Day 1: Dip Into History

Though 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 of 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.

Another 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.

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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