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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Saturday, September 3rd, 2011 - Comments Off on TIFF ’11 Preview: Contemporary World Cinema
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TIFF ’11 Preview: Contemporary World Cinema

This is always one of the hardest categories for me at TIFF because there are so many titles from around the world, and there’s usually nothing to go on but a catalog description in helping to determine which of them might end up breaking out and being a “buzz” film at TIFF, and which will just be mediocre.

Nonetheless, having culled through the entries, these are the films from the Contemporary World Cinema section that I’m most looking forward to at TIFF this year.

Always Brando
Ridha Béhi, Tunisia

After meeting Anis Raache, a young Tunisian actor who bears a stunning resemblance to young Marlon Brando, Tunisian master Ridha Behi decided to write a film casting the two. Marlon Brando was interested, the two met and reworked the script. He died before shooting started. Always Brando chronicles Behi’s saga with Marlon Brando and meditates on the lure and cruelty of the art, system and its industry.

Pedigree: World Premiere at TIFF

Blood of My Blood
João Canijo, Portugal

Magnificently acted and orchestrated, João Canijo’s family saga, Blood of my Blood, depicts the harshness of life in inner city Lisbon and the sacrifices that two women are willing to make for their family. Marcia is determined to end the cycle of poverty for her family and when she discovers that her daughter is dating an older professor, she will stop at nothing to end this unwelcome relationship.

Pedigree: TIFF World Premiere

Color of the Ocean
Maggie Peren, Germany

One of a number of films at this year’s Festival confronting Europe’s migration crisis, Color of the Ocean is unique for its setting: the glorious and troubled Canary Islands. A Spanish archipelago located just off the coast of northwest Africa, the Canaries are both a tourist paradise and a purgatory for refugees. In Color of the Ocean, director Maggie Peren offers a story in which the itinerary of two such refugees collides with those of an altruistic tourist and a Canary Island cop. The experience they share will change the course of their lives.

Pedigree: TIFF World Premiere


Extraterrestrial
Nacho Vigalondao, Spain

When strangers Julio and Julia wake up together, groggy and hung-over from the night before, the last thing they are expecting is to discover that an alien invasion has taken place. In Extraterrestre, Nacho Vigalondo melds science fiction, romance and black comedy in his latest feature about the darkly fascinating aspects of the human psyche.

Pedigree: TIFF World Premiere


Footnote
Joseph Cedar, Israel

Footnote’s premise is grounded in a potent archetypal conflict, set in a specific, fascinating milieu. The ornery Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar Aba, beloved comedic star of Israeli stage and television) and his ambitious, academically bearded son Uriel (Late Marriage’s Lior Ashkenazi) are rival professors in the Talmudic Studies department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The film begins with a ceremony in which Uriel is officially installed in the Academy — an accolade the deeply envious Eliezer, much to his chagrin, has never received.

The balance shifts when Eliezer learns that, following decades of frustrated anticipation, he is finally going to be awarded the prestigious Israel Prize. What unfolds is a game of generational one-upmanship driven by desire, pettiness and pride, involving not only Eliezer and Uriel but numerous academics whose careers are equally bogged down in the wildly competitive realm of Talmudic scholarship.

Pedigree: TIFF North American Premiere


The Forgiveness of Blood
Joshua Marston, USA/Albania/Denmark/Italy

This film by Joshua Marston (Maria Full of Grace) works as a powerful coming-of-age story and fascinating procedural account of a blood feud,transporting us to a small town in northern Albania where time-worn resentments play out with the help of text messaging and video calls.

Pedigree: TIFF North American Premiere

Comments: The director of Maria Full of Grace, back with another film with a fascinating premise? Oh, yes.

From Up on Poppy Hill
Goro Miyazaki, Japan

Following in his father’s footsteps, anime director Goro Miyazaki sets his story of young love and student protest against the period of Japanese modernization and revitalization ahead of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. With charm and tragedy, Miyazaki takes a nostalgic look back at a time when the preservation of the past clashed with progress for the future.

