TIFF 40 is coming into more and more focus with every passing day. This was a big week for announcements and we're less than a month away from the biggest ten days of the year for film in Toronto. Post City will do a more elaborate breakdown for ticket buying toward specific programmes closer to the festival, but nonetheless, here is some of what to expect.
The documentary slate has a music tilt featuring films on Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin and Yo-Yo Ma. The Franklin doc is actually an unfinished work by the late, great Sydney Pollack called Amazing Grace. Janis: Little Girl Blue looks at 27-club singer’s short life and The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble is a look at the work of the legendary cellist, who may attend the festival in person. There’s also a look at R&B queen Sharon Jones’ battle with cancer called Miss Sharon Jones! from Barbara Kopple (Harlan County U.S.A.) and The Reflektor Tapes on the making of Arcade Fire’s 2013 LP.
That’s just a taste however. There’s something for everyone. A new Frederick Wiseman doc called In Jackson Heights that profiles the neighbourhood in Queens. You can add Bolshoi Babylon, which looks at the famed ballet company as they are embroiled in an acid attack scandal in 2013 and a doc on Charlie Hebdo.
The festival will see the Canadian or North American premieres of films by Wim Wenders, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jafar Panahi and many more of world cinema’s working masters.
We know that the opening night film for Midnight Madness will be Jeremy Saulnier’s follow-up to 2013’s Blue Ruin, Green Room, which has a punk band made up of Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots and Alia Shawkat getting into trouble with a supposedly very evil indeed Patrick Stewart. There will be – an apparently disastrous – film from Takashi Miike, who seems to have lost the plot somewhere in his insane work schedule, called Yakuza Apocalypse and a closing night film called The Final Girls which deals with the daughter of a famed 80s scream queen from director Todd Strauss-Schulson.
The Vanguard programme will feature the world premiere of Álex de la Iglesia’s My Big Night and Gaspar Noé’s 3-D bit of erotica Love. There will be restorations of Marcel Ophüls documentary The Memory of Justice about wartime atrocities in the Second World War and Vietnam as well as Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass and Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers to look back upon.
These twelve directors will be in-competition for the first ever Platform Jury Prize and the accompanying $25 000 purse: Fabienne Berthaud, Sue Brooks, Diastème, Eva Husson, Joaquim Lafosse, Gabriel Mascaro, He Ping, Pablo Trapero, David Verbeek, Ben Wheatley, Martin Zandvliet and Alan Zweig.
Primetime puts the small screen on the big screen and will premiere six upcoming series including ones from Iceland, Argentina and France as well as Jason Reitman’s new creation Casual, Morgan Neville’s Keith Richards doc and Heroes Reborn, a 13-episode miniseries from Heroes creator Tim Kring.
Screening Round-up
Pay your respects to Uggie the Dog, who passed away this week, by catching the TIFF in the Park screening of The Artist in David Pecaut Square Wednesday August 18 at 8:30 p.m.
Toronto’s only two-sided outdoor movie screen is back. More importantly, Sail-In Cinema allows you to watch movies by both land and sea. The first screening is Ghostbusters, Thursday August 20 at 8:45 p.m., with The Goonies and then E.T. on the subsequent two evenings. I don’t care if they did it last year, Jaws should be part of it every year.
Toronto Screengrab of the Week
Last week’s entry was an attempt to match up with the finale of the woefully meandering and comically dour True Detective Season 2 with the 2003 Colin Farrell and Al Pacino vehicle The Recruit. Not a good movie. We will move away from that doom and gloom to the brightness of an intricately retrofitted Roncie strip for this 2007 musical remake.
