It was, inevitably, quiet this year in Toronto due to the writers’ and actors’ strikes. That left more films with open seating although several seances were packed. It is still the launchpad for the Oscars though it does coincide with Telluride, Venice, London, and New York.
Of all the press and industry screenings I attended, only one was too full to accommodate me. American Fiction was the winner of the People’s Choice Award for Best Film, and alas, I will have to wait to see it when MGM releases it December 15. The debut feature from from writer and journalist Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams. Adapted from the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett, it is about a frustrated novelist who’s fed up with the establishment that profits from Black entertainment using tired and offensive tropes. To prove his point, he uses a pen name to write an outlandish Black book of his own, a book that propels him to the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain and thus proving what is to be expected for Black writers in contemporary publishing. At the awards presentation, TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey read Jefferson’s written acceptance speech. “This is my first ever feature film and my first ever Toronto debut. When I made the film, I wasn’t yet thinking about how it would feel when it went out into the world. My gratitude towards everyone who watched American Fiction, discussed it after amongst friends and colleagues, is endless. The film is now in your hands, and I’m so grateful that it was embraced in this way.”
The Cannes Palme d’Or winner Anatomy Of A Fall by Justine Triet (*see below for MK2 sales) had press shut out from its packed P&I screening. Sandra Hueller carries quite a load, starring in this and in The Zone of Interest, my choice for the Best International Feature Oscar. Anatomy of a Fall is solidly engrossing and could well have been nominated as Best International Feature. Understandably France chose the more popularly oriented The Taste of Things aka The Pot au Feu to submit to the Academy. The Taste of Things is also classically French, all about food starring Juliette Binoche as Eugenie, an esteemed cook, and Dodin, the fine gourmet she has been working for over the last 20 years. Its director, Anh Hung Tran, won Cannes’ Best Director Award. At San Sebastián International Film Festival, it won for Best Film for the Culinary Zinema and it won the Audience Award in World Cinema at the Mill Valley FF. It too has a good chance of at least making the Oscar short list if not the nomination list.
Also sold out were the public screenings of Agnieszka Holland’s The Green Border , more or less repudiated by Poland for its graphic cruel treatment of refugees fleeing violence at home and trying to reach Germany for asylum, and the industry screening of Boy Kills World directed by Moritz Mohr, a coproduction of Germany, South Africa. ISA Capstone has sold it to VVS for Canada. and U.S. The Opening Night Film, the International Premiere of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and The Heron, was so popular that additional public screenings had to be organized.
The big deal of the Market was Netflix’s $10m acquisition for U.S. and international rights to Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut Woman Of The Hour. Other than that, acquiring international territorial rights to festival selections and completed market titles was steady though U.S. deals were less impressive.
Big news was that TIFF’s long-standing, nearly three-decade relationship with lead sponsor, Canadian telecom giant Bell, was coming to an end in 2023. During the festival, 200+ actors and filmmakers signed a petition demanding TIFF cut ties with its second largest sponsor, Royal Bank of Canada, over their fossil fuel investments. Where will TIFF find financing to cover dip in sponsorship?
More titles getting buzz were Alexander Payne’s award-bound The Holdovers (Focus and UI), which rather disappointed me, Venice sensation Hit Man, Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters, Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters and Ava DuVernay’s Origin, which I am still eager to see, and Dicks: The Musical directed by Larry Charles.
Actors have always tried their hand at directing, with varying results. This year many actors were billed as directors. Most liked was Woman of the Hour by Anna Kendrick, which was picked up by Netflix. Kristin Scott Thomas’s ensemble North Star, Chris Pine’s Poolman with Jennifer Jason Leigh were perhaps the least liked. Michael Keaton’s second directed film was Knox Goes Away, Viggo Mortensen’s western The Dead Don’t Hurt starring Vicki Krieps and himself (his second film as well) was mixed from being too slow to being appreciated for the same. Ethan Hawke’s Flannery O’Connor portrait Wildcat required knowing something about the writer and was pretty heavy going. Very little was heard about Gonzo Girl by Patricia Arquette.
