. With his latest documentary, Tabloid, my obsession with Morris and his obsessions—in this case, an obsessive beauty queen and the reporters obsessed with her—has reached new heights. While you’re waiting with bated breath for Tabloid to […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 16, 2010 -
HERZOG AND MORRIS TALK IN TORONTO
“It’s so strange we remain friends,” said Errol Morris at one point in his dialogue with fellow director Werner Herzog at the Toronto International Film Festival Monday. During their hour-long conversation at the new Bell Lightbox, the two men spoke of many things — filmmaking, of course, but also reading, music, the Warren Commission report, and actors vs. non-actors (Morris: “In my more spurious moments I’ve said that the main difference between SAG actors and real people is that real people can act”). But mostly they engaged in a kind of digressive contemplation inflected by occasional bouts of one-upmanship — […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 15, 2010 -
TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL: IN A BETTER WORLD
More than any filmmaker in recent memory, the Danish director Susanne Bier examines familial breakdown with an eye toward rupture in the larger social order. In After the Wedding (2006), the protagonist operated a charity in India but his domestic life was in complete disarray. Now, in the powerful In a Better World, written by her longtime collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen, and which just had its world premiere in Toronto, the main adult character, Anton (the sensational Swedish actor Mikael Persbrandt), is a doctor who spends much of his time in Africa (it could be Darfur) treating the maltreated in […]
by Howard Feinstein on Sep 14, 2010 -
TORONTO: ON ELEPHANTS, VIOLINS AND TATTOOS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DOUGLAS GORDON
Have you ever seen an elephant lie down? This question provoked Scottish artist Douglas Gordon to create Play Dead; Real Time, a giant, startling multiple projection depicting just that. Timeline, a beautiful Gordon exhibition the Museum of Modern Art in 2007 that included the piece, was a triumph not only with art enthusiasts but with cinephiles as well, and Gordon regularly walks the line between these two worlds. In addition to his successful art career and installation pieces, he has made two feature films: Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) and a new work, k.364 A Journey by Train (2010). […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 14, 2010 -
TORONTO: SPC NABS “INCENDIES”
According to Michael Fleming at Deadline, Sony Pictures Classics has acquired Denis Villeneuve‘s Incendies, which follows twins who travel to the Middle East to investigate their mother’s past and find a shocking revelation. See the trailer here.
by Jason Guerrasio on Sep 13, 2010
