September 2005 Archives

Day 9: Agree to Disagree

by Scott Foundas
September 17, 2005 11:09 AM

The end is nigh. The intersection of Bay and Bloor streets — directly in front of the multiplex known as the Varsity Cinemas — has already returned to a reasonable level of pedestrian traffic. But as Toronto 2005 winds to a close, the only thing people seem to be able to agree on is that, more so than almost any other film festival, this one is what you make of it. Which is to say that there are so many films shown here, over so many days, that no two people risk experiencing the same event. Unlike Sundance or Cannes, there's no official competition to follow, no one particular lineup of screenings around which everything else is built. So it comes as no real surprise that, as the experts began to weigh in on the festival that was, doomsday scenarios jostled for position with proclamations of an annus mirabilis. "Too many movies!" was a consistent refrain among those whose moviegoing choices had yielded something other than the cream of the crop. Meanwhile, in the pages of the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert declared, on the basis of his Toronto experience, that "this is the best autumn movie season in memory."

I suppose my own take falls somewhere in-between those two extremes. In the luck-of-the-draw departmEdison1026ent, I too came up short a few times, never more so than in the case of the festival's Closing Night Gala, Edison, a ludicrous (and then some) police corruption drama starring Justin Timberlake as — brace yourself — a cub reporter for a Jewish community newspaper who stumbles on to a police corruption cover-up involving an elite team of super-cops known as F.R.A.T. That would make a fine premise fora Zucker brothers parody of a Sidney Lumet movie. But the lead-footed and gratuitously violent Edison asks to be taken seriously — and that is no laughing matter. When Pauline Kael noted that some movies are so bad that they drain you of the energy required to get up and walk out before they are over, surely she had Edison in mind.

Still, a quartet of discoveries like October 17, 1961, Sketches of Frank Gehry, Regular Lovers and Entre la mer et l'eau douce is more than enough to make any festival seem justified in its endeavors. And there were other outstanding works on display that I simply have not yet gotten around to discussing, including two of the festival's best and most provocative movies, Dear Wendy and A History of Violence, both of which open in Los Angeles theaters this week and are reviewed at length in the current issue of this paper.

Michael Almereyda's documentary William Eggleston in the Real World is a study of the acclaimed American photographer who has described himself as being "at war with the obvious," aReal_world_smnd much the same can be said about Almereyda's film, which is at once one of the most casual and most revealing portraits of an artist at work that I have ever seen. Actively suppressing the urge to "explain" Eggleston or to put his photographs into some kind of artistic "context," Almereyda instead approaches his subject in much the same way that Eggleston does the things before his own camera lens — which is to say stealthily, from a cautious distance, and yet with extraordinary intimacy. There are long scenes here of Eggleston at rest, which some will call voyeuristic or pointless, when they are in fact among the most remarkable things in the film — snapshots of the artist as an ordinary man, as vulnerable as the rest of us, but capable of seeing uncommon beauty in the seemingly everyday as few of us can.

Eggleston's "democracy of objects," and of people, could also be seen to sAndraandwinston3_rgbtrong effect in Stranded in Canton, the distillation of an epic video project begun by the photographer in the 1970s and never finished. Using one of the world's first portable video cameras, Eggleston captured family, friends and total strangers in moments of pantomime, storytelling and drunken confession. All the more remarkable is how unawares they all seem, making Stranded, among many other things, an invaluable record of perhaps the last moment before reality television and the camcorder revolution insured that we would never be less than ready and willing for our close-up.

There are movies that still haven't been mentioned and others that merit further consideration, but Toronto has now officially ended and my own real world is beckoning. Until next year.

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Day 8: The Future of Movies

by Scott Foundas
September 16, 2005 11:09 AM

Field

 

One of the pleasures of Toronto is the opportunity it affords to catch up with old friends, which, on the next-to-last night of this year's festival, means a chance encounter with Simon Field. If that name rings a bell, it's likely because Field was the subject of a story printed in these pages last year, when his remarkable eight-year tenure as director of the Rotterdam Film Festival came to an end. As I wrote back then, Field isn't one to skip a beat, and by the time of his departure from Rotterdam, he'd already embarked on a career as an independent film producer, planning, in collaboration with the acclaimed theater and opera director Peter Sellars, an enormously ambitious multimedia project to be unveiled in Vienna, in 2006, on the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth.Nch_logo

Now that project, called New Crowned Hope, is a reality, and at its completion will be responsible for six new feature films, directed by a mixture of world cinema vets like Taiwan's Tsai Ming Liang (Goodbye Dragon Inn) and Iran's Bahman Ghobadi (A Time for Drunken Horses) and young turks like Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady) and Paraguayan director Paz Encina, whose contribution to the series will constitute her feature debut. The films themselves won't deal explicitly with Mozart or his work, but will rather look to several recurrent themes from the latter stage of the composer's career transformation, forgiveness, reconciliation as the starting points from which to tell their own unique stories in their own cultural idioms.

