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| Sarah Gadon and Malin Buska star in The Girl King. |
The Girl King
Director: Mika
Kaurismäki (Road North)
Synopsis: An
enigmatic young woman in conflict - torn between reason and passion; between
her woman's body and being raised as a prince; between the ancient and modern
worlds and between the brilliance of her educated mind and the conservative
forces around her. Crowned Queen at the age of six, Kristina of Sweden (Malin
Buska) was thrust into a labyrinth of power and tradition, where a court of
austere, Lutheran men pressures her to marry and produce an heir to fulfill her
destiny. She finds sanctuary and love with her lady-in-waiting, the beautiful
and elegant countess Ebba Sparre (Sarah Gadon), although the Chancellor, Axel
Oxenstierna (Michael Nyqvist), pressures her to pair with his son, Johan (Lucas
Bryant). Soon the forces around the Queen realize that Ebba is the key to
controlling her, but they underestimate Kristina's brilliant mind and her drive
to be free.
Why it’s on the wish
list: This sweeping Canadian-ish film marks one of our biggest international
co-productions of the year as Canada teams up with Finland, Germany, and Sweden
for this provocative story about a powerful young woman caught between passion
and tradition. The film also brings a topical chapter of history to a film
scene that demands more and more films that headline women as fully formed
characters. The Girl King also proves
a point of interest simply for the level of talent it brings to the screen,
especially a plum role for Sarah Gadon (Enemy)
with Canuck co-stars François Arnaud (I
Killed My Mother) and Lucas Bryant (Haven)
with top international players like Michael Nyqvist (the Swedish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo films)
and Martina Gedeck (The Lives of Others).
Add a script by playwright/screenwriter Michel Marc Bouchard (Tom at the Farm) and notable Finnish
director Mika Kaurismäki, and it’s safe to say that The Girl King checks all the boxes for TIFF.
Status: The film
has not yet screened and is looking at a world premiere unless it hits up
Venice, but Kaurismäki’s Road North
debuted at TIFF and The Girl King’s
up the festival’s angle even more. The film has distribution in Canada
(Equinoxe) and the US (Wolfe) and could presumably appear anywhere in the
festival line-up from the Galas to the potpourri of the Contemporary World
Cinema slate.
He Hated Pigeons
Director: Ingrid
Veninger (The Animal Project)
Synopsis: He Hated Pigeons is the new feature film
by DIY Queen Ingrid Veninger. Chilean actor Pedro Fontaine stars in a fictional
story that travels from the Atacama Desert to the ice fields of
Patagonia. It's about a young man pushed to the borders of sexuality and
sanity, and to the edge of the earth, where he must step into his manhood
before the extremes of an immense and varied landscape.
Why it’s on the wish
list: A phantasmagorical film with a
live score from Toronto’s Queen of DIY Indie Filmmaking Ingrid Veninger? Sign
me up! If I made a live writing here, then I would have donated to the
impressive campaign for this film, but since support isn’t simply synonymous
with financial support, I will be among the first in line to see the film at
Toronto and I’ll gladly dropkick a pigeon to earn my way. Pigeons aims to pair its live score with local musicians at
screenings and I love how this project turns micro-budget filmmaking into an
“event.” This film looks to be the most ambitious project yet from Veninger,
who consistently brings of the most original and innovative lo-fi work on the
Canadian film beat and He Hated Pigeons
is the biggest test of her philosophy that “nothing is impossible.”
Status: The film
is complete, but has not yet premiered. Veninger’s a TIFF regular, so this one
seems like a no-brainer.
He Hated Pigeons is finished! Huge gratitude to an unbelievable cast and crew & our indiegogo champions (can't wait for you to see your names on this one). #HHPMovie
Posted by He Hated Pigeons on Wednesday, June 10, 2015
The People Garden
Director: Nadia
Litz (How to Rid Your Lover of a Negative
Emotion Caused by You!)
Synopsis: Sweetpea's
world is full of artifice. She is a B list actress with an A list rock star
boyfriend. When Sweetpea flies to Japan with the intention to break off the
relationship she finds a mystery awaits her. Her boyfriend Jamie is missing. He
was last seen shooting a music video in a Japanese forest with a dark secret.
