Toronto International Film Festival
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The Best and Worst of the Toronto International Film Festival
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 […]
by Howard Feinstein on Sep 17, 2012 -
Angela Davis on Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners
“When the doors slid open, furious flashes of light jolted me out of my reflections. That’s why they had cuffed by hands in front. As far as I could see, reporters and photographers were crowded into the lobby. Trying hard not to look surprised, I lifted my head, straightened my back and between the two agents, made the long walk through the light flashes and staccato questions toward the caravan waiting outside.” These lines from Angela Davis’s 1974 autobiography, written at the age of 28 and edited by Toni Morrison, describe the way she remembers a humiliating perp walk four […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 15, 2012 -
Ruba Nadda and Alexander Siddig Return to Tiff with Inescapable
Ruba Nadda, whose Cairo Time captured Best Canadian Feature in 2009, returns to TIFF with Inescapable. Both star leading man Alexander Siddig and are set in the Middle East. However, Inescapable is anything but a charming romance, but rather a fast-paced political thriller set in the most dangerous country in the world, Syria. When he learns that his daughter has gone missing in Syria, Adib (Siddig) leaves his comfy business in Toronto to track her down in Syria. Turns out that the Syrian government has abducted Adib’s journalist daughter and that a shady Canadian diplomat (Joshua Jackson) knows more about it […]
by Allan Tong on Sep 14, 2012 -
Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon’s The Central Park Five at TIFF
It was horrific. One April night in 1989, a woman was jogging through New York’s Central Park when she was beaten and savagely raped. She lost 75% of her bodily fluids, lay in a coma for days and her face was pulverized so badly that friends identified her by a ring on her finger. Police picked up five black and Latino teenagers, secured confessions and launched one of the ugliest trials in New York’s history. Newspaper pundits and Donald Trump called for the death penalty. Even the African-American community turned their backs on the teens. After all, they were savages. […]
by Allan Tong on Sep 14, 2012 -
DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE: A TORONTO 2012 PREVIEW
The optimist and the contrarian may find common ground in anticipation; to be a festivalgoer at the Toronto Film Festival is to be a bit of both. Particularly when preceded by negative reviews trickling out of earlier festivals in Cannes, Locarno, Venice and Berlin or less-than-enticing trailers, the debut of new work from filmmakers who have proven themselves capable of greatness can have cinephiles’ hearts in their throats. What if the hype is true, and your favorite living director is no longer creating essential work? Yet with reports of boos just might come a sneaking desire to go to that movie anyway. See […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 4, 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 -
BLACKHOUSE FOUNDATION STRESSES STRATEGY AND COMMUNITY IN THE FESTIVAL PROCESS
Last night at HSBC’s corporate headquarters in New York, The Blackhouse Foundation celebrated the launch of the 2012 film festival season with a networking event and panel discussion focused on festival strategy. Now in its fifth year, Blackhouse is a non-profit organization set up to support communities of black filmmakers throughout the festival process. The Foundation has had a presence at many of the top North American festivals, including Sundance, Tribeca, Toronto, and the LA Film Festival. Blackhouse exists to help black filmmakers at all stages in their careers, a fact made clear by the event’s attendees. The talent in the […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Oct 28, 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 -
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