Meanwhile, in Field's spare time I'm convinced he never sleeps he's also curating a showcase of new Asian and European films for the Dubai International Film Festival in December. Proof positive that while you may be able to take the festival away from the programmer, you can never quite...well, you get the idea. Yet of all his current projects, New Crowned Hope is the one that excites me the most, because of its belief in cinema as a universal language at a historical moment when common tongues are in precious short supply. There are few films whose arrival I more eagerly await.

Day 8: The Future of Movies

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Day 7: Nirvana

by Scott Foundas
September 15, 2005 11:09 AM

Finally, a masterpiece — two of them, in fact.

M01_rgbPhilippe Garrel's Regular Lovers begins with an event that has become one of the sociopolitical touchstones of the 20th century — the May, 1968 uprisings in which all of France was momentarily gripped by countercultural fervor — before going on to ponder why those sentiments lingered all too briefly in the public consciousness. What if, the movie asks, you start a revolution and nobody comes — or, at least, stays?

It is the story of Francois (played by the director's actor son, Louis Garrel), who has dodged his compulsory military service and who aspires to be a poet, and it is about how he is torn by the conflicting desires to make love or to make revolution. And while attentive viewers may recall that the lanky Garrel fils previously played a young man caught up in the events of '68 in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, whereas that movie used history as the backdrop for a nostalgic-romantic fantasy, Regular Lovers is like a long, intoxicating drag from a revolutionary pipe lit 37 years ago and still smoldering today. This movie gets into your bloodstream and it lingers there.

You don't merely watch this movie, you live it, right alongside its characters. We are there, in the quartier latin, during a midnight confrontation between rioters and police that unfolds in something resembling real time; at a party, as a great, shifting mass of bodies sways in the half-light to the rhythms of The Kinks singing "This Time Tomorrow" — maybe one of the most arrestingly sensual moments I've ever seen in a movie; and with Francois and his girlfriend Lilie (stunning newcomer Clotilde Hesme) as they traverse the streets of a Paris that seem unusually quiet and uninhabited — as if a private oasis that reveals itself only to those in love and flush with the belief that they can change the world.

Entre_la_mer_et_l_eau_douce_1 Paris, of course, was not the only place in the world that was stirring with unrest at this moment. An ocean away, French-speaking Canada was too, and it provides the backdrop for director Michel Brault's 1967 debut feature, Entre la mer et l'eau douce, which screened as this year's selection of Toronto's Canadian Open Vault program — a festival sidebar devoted to the presentation of classic works of the Canadian cinema.

The film takes place in a moment: As a folk singer named Claude (real-life singing star Claude Gauthier) performs in a sold-out Montreal concert hall, he flashes back to key events from his past, including his journey from his small home town of St. Irenee and his relationship with a young waitress (Genevieve Bujold), herself from L'Abord-a-Plouffe, who is willing to give more openly of herself than Claude is ready to receive. Shot in stunning, full-frame black-and-white compositions, with an often handheld camera, it is, like many key films of the late 1960s and early '70s (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Mother and the Whore) a study in drift and discontentment, of a nation and its young people yearning for freedom and senses of self. And it is one of the most exquisitely pained and exhilarating of them all.

Brault is considered a major figure in Canadian cinema, French-speaking or otherwise, but his work is difficult to see and only one of his feature films has been released on DVD. With any luck, the pristine new print of Entre la mer... struck for this screening will help cause retrospectives to be mounted.

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Days 5 & 6: The Midpoint

by Scott Foundas
September 14, 2005 11:09 AM

Pic22 Halfway through this year's Toronto Film Festival, gossip about the festival's hits and misses has reached something of a fever pitch. As far as I've been able to gather, a few movies — Bennett Miller's Capote, Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain among them — have been received almost universally well, while three others — Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown, Guy Ritchie's Revolver and Terry Gilliam's Tideland — have landed with resounding thuds. By the time of the official Elizabethtown press screening, Crowe had reportedly gone from calling the film a finished work to saying it was a work-in-progress, to be shorn of some 20+ minutes before its scheduled October release. Reacting to that news, several colleagues who saw the film suggested that there may only be 20-odd minutes that are actually salvageable.

