The Notebook is covering TIFF with an on-going correspondence between critics Fernando F. Croce, Kelley Dong, and Daniel Kasman.
Color Out in Space
Dear Fernando and Kelley,
The gang's all here! It is good to have you all back again for another Toronto International Film Festival. We have our work cut out for us, as usual: TIFF is giving no signs of slimming down its waistline. Often I wonder if, in a strange paradox, these mega festivals simply cannot afford to be smaller, that they need their size to justify their cost, and vice versa. Look back at our last eleven years of covering this festival and you will find, unabated, me and others grumbling about the sheer size of the enterprise, the unmanageably large slate of films. Apologies, then, for repeat readers. Covering TIFF would certainly be different if we were in less privileged, well-traveled position, as we could focus on the big name auteurs the festival gathers from premieres throughout 2019. Having sent dispatches this year from Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, and Venice—the three premium sources for North American premieres at the festival—we are relieved from having to see such films as Heimat Is Space in Time, Synonyms, I Was At Home, But…, A Hidden Life, Parasite, Zombi Child, First Love, Vitalina Varela, Martin Eden, and other greats, as we've already raved about them. If you haven’t seen these, I strongly urge you to do so and then return to our earlier reports; they are among the year’s best films. Meanwhile, we will be in other screening rooms, hunting for even more movies you deserve to hear about—hopefully films just as good.
Before us in instead lays Toronto's promising world premieres (looking forward to: Arturo Ripstein's Devil Between the Legs and Nicolas Cage's H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space), the pictures hauled over the Rocky Mountains from Telluride (Uncut Gems, where the Safdie brothers meet Adam Sandler), a killer-looking Midnight Madness section (the Ugandan Crazy World), the experimental works found in the festival’s most distinctive and essential program, Wavelengths, and the festival’s only competitive section, Platform (Alice Winocour's Proxima), which is still trying to find its identity. But perhaps above all, what lays before us is the unexpected. It is in many ways easy to attend a festival like this, see a handful of sumptuous productions with big stars, and walk away sated. But most likely, unless you suffer to live a life isolated from local cinemas and the internet, these major films you may have the opportunity to catch again, albeit outside the heightened energy of a festival audience. The most thrilling experience at a film festival is at being surprised, being caught unaware and unsuspecting—and it is this experience that the shotgun-style approach to film programming seen in such a large lineup as that of TIFF can pay off. Reward the audience for taking risks, and thereby teach an audience to take even more risks, in order to build an audience that expects and desires to be challenged and surprised by a film festival. Anyone who thinks cinema is dying need only take the pulse of an event like TIFF: It may be highly commercialized, even institutionalized, but the audiences sure are thrilled to attend, and screenings for bold art-cinema can fill their seats as completely as those for red carpet gala events. A slate of films this large doesn’t ask for curiosity and open-mindedness, it requires it.
I fear I’m starting to slide into branding-speak aphorisms—a window to the world, see things differently, and so on—but this is the approach one must take to navigate a schedule of hundreds of films, many as weak as anything in the mainstream multiplex, but many too that are far more vibrant, inventive, diverse, compassionate, or unconventional. The hope, always, is that these are the films that the festival’s programming team has chosen for us, and not awards bait, middling international co-productions, or pictures pandering sentiment or calculated cultural importance. The balance remains to be seen; the festival has a certain reputation now for trendsetting the middlebrow in the guise of celebrating cinema that has made it more of a tool for mainstream publicity than a passageway to the wondrous possibilities of the art. The hard work of good programmers, like Wavelengths’s Andréa Picard, can easily dispel the notion that TIFF is merely a hype machine for a few chosen pictures under which lays an indiscriminate heap of international cinema. The festival has not been immune to the institutional re-organization that seems to be rippling through the film festival world. While not shaken up to the same degree as Locarno and Berlin, which have changed leadership this year, TIFF has seen changes among its programmers, new promotions and responsibilities. The news of such things used to be for industry insiders only, but with heated cultural attention on such aspects of international film festivals as gender quotas in staffing and programming, there is a new and welcome desire to know who is behind the projectors, helping us see in the darkness. It is to them we look for inspiration in risk-taking; it is in their hands that we form a picture of what contemporary cinema and be and can do.
See you both at the movies.
Warmly,
Danny
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