Day 8: The Future of Movies

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.

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