If I begin with rumor and innuendo, it is because they are part of the ritual of festivalgoing, and because it is almost always the name-brand auteur films that are subject to such intense scrutiny. In short, in a festival landscape as vast as Toronto's, some disastrous low-budget indie by a first-time director may be able to fall quietly in the forest. But if Cameron Crowe and Terry Gilliam stumble, the vultures begin to circle. In truth, I haven't seen either of those films — though, admittedly, I'm intrigued. When movies inspire this level of hatred, they're usually worth checking out. People don't get so upset over just any ordinary misfire. Besides which, according to the daily poll of international critics conducted by the British trade magazine Screen, Tideland is actually quite popular with reviewers in Denmark and the Netherlands. Mr. Gilliam, grab thy passport.

Il7q1396_rgb1_rgbContinuing on the subject of failure, I suppose I should spend a few words discussing the latest opus from Korean director Park Chan-wook, whose OldBoy won the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes last year, and whose Sympathy for Lady Vengeance arrived in Toronto fresh from its world premiere in Venice. It is, per Park, the concluding chapter in his Vengeance Trilogy — and in that, I suppose, one can take some small comfort. As regular readers will know, I have harbored little sympathy for Mr. Park's recent work, though I continue to have some affection for his Joint Security Area (2000), an enterprising use of genre storytelling to explore the effects of the North/South Korean divide on both nation's psyches. Still, I entered into the Lady Vengeance press screening with an open mind, buoyed by reports from Venice that the film — and particularly its second half — had divided audiences: Those predisposed to Park's work were generally disappointed, while those who have thus far avoided indoctrination deemed it an advance.

Well, I'll say this much: The second half of Lady Vengeance is indeed different. After an hour of Park's de rigeur camera pyrotechnics, cartoonish blood splatter and simplistic dream imagery, the movie settles into what might be called a mature rhythm, with expansive widescreen compositions held for more than a few seconds at a time and a downright sedate pace that suggests someone on the crew injected a powerful tranquilizer into Park's bloodstream. If only the same could be said of his puerile mind. Lady Vengeance finds Park working in a by-now familiar storytelling mode: Upon her release, a recently paroled prisoner begins plotting an elaborate revenge against the man who, 20 years earlier, framed her for a brutal child kidnapping and murder, then absconded with her own young daughter. Put simply, this is OldBoy or Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance redux, with the minor twist of having a female protagonist — something that, to my eyes, only makes the movie seem that much more of a a cut-rate Kill Bill clone. Furthermore, aren't trilogies supposed to take us somewhere, as opposed to doubling back on the same well-trodden ground, over and over again? Though the movie's style changes mid-stream, its ideas do not evolve, and by the end Park even resorts to that old warhorse of making his villain so execrable (which is to say, not merely your run-of-the-mill child murderer or pedophile) that the movie's heavy-handed discussion of the morality of revenge killing is rendered moot. If this is what qualifies as an advance, let us hope for a hasty retreat.

This year in Toronto, I've been sticking mostly to press screenings and, only on occasion, venturing to see films with the ticket-buying public. And there's a reason for that. Unlike most film festivals, Toronto doesn't bend over backwards to accommodate journalists and other assorted industry folk — to the contrary, they view us as something of a necessary annoyance. The majority of accredited press can only attend public screenings on a rush admission basis, while select others (usually from the biggest daily and weekly newspapers) can obtain advance tickets for public shows, but only at a special press box office and, even then, at a limit of one ticket per day. The priority here, you see, as it has been for all of the festival's 30 years, is the public at large — and that philosophy is what makes Toronto uniquely democratic among festivals of its size.

Ruy_gurra_2_mineiro_1 I was acutely reminded of this when I did finally venture out to a public screening, of director Andrucha Waddington's The House of Sand, a visually stunning frontier western that traces some 70 years in the lives of a family living (if it can be called that) in a barren desert region in northern Brazil. The movie stars two of Brazil's greatest actresses, Fernanda Montenegro (who was Oscar-nominated for her performance in Central Station) and Fernanda Torres (who won the best actress prize at Cannes in 1986 for Love Me Forever or Never), and as the story takes its course, they trade off roles: In the early passages, Montenegro plays the mother of Torres' character, Aurea. Then, as the years pass, Montenegro assumes the role of Aurea and Torres comes to play Aurea's daughter, Maria.