Pedigree: TIFF International Premiere

A Funny Man
Martin P. Zandvliet, Denmark

Martin Pieter Zandvliet’s A Funny Man (the follow-up to his debut Applause) examines the career of one of Denmark’s most successful comics, Dirch Passer (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), whose long and extremely successful career was plagued by self-doubt, overwork and his audience’s resistance to any attempts he makes to branch out. A fascinating and affecting exploration of the dilemma facing every popular artists, A Funny Man is distinguished by Zandvliet’s elegant, sensitive direction and a major, major turn by Kaas (The Green Butchers, Brothers).

Pedigree: TIFF International Premiere

Comments: This new film by the team that made Applause, one of my favorite TIFF films from 2009, looks very promising.

Hotel Swooni
Kaat Beels, Belgium

Six lives, 24 hours, and a hotel in the middle of a heat wave. Anna and Hendrik have it all: a great son, a good job, a lovely house – but the wedding they witness in the hotel forces them to reflect on the choices they have made. Violette wants to reconcile with her daughter Vicky before she dies, but Vicky struggles to let go of a hurtful past. Meanwhile, a young African refugee hides out in the hotel from the police. The lives of all these people become irrevocably intertwined until the heat breaks and the rain offers some relief.

Pedigree: TIFF International Premiere

Lena
Christophe Van Rompaey, The Netherlands/Belgium

Driven by a telling performance by Emma Levie in the title role, Christophe Van Rompaey’s Lena follows its heroine as she struggles to find a place in the world despite a cross-addicted mother who considers her nothing more than a burden and constantly berates her about her weight. Lena’s only outlets are dancing and sex until she meets Daan, whom she rescues as he’s running from the police. But is Daan really all he claims to be? Lena thoughtfully and powerfully examines divides of class, gender and body type.

Pedigree: TIFF World Premiere

Lucky
Avie Luthra, South Africa

Lucky, an AIDS orphan, is forced to leave his native village to live with his uncle in Durban. He learns about life the hard way, but forges an unlikely bond with an elderly Indian neighbour in spite of racial prejudice and language barriers. Together they go on a journey to find him a new life and family.

Pedigree: TIFF World Premiere

Superclásico
Ole Christian Madsen

Longtime Festival favourite Ole Christian Madsen (Prague, Kira’s Reason, Flame Citroen) is best known for powerful dramas about domestic discord, but his latest is a slyly funny romantic comedy about the mercurial, confounding nature of love and desire. The ostensible hero is Christian (Anders W. Berthelsen), the owner of a Copenhagen rare wine shop. As the film opens, Christian is bemoaning the impending remarriage of his wife, the temperamental Anna (Paprika Steen), a sports agent who has left him to live in Buenos Aires with one of the world’s most infamous soccer players, Juan Diaz (Sebastián Estevanez). Finding courage at the bottom of another vintage bottle, Christian packs up his son and heads for Buenos Aires to win Anna back. Where Madsen’s earlier films were about the pain of letting go, Superclásico is more about its possible benefits.

Pedigree: TIFF North American Premiere

Comments: Madsen is one of my favorite of the Danish directors, and the presence of Paprika Steen in anything considerably ups the ante for me. This is a must-catch.

Think of Me
Bryan Wizemann, USA

Angela, a single mother, struggles to make ends meet for her daughter. Beneath the Las Vegas neon glow, her life hits a breaking point, presenting her with an impossible choice: keep trying to make things work, or let it all go for the promise of something better.


Pedigree: TIFF World Premiere

Your Sister’s Sister
Lynn Shelton, USA

Iris is both Jack’s best friend and his dead brother’s ex — which makes them almost like siblings. It also complicates the not-so-platonic feelings Iris may have developed for Jack. Lynn Shelton’s 2009 film Humpday balanced an out-there premise — two straight men test their male identities by making a gay porn — with a grounded understanding of male friendship and post-twenties anxiety. Your Sister’s Sister builds upon Humpday’s emotional honesty and naturalistic humour, marking a true maturation for Shelton as a filmmaker.

Pedigree: TIFF World Premiere

Comments: Shelton has been an interesting filmmaker since her 2006 debut, We Go Way Back, and especially with her last effort, 2009’s Humpday, a surprisingly astute examination of friendship, marriage, and what it means to be a grown-up. I’ve been looking forward to catching Your Sister’s Sister since it was announced for the TIFF slate. Indie film buffs won’t want to miss it.

*(All film descriptions are from the TIFF catalog.)

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon