Illustration by Jillian Tamaki.
The Toronto International Film Festival turns 31 this year, with 352 films from 61 countries showing over 10 days. We don’t have time to see all of them, so we asked festival co-director Noah Cowan to help us wade through the numbers and make sense of this year’s TIFF.
Q: Every year, the media attempt to unearth a theme from this massive pile of films — one year, it was explicit sexual content, another it was the year of movies about children. Is there a commonality among films in the 2006 lineup?
A: I think the theme we’ve tried to underline is that there is a courage and audacity in cinemas outside North America to compete with Hollywood. Major star power from beyond the U.S., directorial and actor-driven, is going to stand shoulder to shoulder and duke it out with big Hollywood names here. There’s a sense that European films are less self-involved; perhaps there’s a new desire amongst filmmakers to reconnect with broader audiences. The Danish film After the Wedding, I Am the Other Woman from German director Margarethe von Trotta, a film about Sicilian immigrants called The Golden Door — these are very accessible movies. From China, we get The Postmodern Life of My Aunt by Anne Hui, starring Chow-Yun Fat, and The Banquet — these are not tough slogs. Our audience is unbelievably smart, and they’re asking for global perspective on what mainstream, entertaining pictures might look like.
So to me, it’s a bit more complex than “There’s more or less f---ing than last year.” But on the f-word side of it, there are a collection of new films that take a different approach to sex and sexuality than the notorious Catherine Breillat and Lars von Trier movies of a couple of years ago. These ones have a much sunnier attitude towards sex, or at least see sex as something that is not immediately punishable. Shortbus by John Cameron Mitchell, who did Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and another film out of France called Chacun sa nuit share the attitude that passions can run amok, but basically sex is an enormously healthy thing to do. Sex can help you be a better person, if enjoyed appropriately.
Director Michael Moore. (Photo by Carlo Allegri/Getty Images)
Q: But surely there will be some controversy to look forward to?
A: Michael Moore, easily the most controversial filmmaker alive, is coming in our Mavericks program. You know, occasionally people say, “These are movies, I can go see them later. What’s the point of a festival?” We have never felt that way because, essentially, we try to provide a live experience. There is nothing like seeing the movie and talking with the maker afterwards. Our Mavericks program allows filmmakers to speak their piece and have an audience talk through the issues that they face. Michael Moore has laid low for two years and he has a few things to say about what’s going on in the U.S., particularly in the run-up to the upcoming election. This is his coming-out party. He’s going to show clips from two works in progress. The Great ’04 Slacker Uprising is almost a home movie, where he had a camera crew with him throughout the whole ’04 election process when he was speaking to young audiences, trying to galvanize them in opposition to George Bush; and his other film is Sicko, about the U.S. health-care system. I admit this is a particularly wonderful thing for us Canadians, as we read the tabloids in the U.S. talking about how crappy our health-care system is. Perhaps it’s a little schadenfreude for us to have Moore’s movie here critiquing the U.S. system.
A: We have always had a lot of interest in cinema from South Asia and not just because of the vast South Asian communities in Toronto and the Toronto area, but a real interest in engaging with the subcontinent and its various cultures and filmmaking styles. This year, we’ve gone whole hog on the commercial side with Karan Johar’s gala movie Never Say Goodbye, which is really an attempt at creating a new kind of hybrid, transposing the idea of Hollywood romantic comedy into Bollywood formula. But we also have a very deep program of more traditional documentaries and South Asian art cinema [and] Bengali art cinema, and that’s the kind of balance every festival should have: commercial and artistic. Whatever you feel about Brad Pitt [in town for Babel], truly the biggest stars in the world are Bollywood stars, and this year, Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan are making themselves available for an up-front conversation in the Mavericks program. These are the stars of Never Say Goodbye and they are quite literally worshipped by a billion people. Not everyone is going to get in — the venue we’re using is 500 seats — but it is going to be a life highlight for a lot of people.
A: We have a more relaxed attitude toward celebrity and Hollywood than most festivals around the world. I’m not even going to say they’re a necessary evil, because they’re not evil at all. We support the films we show. We are not showing movies as spectacle; I don’t like that, I think it’s pretentious. The films we have here are real artistic efforts, and some of them have stars in them. If stars have made commitments to being in movies of artistic quality, that’s something we support. On the celebrity level, let’s be adults: if someone like Jennifer Lopez is going to make an independent movie about something that’s important to her in her Puerto Rican culture [the Hector Lavoe biopic The Singer], I’m going to support that, and I’m going to show that. And if she wants to come here and shut down Yonge Street to support a movie that I support, that’s great. Why would I possibly object to that?
Q: Is there a risk of smaller films — and Canadian films — getting elbowed aside by the big guys?
A: We do everything in our power to level the playing field. Our first priority is to promote our Canadian cinema. We always open with a Canadian film; this year it’s Zacharias Kunuk’s follow-up to Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, called The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. We always put our most significant Canadian films front and centre in our scheduling. Sarah Polley’s film Away From Her, based on the Alice Munro short story, is right in the middle of the festival, one of the most desired slots for Hollywood. And elsewhere, the wonderful, iconoclastic Guy Maddin [Brand Upon the Brain] will be sitting in the Elgin [Theatre] on a Friday night. I can’t even estimate the number of significant Hollywood players who would have wanted that spot instead of Guy. I wish we took bribes.
Q: You’ve been doing this since you were a volunteer in high school over 20 years ago. Does anyone in the industry still make your heart beat faster?From left, Christopher Moynihan, Harry Shearer, Catherine O'Hara and Parker Posey in the Christopher Guest film For Your Consideration.
(Warner Independent Pictures)
A: I know that a lot of us here are looking forward to meeting Julie Christie [Away From Her]. Several years ago, I had a heart murmur when Gena Rowlands crossed my path. We always love Christopher Guest, who’s coming with For Your Consideration. When they were here last time with Waiting for Guffman, I introduced the cast and Fred Willard seized the microphone out of Chris Guest’s hand and proceeded to do a 10-minute monologue about his true feelings about the people on the stage. It was one of the most wonderful moments of improvised comedy I’ve ever seen. Probably some of the filmmakers I’ve been nervous and excited to meet are Eytan Fox and writer Gal Uchovsky, a gay Israeli couple that contend with politics and sexuality in a profound way. Their new film, The Bubble, concerns the relationship between a Palestinian boy and an Israeli guy, and what happens when that political dynamic gets sexualized. They are so brave.
A: Our approach is a respectful one. We believe that there are a lot of filmmakers who have integrated into their work lessons learned, ideas generated by not only Sept. 11 but the incredibly violent world situation that has transpired since then, and audiences will see this reflected during the festival. Our feeling has always been that Sept. 11 is just one event amongst others that has shaped our age and in terms of commemoration, out of respect, we would like those ceremonies to take place closer to where the events happened. We may ask for a moment of silence at the gala and of course we’d welcome any participants to speak on that day.
A: It’s really different and really interesting! Seriously! Capote is a pretty straight-ahead narrative, a 1950s melodrama, a little Sirk-ian in terms of camerawork, but Infamous is from the Killer Films school. It has the formal twang of Todd Haynes or Tom Kalin, extremely focused on Capote’s homosexuality, how his sexual needs played such a huge part in the story of In Cold Blood. Bennett Miller’s Capote takes a more old-fashioned romantic approach to this fascination. Believe me, we had a conversation internally on exactly the same thing and we decided it’s a damn good movie and we should show it.
Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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