24_1But to make a long story short: As I arrived at the Ryerson Theater — one of the festival's largest venues — for the House of Sand screening, I found the entire building encircled by a throng of ticket holders that, if you stretched it out in one straight line, would probably run the length of three city blocks. And as I made my way to the end of it, I saw not so much as one single press or industry accreditation badge, save for the one hanging around my own neck. In other words, these particular 500 or so festivalgoers were there for no reason other than their love of movies — and judging from the conversations I overheard while waiting in line, many of them didn't know anything about the particular movie they were about to see.

There's something else most of those ticket holders didn't know (or care) about, and that's whether the movie in question was having its world premiere in Toronto, or had already screened at some earlier festival(s). I make that point because, particularly in this crowded season, with Venice, Telluride, Toronto and Los Angeles' own AFI Fest following one right after the other, there arises a certain myth — mostly in the pages of industry trade publications — that a festival's importance/worth is somehow directly tied to the number of world premieres it can secure. And sometimes, even festival directors and programmers who should know better, fall under the sway of this fairytale and adjust their selection process accordingly: The screening history of a film becomes more important than its artistic merits. It's an equation in which the moviegoer loses and nobody really wins, because the people who accord credence to this "premiere status" derby are vastly outnumbered by those who don't. At the end of the day, the best film festivals are simply the ones that show the best available films, regardless of other considerations — a point more festivals would do well to absorb, and embrace.

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Day 4: A Stone's Throw

by Scott Foundas
September 12, 2005 11:09 AM

Last year, I wrote about the odd experience of traveling halfway around the world to the Buenos Aires film festival only to find myself watching a documentary about the architect Bruce Goff, whose Japanese Pavilion for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is located a stone's throw from my Los Angeles apartment and something I drive past almost every day of my life that I'm not off attending a film festival halfway around the world. Well, now I am in Toronto, which is not quite halfway around the world, and I have seen another documentary about another architect whose work is inescapable in Los Angeles, but who is actually Canadian by birth. The point, I suppose, being that it really is a small world after all.

Sp___fog_bilbao1_rgb The movie is Sketches of Frank Gehry and it represents the culmination of four years of work by director Sydney Pollack to capture the architect, his work and the minutiae of his creative process on film. The result is one of the best movies I've seen so far in this year's festival. Though Gehry and Pollack have long been friends, the veteran Hollywood director confesses early on to being an architecture neophyte, and so, like the documentary Ballets Russes that screened here last week, much of the film's sprightly energy stems from its combination of expert research and amateur enthusiasm. True to its title, this relentlessly intelligent film approaches its subject from a multitude of angles: It is partly a talking-heads portrait of the artist as seen by his greatest admirers (Ed Ruscha, Philip Johnson and Dennis Hopper among them) and harshest critics (particularly writer Hal Foster), partly a travelogue surveying Gehry's major buildings (captured by Pollack in exquisite, sensual compositions) and, above all, an intimate observance of Gehry at work, cutting and pasting the scraps of silvery construction paper that will one day become sheets of corrugated metal and beams of steel.

Pollack may not know much about architecture, but he knows more than a bit about the struggle to carve out a personal niche in what is an inherently commercial field, and it's on that level that he and Gehry make their most meaningful connection — as two creators all too keenly aware of the neverending battle between art and commerce. (Among the film's many intriguing bits of trivia is the reminder that, in his pre-celebrity days, Gehry was the architect of the Santa Monica Place shopping mall on the 3rd Street Promenade — an achievement Gehry now regards with about the same enthusiasm Pollack might muster for his much-maligned Sabrina remake.) Sketches was produced for PBS' American Masters series, but it deserves to be seen in theaters, and on the largest possible screens.

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Day 3: Les Massacres

by Scott Foundas
September 11, 2005 11:09 AM

There may be no more effective crash course in the way that movies can pervert and distort history for their own purposes than one I experienced during last year's Toronto Film Festival, when I sat through back-to-back screenings of Hotel Rwanda and Shake Hands with the Devil, the latter being an extraordinary documentary that helps to expose all the ludicrous methods by which the former attempts to turn one of the most awesome human tragedies of the 20th Century into an uplifting, triumph-over-a2457_fly_rgbdiversity melodrama. This year, as discussed in a previous post, it's another coldblooded massacre — this one of of Algerian protest marchers by French police on October 17, 1961 — that is the subject of multiple festival films. But that hasn't stopped there from being a new Rwanda movie too, even if — judging from the sparse turnout at yesterday morning's press screening — Rwanda has already outlived its usefulness as a buzz topic for film journalists.

The movie is Michael Caton-Jones' Shooting Dogs, and it filters the events of the genocide through the prism of the Ecole Technique Officielle, a Catholic school in the capital city of Kigali, where some 2,500 Tutsis and moderate Hutus sought refuge after the killing began, believing that the Belgian UN troops stationed there would protect them. The story is similar to that of Hotel Rwanda, only it doesn't have anything resembling a happy ending and it doesn't try to manufacture one — to wit, the end credits of the film (which, unlike Hotel Rwanda, was filmed on location in the real places where the events occurred) are punctuated with images of those crew members who lost family in the genocide. Shooting Dogs isn't without flaws — a great many of them, in fact: Like Glory and The Long Walk Home and countless other 3064_fly_rgbfilms made about expressly black subjects, it tells its tale through the eyes of two white martyrs — a British priest (John Hurt) and a wide-eyed young teacher (Hugh Dancy) — who, despite being based on on real persons, come across as a guilt-riddled apologia for all the whites (which is to say both people and houses) who might have acted to temper the Rwandan bloodletting. "See?" the movie seems to say. "We're not all bad."

But it was something other than white guilt, I fear, that kept the press and industry audience away from Shooting Dogs. Last year marked the tenth anniversary of the genocide and that meant that, until the calendar turned over, Rwanda was a good news story and even better water-cooler conversation. Eleventh anniversaries just don't have the same ring about them. Which is to not even ask why it took so long for most of the world (and its media) to wake up to Rwanda in the first place. (Though perhaps we should feel lucky, in that it took so much longer for the full specter of the Holocaust to come to light. And we are still learning new things about the French-Algerian war.) I suppose this is all a roundabout way of saying that today is September 11, and while New Orleans recovers from an act of natural destruction, New York and Washington, D.C. remember a man-made one, and troops on the ground in the Middle East continue to play out its collateral damage. How long before we will be ready to walk into a cinema, in Toronto or elsewhere, and see the hard truths of those 21st-century atrocities made plain before our eyes?

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Day 2: Karaoke at the Fox & the Fiddle

by Scott Foundas
September 10, 2005 11:09 AM

On any given day during any given film festival, I will see at least four and often five new films, which at the end of a festival like Toronto can mean 40-50 movies digested in less than two weeks' time. Yet, yesterday, on the second day of the 30th annual Toronto International Film Festival, I saw not one film. Nor did I so much as leave my hotel room from sunup to sundown. Instead, I spent the entire day at my computer, writing or editing the film reviews and other articles you will read in next Thursday's print edition of this publication. For while the Hollywood studios may use Toronto as a launching pad for some of their highest-profile fall releases, that doesn't mean that they take a hiatus from releasing lower-priority films while the festival is going on. In fact, it may be that these particular ten days in September are viewed as an ideal time to unload certain troublesome pictures whose makers would just as soon not attract a plethora of media attention. To wit, next weekend brings with it a whopping 15 new films arriving in local theaters — one of which, Lodge Kerrigan's Keane, is among the best American films of the year, two of which (Venom and Cry Wolf) are not even being screened in advance for critics and the other dozen of which fall somewhere in-between those two extremes.

All told, that left me with somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 words of fresh copy to either produce or pick through with a fine tooth comb before next week's pages could be put to bed and I could resumeFox my festival-going activities. So I doggedly plowed away and, when 10:00 PM finally rolled around, decided to treat myself to my first meal of the day that did not issue from the vending machine outside my hotel room door. This entailed venturing as far as the hotel lobby and a pub called the Fox and Fiddle that I suspect may be less than the finest the city of Toronto has to offer. There, for the next 45 minutes or so, I proceeded to consume a freeze-dried caesar salad and a rubbery chicken parmesan, all the while a DJ in a cheap pinstripe suit and circa-1987 John Stamos haircut ran through a litany of pop standards. Among the highlights: Nirvana's "Rape Me" (dedicated "to all the ladies out there") and The Tragically Hip's "New Orleans is Sinking," complete with the sound effect of a toilet flushing added at key moments. This was before the karaoke portion of the evening's entertainment got rolling, and a portly middle-aged man named Pierre, who I quickly gathered to be a fixture around here, took to the stage and offered his rendition of James' "Laid," adding special emphasis to the lyric "But she only comes when she's on top."