Sweetpea sets out to solve the mystery of Jamie's disappearance with the help of Mak, a laconic Japanese forest ranger with secrets of his own. Sweetpea does not know that the forest with its breathtaking vistas is most famous as a destination for suicide. As Sweetpea comes closer to the truth, she must reconcile what this means to the mystery surrounding Jamie and what lies beneath the surface of her own world in The People Garden.
Sweetpea sets out to solve the mystery of Jamie's disappearance with the help of Mak, a laconic Japanese forest ranger with secrets of his own. Sweetpea does not know that the forest with its breathtaking vistas is most famous as a destination for suicide. As Sweetpea comes closer to the truth, she must reconcile what this means to the mystery surrounding Jamie and what lies beneath the surface of her own world in The People Garden.
Why It’s on the List:
Nadia Litz’s 2010 short How to Rid
Your Lover… is a spectacular feat of strangeness and one of the films that
most got me interested in covering Canadian films, especially shorts and
emerging filmmakers, so I’m very excited to see her latest feature.
(Unfortunately, her 2014 film Hotel
Congress never screened here.) The
People Garden sounds like a delightful mix of peculiarity and novelty with the casting of Dree Hemingway (While We’re Young) as Sweetpea alongside
Baywatch’s Pamela Anderson. Litz also
shows a great sense of genre and atmosphere with her unconventional turn as a
maternal femme fatale in current release Big Muddy and her work demonstrates as strong of an artistic sense behind the
camera as she has in front of it. Add her to the list of original voices for
up-and-coming directors.
Status: The People Garden has yet to screen and Cannes Market blurbs note its completion. Litz's script for won the audience prize
at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival's inaugural Screenwriting Lab, which pretty
much guarantees it a slot if it’s ready.
Closet Monster
Director: Stephen
Dunn (We Wanted More)
Synopsis: Closest Monster follows the life of
Oscar Madly, played by Connor Jessup
(Falling Skies, Blackbird), a teenager who has
spent years destabilized by his dysfunctional parents, unsure of his sexuality
and haunted by horrific images of a childhood trauma. Closet Monster is a coming of age film about an imaginative young
man's struggle to break away from his toxic family and come to terms with his
burgeoning sexuality.
Why it’s on the wish
list: Stephen Dunn’s dramatic short We
Wanted More was the best Canadian short to screen at TIFF 2013, and his
shorts Pop up Porno (m4m screened at Hot Docs) and Life Doesn’t Frighten Me (featuring
Instagram sensation Igor Pugdog and Gordon Pinsent) show that he really has a
handle on style and substance alike. Closet
Monster looks to be one of the more promising Canadian titles in a great
year for queer filmmaking and offers to bring more diversity to the table as
the local film scene discovers new voices in feature film. Additionally, star
Connor Jessup gave a powerhouse performance in TIFF ’12 winner Blackbird and has a legion of fans from Falling Skies, and Closest Monster offers a bold test for this up-and-coming actor.
The film also features Isabella Rossellini as a talking hamster. That’s right:
Isabella Rossellini as a talking hamster!
Status: Not yet
premiered, but sales agent Fortissimo earned the film a respectable amount of
coverage for a Canadian flick at the Cannes market.
Guibord Goes to War (Guibord s’en va-t-en guerre)
Director: Philippe
Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar)
Synopsis: Guibord is the
independent MP for Prescott-Makadewà-Rapides-aux-Outardes, a huge county in
northern Quebec. Under the eyes of the whole country, Guibord finds himself in
Parliament to hold the decisive vote that will determine whether Canada will go
to war. Accompanied by his wife, daughter and a Haitian idealistic intern named
Souverain, Guibord visits his
riding to consult his constituents. While interest groups are invited in a
debate that goes horribly wrong, the MP will face the weight of his conscience.
Guibord Goes to War is a biting comedy in which politicians, citizens and
lobbiests clash without restraint, breaking democracy into pieces.
Why it’s on the wish
list: This comedy from Oscar nominee Philippe Falardeau was shot in and
around the Ottawa area to make the most of Parliamentary settings, so I’m
rooting for the home team on this one. Guibord
offers a crowd-pleasing comedy with a timely election-year appeal as Starbuck’s Patrick Huard gets another
comedic showcase in a strong cast that includes Suzanne Clément and Micheline
Lanctôt. The film marks a return to comedy for writer/director Philippe
Falardeau after his sweetly sentimental Oscar-nominee Monsieur Lazhar and his Hollywood fable The Good Lie (which got a surprisingly small release despite the
presence of Reese Witherspoon).
Status: The film
premieres at Locarno in August with fellow Canadian films The Waiting Room and Les
êtres chers (both of which get honourable wish list mentions!) and
bodes a smart choice for a North American Premiere. Don’t expect Falardeau to
rep Canada at the Oscars again, though, as Guibord
opens in theatres October 2nd, after the Academy deadline of Sept.
30. Qualifiers are possible, although Guibord
mostly more fun and commercial.
Waiting for Ishtar
Directors: John
Mitchell (Portrait of a Serial Monogamist), Jonathan Crombie (Anne of Green Gables)
Synopsis: An
examination of the merits, media treatment, and cinematic legacy of the
notorious and controversial 1987 comedy Ishtar.
Ultimately, one man's love letter to one of the most misunderstood films of all
time the most misunderstood films of all time.
Why it’s on the wish
list: I haven’t seen Elaine May’s notorious Razzie-winning film Ishtar that inspires this search for
meaning behind the canon of guilty pleasures and box office bombs, but Waiting for Ishtar sounds like a fun
documentary that probes cult phenomena and film history alike. The film
features interviews with Ishtar die-hards,
as well as Elaine May, actors Carol Kane and Charles Grodin, and a gaggle of
film critics. The film marks a sentimental release for Canadian film fans as
well, since Waiting for Ishtar marks
the final work of co-director Jonathan Crombie (best known for playing Gilbert
in Anne of Green Gables), who died
suddenly while the film was in post-production. There’s enough of a fan base
for Ishtar to find a home in the doc
club.
Status: No word
on the film has been updated since Crombie’s passing, but it seems to have been far along the post-production work, although it might be
better suited for something like Sundance, Hot Docs that has more room for
lo-fi DIY docs.
Rock the Box
Director: Katherine
Monk (debut)
Synopsis: The
film profiles DJ Rhiannon Rozier, a 29-year-old Victoria native and UBC grad
with a degree in political science and Latin American history, whose battle to
break into the male-dominated fortress of the DJ booth has forced her to the
front lines of an old feminist battle: use your sexuality and get noticed, or
linger in the shadows. Rozier agreed to a nude Playboy
shoot and has capitalized on that visibility, creating a sex-kitten alter ego
that she's turned into her own cottage industry.
Why it’s on the wish
list: It still disappoints me that Vancouver-based film critic Katherine
Monk, now working with Ottawa’s Jay Stone at The Ex-Press after Post Media annihilated its film coverage in favour of a
handful of Toronto-based critics that pan everything, isn’t making her directorial debut with
a Joni Mitchell movie. I’m nevertheless intrigued to see the ever-readable arts
journo tackle the music scene in this intimate short doc from the NFB. It’s
always interesting to see how well film critics perform when they’re making
films rather than writing about them, and this sexy pic from the author of Weird Sex and Snowshoes is just the
right test.
Status: Monk’s website states that the
film’s a wrap and that it will “hit some form of screen this fall.” The NFB
always has a few TIFF shorts, and familiar names and selling points often elude
short films, so Rock the Box is a
smart get if it’s ready, otherwise Monk might be partying with the bloggers in
the cheap seats.
