By Kevin Lally
FJI correspondent Daniel Steinhart files the first of several reports from the busy Toronto International Film Festival.
One of the most daunting tasks facing any dedicated festivalgoer is arranging a screening schedule. With 409 features and shorts (by my count) at this year's edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, this is a task that requires military-like strategizing. You need to consider running time, if a film will have more than one screening, and how you want your day to flow. Difficult art films in the morning when critical faculties are sharpest? Or livelier genre fare to rouse you from the morning daze? Fortunately, geography is rarely an issue, since most press and industry screenings are clustered at the Manulife Centre, making it easy to slip out of one screening as the end credits roll and saunter across the hall into another screening just as the opening credits come on. Certainly, this can make for jarring juxtapositions. I left the screening of Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir with images of Lebanese refugee camp massacres seared into my brain, then immediately sat down for the cartoon violence of Kim Jee-woon's kimchi-western The Good, The Bad, The Weird. Such are the challenges of navigating the film festival world!
So where to begin with such a massive offering of films? There are high-profile U.S. films, such as the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading and Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, which will make their fall bow in the coming weeks. There's new work in the Discovery, Vanguard and Visions sections, which showcase emerging filmmaking talents from around the world. In the Wavelengths section, there's new experimental work from old masters such as Nathaniel Dorsky, Pat O'Neill and James Benning. My strategy is to go eclectic�a sampling of everything. But to start off, I felt compelled to catch up on the films that made a stir at this year's Cannes Film Festival and now make their appearance in North America. Perhaps it's a good way to get a sense of the movie trends that will unfurl over the next year.
If we are to look to any region for new exciting work, we should look to the U.K. In the first three days of the festival, I've seen three stellar films from there. Most formidable was visual artist Steve McQueen's Hunger, a film of intensity, brutality and formal precision. Set in 1981 during the IRA's deadly attacks and the Thatcher government's repressive response, the film charts the events that occurred at Maze Prison outside Belfast. Denied political status, IRA prisoners are stripped of basic human rights. In reaction, the prisoners protest through every unthinkable action. And in turn, the prison guards resort to all-out torture. This is a film of few words and it takes time for the main player to emerge: the prisoners' leader Bobby Sands (impressively played by Michael Fassbender). In the film's centerpiece, a daring long take (I lost count at about 15 minutes) captures Sands laying out the rationale for going on a hunger strike to a Catholic priest. What follows is a graphic and near-wordless depiction of Sands' bodily degradation that demonstrates the physical and psychic limits that the strike leader was willing to push himself to.
Far less brutal, but no less aesthetically forceful is Duane Hopkins' Better Things. Set in England's rural Cotswolds, the film follows various interweaving storylines of drugged-out teenagers and declining seniors, all experiencing the loss of or estrangement from loved ones. Hopkins, another visual artist, exploits the expressive possibility of the medium to link the various characters. Instead of structuring the film with a cause-and-effect flow of action, the scenes are strung together using an idea, a gesture, a repeated pattern, or an overlapping sound. This is the kind of micro-level storytelling one finds more often in experimental film, but here, this approach gives the film a poetic charge and serves to visually connect characters who can't seem to make those human connections themselves.
Fresh from a newly inked U.S. distribution deal with Strand Releasing, Terence Davies' Of Time and the City is both an essay film and memory piece. The city of Liverpool commissioned Davies to make a film in commemoration of its selection as the 2008 European Capital of Culture. What he produced is at once a celebration of and acerbic broadside at his birth city. Over stock footage of Liverpool throughout the 20th century and recently shot footage, Davies dwells on cinema, music, soccer, religion, community, nationalism, and the strange land that his city has become. The filmmaker is generous and erudite in his remarks and recollections and one emerges from the film feeling well nourished. Kudos to Strand for picking this one up.
And then there was the film Liverpool, which actually isn't even a British film and really doesn't have much to do with the titular city, but it deserves mention. I would make the case that this Argentine film from Lisandro Alonso is part of a trend of contemporary international art cinema marked by long takes, de-dramatized performances, loose plotting, glacial pacing�and I eat this stuff up. On the surface not much happens in this film: A seaman takes shore leave at the tip of the South American continent in order to visit his ailing mother. The film follows his arduous journey to his small village, where few people recognize him. Then he departs, leaving only the audience to witness the village's quotidian routines. There's little action and little dialogue, but the film's real interest seems to lie in its attempt to convey the seaman's estrangement from his surrounding in nearly every shot, either through composition, landscape, or the juxtaposition of actions. This is a film that requires patience, but I think that patience is rewarded with a work of great beauty.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. So many more films to consider. More to come�
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