I was lucky to have already seen a few of the African films playing there at other festivals. I found them more polished in both scripts and production values than those of some years back. I very much enjoyed the Wavelength section film Mambar Pierrette, directed by Rosine Mbakama, a Belgium-Cameroon copro and Senegal’s submission for the Oscar, Banel & Adama by Ramata-Toulaye Sy, a copro of France, Senegal and Mali, and the Berlinale Panorama Audience Award winning Sira directed by Apolline Traoré with music by Cyril Morin. (See my blog on this film)
I had already seen some other films in Berlin like the Chinese film Youth (Spring) by Wang Bing, about one of the centers of textile industry where young people from rural areas flock for work. They toil away tirelessly, live in squalid conditions, face prejudice and have to fight for better pay conditions, but are still young and enjoy life. The Teachers’ Lounge from Germany by Ilker Çatak was troublesome to me as I did not agree with how the protagonist handled her problem, her students or their parents and that was the crux of the film.
The film that disappointed me most was Lee about the American war photographer Lee Miller whose photograph of herself in Hitler’s bathtub has hung for years in my own bathroom. The best part of the film was seeing how that photograph came to be made. The film was fatally miscast with Kate Winslet as Lee Miller, who no more looks like a model for Man Ray and Paris Vogue in the 1930s than a Land Rover looks like a Porsche. I spent much of the film acutely and uncomfortably aware of the visual effect of her wrongness for the part.
The film that hit me most emotionally was One Life starring Anthony Hopkins. With a loving interlude with Jonathan Pryce, it is the story of an ordinary British man who saves the lives of more than 600 children, mainly Jewish, in Czechoslovakia as the Nazis take over. I also loved The Promised Land (Denmark-Germany-Sweden) directed by Nikolaj Arcel, a classic epic of a renegade farmer who makes the land grow in spite of everyone’s lack of faith in him. I loved the sweep of the land on the heath, the interactions of the stoic outsider and his aristocratic neighbors and how he creates a family against all odds. Both films are classic in style and subject and deliver 100%.
I was most sorry to miss Evil Does Not Exist from Japan directed Ryûsuke Hamaguchi whose Drive My Car was such a knockout. Also I regret not seeing Lone Scherfig’s The Movie Teller, a Spanish, French, Chilean copro.
Others I had on my if-only-I-had-time-to-see list were Dicks: The Musical by Larry Charles that had an enthusiastic reception, Achilles by Farhad Delaram a copro of Iran, Germany and France, The Teacher by Farah Nabulsi a copro of United Kingdom, Palestine and Qatar, Hajjan by Abu Bakr Shawky a copro of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, La Suprema by Felipe Holguín Caro from Colombia, Widow Clicquot by Thomas Napper, a copro of United Kingdom and France, Wild Woman by Alán González from Cuba, Without Air by Katalin Moldovai from Hungary, Yellow Bus by Wendy Bednarz of United Arab Emirates, Do Not Expect Too Much at the End of the World (Romania-Luxembourg-France-Croatia), About Dry Grasses (Turkiye-France-Germany-Swedem) directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Close Your Eyes (Spain-Argentina) directed by Víctor Erice, Inshallah a Boy (Jordan-France-Saudi Arabia-Qatar-Egypt) directed by Amjad Al Rasheed, Perfect Days (Japan) by Wim Wenders, Snow Leopard (China) by Pema Tseden, The Reeds (Turkiye-Bulgaria) by Cemil Ağacıkoğlu, The Settlers (Chile-Argentina-France-Denmark-U.K.-Taiwan-Sweden-Germany — wow!!) by Felipe Gálvez Haberle, They Shot the Piano Player (Spain-France) by Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal, Quiz Lady (U.S.) directed by Jessica Yu.
I ended the festival by having coffee with Piers Handling and catching up on our activities since the last time we talked when he had just ended his tenure as Director and CEO of TIFF (1994 - 2018). Our joint history with Toronto is a long one. He started there as a programmer in 1982 and then was Artistic Director/ Deputy Director to Helga Stephenson for seven years from 1987 to 1994. He is now on page 750 of his opus on the political history of film festivals and has discovered much, including the fact that the history of U.S. festivals has never been researched or written about. We discussed our lives, the movies we saw here. I have been attending since 1985 when I was a buyer and helped establish the industry sector there. I missed only one year when a cat attack sent me to the hospital. Otherwise I attended every festival until 2020 shut it down. I remember Jonathan Dana, Bobby Rock and me banging on the glass doors of the theater demanding that we be let in to see the film that had just closed its doors to us: We had a job to do and they were thwarting us from our reason to be there! That outburst resulted in the P&I screenings, but we were still allowed in public screenings because the audience was so integral to our work of judging films’ potential in the marketplace (until we got it terribly wrong with Priest (1994) which had a standing ovation there and bombed in the U.S.). This year there did not seem to be such a division between public and P&I screenings. They were all held at the Scotia and public was allowed into P&I screenings as much as industry was permitted into the public screenings.