Throughout, a rail-thin man in a horrid costume consisting of rugby shirt, shorts and Teva sandals, gyrated his body right in front of my table, while I stared fixedly at the reflections of the overhead disco ball as they twinkled in my fizzless Diet Coke. Somewhere, new movies by the likes of Steven Soderbergh, Cameron Crowe and Tim Burton were being screened, and there were, I felt certain, film critics there watching them. But as Scarlett O'Hara so astutely observed: After all, tomorrow is another day. And likewise, after dining at the Fox and Fiddle, it's entirely possible that I may never be hungry again.

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Day 1: Dip Into History

by Scott Foundas
September 9, 2005 11:09 AM

Tiff2005_posterlrgjpg_rgbThough it officially kicked off last night, the 30th Toronto International Film Festival really began today, with more than 100 films unspooling at nine different screening venues, some starting as early as 9:00 in the morning and the last commencing at 11:59 PM. By comparison, the New York Film Festival, which starts just after Toronto ends and runs one week longer in duration, will show only a fraction as many films in its entire program as Toronto does in a single day.

It's for that reason that some are prone to regard Toronto less as a traditional film festival than as a film exposition — a giant world's fair of new cinema. But whatever one chooses to call it, Toronto is still incontrovertibly the most expansive and important event of its kind in North America — a film lover's delight where, if you play your cards right, you can see the best films from Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and Venice, all under one roof, plus a few discoveries that Toronto can claim as its very own.

That last designation certainly applies to October 17, 1961, an extraordinary docudrama by first-time feature director Alain Tasma. The date of the title is one that still weighs heavy on the French national psyche, referring to a the massacre of some 200 Algerians (and the arrest oOctober__4__c_thierry_ozil__canal_rgb_9f thousands more) during a nonviolent demonstration in the streets of Paris. The Algerians were protesting not just the war abroad, but the alarming civil rights abuses enacted against them at home by the French police. The police, in turn, were acting under official orders that, in effect, gave them free reign to terrorize any suspect of color. Those events were largely suppressed in the French newspapers of the day and were only fully exposed decades later. Now, they have become part of the storyline in a series of films, including Michael Haneke's Cannes-awarded Cache and Peter Watkins' masterful La Commune, that are, directly or indirectly, about the collective guilt of people and nations.

In October 17, 1961, Tasma employs the handheld camera and documentary-style editing of an earlier, seminal film about this same period in French history, The Battle of Algiers, and the result is a raw, nerve-jangling, brilliantly cinematic experience that exhumes that godforsaken day from the sarcophagus of history and makes it live again as vividly as the images of Baghdad that populate the evening news. The film is often hard to watch, yet nonetheless demands to be seen.

AnothBallet_russes_5_rgber movie that delves into the recesses of history, but for a considerably different purpose, Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine's Ballets Russes chronicles the various ballet companies that danced under that famous name, over some 60 years, from Russia to Australia and whistle-stop America. By their own admission, Geller and Goldfine knew very little about dance and even less about ballet when they started working on this project, and perhaps for that reason the finished film is marked by its rare combination of exhaustive research and amateur enthusiasm. But even these babes in the ballet woods realized that a year-2000 reunion of surviving Ballets Russes dancers from every corner of the globe was too good of an opportunity to pass up. So Geller and Goldfine descended on New Orleans with camera in tow and a five-year labor of filmmaking love was born.

Franklin1 Ballets Russes will open in Los Angeles in November, but in the meantime, it has already been an audience hit in Sundance (where it had its world premiere) and seems headed for a similar destiny in Toronto, where two opening-night screenings quickly sold out. Writing about the movie earlier this year in Variety, I noted that Geller and Goldfine's frequent juxtaposition of archival footage of certain Ballets Russes dancers against their own recently-filmed interviews with those same dancers created an ethereal effect, as though we were seeing these octo- and nona-genarians engaging in ghostly pas de deux with their own former selves. So it was only fitting that the Toronto Ballets Russes premiere brought with it 91-year-old Frederic Franklin, who is featured extensively in the film and took a break from his busy schedule as a ballet choreographer to attend the festival. After joining Geller and Goldfine on stage for the post-screening Q&A session, Franklin joked that the film was helping to make him a star all over again. Confirmation that, at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival, everything old truly is new again.

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