Public transit’s always been a great place for art, from busking musicians to the New York MTA’s current Sam Shaw photography exhibit, sponsored by Arts for Transit. Such exhibits are often moving in the direction of narrative media, and today the Toronto Transit Commission is launching a new project that explores the boundaries between public art and a good old-fashioned transmedia detective story. Every day for the next two months a new thirty-second episode of Murder in Passing will play in the Toronto subway. The series, which adds up to a roughly twenty-minute film, begins today with the discovery of […]

Nearly 10 years in the making, Habibi is the semi-autobiographical first feature from 2010 “25 New Face” Susan Youssef, a tale of forbidden love between two Palestinian students who find it impossible for their affection to overcome the rigid conventions of class in Palestinian life and Israel’s ironclad security regime. With Israelis and Palestinians again in actively violent conflict, the film couldn’t be more newsworthy, but Youssef’s low-budget aesthetic ingenuity (she couldn’t shoot in Gaza, but faked it admirably) and a remarkable performance from Maisa Abd Elhadi, as the young woman at the center of multiple circles of conflict (family […]

We file past a solemn priest down the stairs into the church basement. My friend and I excited.“There are the infected. There are the survivors. Then there is you.” That’s what the e-mail boasted when it arrived 30 hours earlier, promising a mix of live theatre and film called a 360 Screening. We were part of a sold-out audience of 200 that paid $60 apiece to see a film without knowing the title until the last minute. This was the third 360 Screening in Toronto and its first Hallowe’en edition. Tonight it was taking place in the old Berkeley Church […]

My fifth year in a row of attending the Vancouver International Film Festival in my hometown has been unique thus far—I’m at the precise halfway point of the 16-day event as I write this—in that it’s the only time that I’ve already caught many of the films playing thanks to my trip to Locarno in August. This has afforded me the freedom to venture beyond the “festival-of-festivals” programming of obligatory Cannes leftovers and such, to explore, among other things, the Dragons & Tigers section for which VIFF is renowned. For those that don’t know, Dragons & Tigers is a long-running […]

Occasionally a period piece comes along that feels neither like the gauzy, ignorantly rendered, idealized versions of the past churned out by the Hollywood of yesteryear nor like the product of our grim, cynical and corporatist postmodern times, the maddening ideological manifestations of which are usually filtered through the perspective of some stooge director. I’m about to tell you about one such film. As stark and unforgiving as her previous works, Andrea Arnold’s new film finds her pondering the aftermath of a mysterious, multi-pronged trauma for yet another soulful, alienated loner. That this shatteringly potent adaptation of Emily Brontë’s too-often-filmed […]

San Sebastian is celebrating six decades in the film festival business with the insistence that “60 years is nothing.” In their welcome guide this year, the organizers say: “As far as a film festival is concerned, 60 years shouldn’t be concealed with facelifts, but should be flaunted proudly.” There’s little doubt that the ever-increasing leviathan that is the Toronto International Film Festival is having an effect on any festival close to its dates — and San Sebastian follows hot on its heels. But José Luis Rebordinos’s second edition as director shows this Basque country old lady has plenty of life […]

Hi, my name is Ian Harnarine and I’m one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” for 2012. My short film Doubles With Slight Pepper won the award for Best Canadian Short Film at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and also won the Genie Award (Canada’s Oscar). I am adapting the short film into a feature and was invited back by the festival to compete in their PITCH THIS! competition. I will compete with five other filmmakers that each have six minutes to pitch their feature film idea to a live audience of over 200 industry […]

Rock “documentaries” are self-serving films that fawn over their subjects so their record companies can move more product. The typical rock doc strings together concert highlights with studio clips and innocuous musician quotes that add up to a fun, but facile movie. The L.A. band 30 Seconds To Mars turns this formula upside-down in Artifact, which enjoyed its world premiere at TIFF on Friday. Actor/musician Jared Leto’s band wants to leave their record label, EMI, when multimillionaire British tycoon Guy Hands devours the ailing company and sues 30 Seconds To Mars for $30 million. Artifact tells their battle as they struggle to […]

Maybe I’m just a delusional film buff, but after a quarter-century of attending the Toronto International Film Festival – now affectionately called TIFF, a less compensatory moniker for Canadians with a complex than the laughably arrogant Toronto Festival of Festivals label of yore – I believe that the event and its component parts echo the unique demographic of this large North American city. The festival’s multiple ethnic and racial sections coexist snugly. More than any other big international film festival, TIFF – proudly uncommercial – is built upon a carefully balanced assortment of heterogeneous cinemas: national and generic, mainstream and esoteric, the spanking new and […]