Zoom
Director: Pedro
Morelli (Entre Nos)
Synopsis: A
multi-dimensional interface between a comic book artist, a novelist, and a film
director. Each lives in a separate reality but authors a story about one of the
others. Emma (Alison Pill) smuggles drugs inside artificial love dolls to fund
a secret cosmetic procedure. Emma is also creating a comic book about Edward
(Gael García Bernal), a cocky film director with a debilitating secret about
his own anatomy. Edward’s film features Michelle (Mariana Ximenes), a beautiful
novelist living in Brazil, escaping her former life as a model. Michelle’s
novel tells the story of Emma, who smuggles drugs in artificial love dolls to
fund…
And so around it goes...
Why it’s on the wish
list: Zoom, a majority Canadian
co-pro with Brazil, reads like in belongs in 2006-2008 when globe-trotting
multi-narrative films were trendy. The film seems like a by-product of the
negotiations for international co-production with Blindness (which was pitched internally as “ideal” for
international partnerships) but Zoom
doesn’t have to live up to the standards of bringing to the screen the best novel
ever written, so expectations are more fair this time around. The film features two Blindness stars, Don McKellar and Gael García Bernal, alongside an
impressive roster of Canadian talent that includes Jason Priestley, Alison
Pill, Clé Bennett, Rick Roberts, and Tyler Labine. The story of the film more aptly
recalls Blindness director Fernando Meirelles’s
360 or Paul Haggis’s dense multi-narrative
drama Third Person, and while stories
of interconnectedness, chance, and universality can go either way, it sounds as if Brazilian director Pedro Morelli uses a mix
of live action and animation to create different layers of reality among the
narratives, so Zoom shouldn’t be
something that audiences have seen before.
Status: Film is
complete, but has not yet screened.
Sleeping Giant
Director: Andrew
Cividino (feature debut)
Synopsis: Teenager
Adam is spending his summer vacation with his parents on rugged Lake Superior.
His dull routine shatters when he befriends Riley and Nate, smart aleck cousins
who pass their ample free time with debauchery and reckless cliff jumping. The
revelation of a hurtful secret triggers Adam to set in motion irreversible
events that test the bonds of friendship and change the boys forever.
Why it’s on the wish
list: Is Sleeping Giant Canada’s Whiplash? The short film Sleeping
Giant is simply terrific. It was a highlight of last year’s Short Cuts
Canada series and the feature undoubtedly looks to be one of the bigger
Canadian discoveries after it premiered to strong reviews at in the Critics’
Week sidebar at Cannes earlier this year and played well at festivals like Karlovy
Vary.
Status: Seems
like a plum choice to make its North American Premiere at TIFF, just like the
short did.
The Sound of Trees (Le bruit des arbres)
Director: François
Péloquin (debut)
Synopsis: The Sound of Trees chronicles the summer
of a teenager caught between the river and the forest. Seventeen year-old
Jérémie (Antoine L’Écuyer) dreams of a better life, away from the family
sawmill and his native village of Gaspésie, Québec. Instead of the forestry
work, Jérémie prefers pimping his car, hip hop and slacking off with his
friends. The situation drives his father Régis (Roy Dupuis) to despair as he
blames his son’s attitude on a local drug dealer. When Jérémie’s elder brother
leaves town, tensions rise quickly in the summer heat.
Why it’s on the wish
list: Subtle, slice of life films are a must on every festival schedule,
and the best of the Canadian ones usually come from Quebec or debut filmmakers.
Trees sounds like it succeeds as an
accomplished debut with an impressionistic sense of place and character, and its
positive response from its World Premiere at Karlovy Vary and from its
theatrical release in Quebec is very encouraging. For example, Variety critic/thesaurus Guy Lodge gives
an especially promising review
of the film’s understated character while Marc-André Lussier of La Presse praises
the film’s authenticity and situates the film within a larger circle of
Québécois cinéma. Critics also agree that the performances by Antoine L’Écuyer
(best known for Philippe Falardeau’s C’est
pas moi, je le jure!) and Roy Dupuis are highlights.
Status: The Sound of Trees opened in Quebec
theatres on July 3rd, but don’t be quick to say that TIFF is too
concerned about premiere statuses for films from Quebec: so long as they don’t
screen anywhere but Quebec and don’t screen with English subtitles, they’re
fair game for the festival.