This year was the 23rd anniversary of September 11, 2001, when we, the film industry, were all stranded in Toronto on the days following the destruction of the World Trade Center. Very little mention was made of the fact except if it came up in some way in conversation.
At the opening of every film, however, there was the reminder that the land we were on was originally tribal land. I even saw an impressive two of four episodes of a documentary about the original inhabitants of what we call Canada, spoken of in the first person by survivors who are at the forefront of resurrecting the erased knowledge to incorporate into our own thinking and awareness that where we stand today is a result of our treatment of those original inhabitants and their habitats. Telling Our Story is a visually stunning four-part documentary series highlighting 11 different First Nations in Quebec, spoken in 11 different languages and illuminating the rich Indigenous cultures and stories that exist within the province.
Canada | 2023 | 104m | English, French, Abenaki, Anishinaabemowin, Atikamekw, Cree, Innu-aimun, Inuktitut, Kanyen’kéha, Mi’kmaq, Naskapi, Wendat, Wolastoqey
Most of my seven days there were taken up with my client and meetings I had set up for them, meetings a partner had set up, and spontaneous meetings to discuss their project and get to know possible distributors once the film is finished and up for sale. We are awaiting the producer-worthy 3rd draft of the screenplay which is being adapted by Anne Peacock (herself a South African) who adapted The Narnia Chronicles: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe for the screen.
The group? One Door Studios. The film? Calculated, one of four YA novels by Nova McBee about a young female math genius who, thinking she is going to an advanced study group in China (she lives in Seattle), is instead kidnapped by the rich underworld and harnessed to their money-making machinations which includes human trafficking.
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SALES ON SOME OF THE TIFF FILMS MENTIONED ABOVE
Anatomy of a Fall, ISA: MK2 sold to Argentina and Brazil-Diamond; Australia/ N.Z.-Madman; Austria-Panda Lichtspiele; France-Le Pacte; Germany-Plaion; Greece-Spentzos; Hong Kong-Golen Scene; Hungary-Mozinet; Indonesia-KlikFilm; Israel-New Cinema; Italy-Toedora; Japan-Gaga; MENA & Iran-Front Row; Mongolia-Sayan; Poland-M2; Russia-New Film (Nofiy); Russia, CIS, Baltics-Provzglyad; Singapore-Anticipate; Spain-Filmin, Elastica; Sweden-Triart; Switzerland-Filmcoopie; Taiwan-Hooray; Turkey-Mars; U.K. and Ireland-Picturehouse; USA and Canada-Neon. In flight — Skeye picked up remaining territories.
The Taste of Things, ISA: Gaumont sold to Australia/ N.Z.-Rialto; Austria-Polyfilm; Belgium-Athena; Brazil-Diamond; Canada-Mongrel; France-Gaumont; Germany-Weltkino; Hong Kong-First Distributors; Israel-Lev/ Shani; Italy-Lucky Red; Japan-Gaga; Portugal-Sun; Spain-A Contracorriente; Switzerland-Frenetic; Taiwan-Swallow Wings; Thailand-Hal; Russia-Global; U.S.-IFC/ Sapan; U.K/ Ireland-Picturehouse
Woman of the Hour, ISA: AGC Studios sold it to Netflix for the world, plus Australia/ N.Z.-Roadshow; Brazil-Diamon; Canada-VVS; Malaysia-GSC Movies; So. Africa-Empire
One Life, ISA: Film Nation sold to Benelux-The Searchers; Brazil-Diamond; Russia-Exponenta; Switzerland-Ascot Elite; Turkey-BGFilm; U.K.-Warner Bros; U.S.-Bleecker Street Media
The Green Border, ISA: Films Boutique sold to Australia/ N.Z.-Sharmill; Austria-Panda Lichtspiele; Benelux, Surinam, Dutch Antilles-September; Bulgara-Art Fest; Czech Republic/ Slovakia-AQS; France-Condor; Germany-Piffl; Iceland-Bíó Paradís; Hungary-Vertigo; Italy-Movies Inspired; Japan-Transformer; MENA-Moving Turtle; Poland-Kino Swiat; Portugal-Leopardo; Spain-Vercine; Slovakia-Magic Box; Switzerland-trigon; Yugoslavia-MegaCom
Boy Kills World, ISA: Capstone sold to Canada-VVS, Eastern Europe-Prorom Media; Greece-The Film Group; Italy-Plaion;
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