TIFF '24 Day Five

A few words about medium

The Wild Robot

TIFF is halfway finished, though for many it’s already pretty much wound down. particularly the press in town who often leave by Wednesday or so. Living in Toronto, and with nothing better to do, I’m pushing it right to the end, and by that point I’ll have seen an absurd number of movies. It’s a problem, but that’s fine. Seeing so many movies, you start to notice trends. Like films centred on motherhood, for example, or the continued influence of the pandemic on both the stories and the production styles. Another cruious trend has emerged, though, and I’m willing to call it that because I’ve now seen three examples.

There are a good number of movies wholly or partially shot on film at the festival this year, which is nice to see. The Brutalist, which I’ll be seeing in the coming days, is perhaps the most notable example, having been shot on the old VistaVision format, and is being projected at the fest on 70mm. The rest, though, are screening digitally via DCP, which I don’t prefer, but which has allowed filmmakers to play around a bit with even their celluloid-shot footage when it comes to final presentation, given the consistency they can achieve. This year, that playing around has come in the form of unmatted frames, where the borders of the actual image as shot on film are visible. In a couple cases, the edges of the perforations, too. And in one case (Bird), the lack of matting is so extreme, that the top of each previous frame is ever so slightly visible peeking through at the bottom throughout.

This is a trend some will find annoying. I suspect fans of experimental cinema most of all, where this mode of presentation has existed forever, even before the advent of digital, when films were simply screened unmattered through a 16mm or 35mm projector onto like a sheet or a wall. In experimental work, the medium itself is often the subject, or one of the subjects of the work, so it’s not surprising to see films calling attention to their medium this way. It’s less common in narrative features (aside from things like super 8 flashbacks), though it has been gaining steam a bit. The example I can think of was Godland a couple years back, where those rounded corners and rough edges of the frame were visible. To be honest, I’m not sure what to make of it. Some have dismissed it as empty nostalgia for film, but I suspect more is going on here. Something to do with filmmakers making plain the choice of medium as an integral element of the work, in an era where people often don’t know or don’t care what a movie was shot on. In Bird, there is interesting use of cellphone footage, for example, and perhaps it makes sense to make the use of celluloid for the rest of the film apparent to the audience. Or maybe it’s something else, but the trend has my attention now.

I began another heavy day of moviegoing with The Wild Robot, the new Dreamworks animated film from writer-director Chris Sanders, he of Lilo & Stich and How to Train Your Dragon. If those two films would make you think this is one of those animated films that’ll make you cry, you’re right. It’s pretty much fine-tuned to do exactly that, with a story of a helper robot lost on an island populated only by animals. When Roz, the robot, accidentally kills a family of geese, she ends up raising the runt left alive. It’s a story of motherhood and parenting, and working together in the “it takes a village” mode, and that’s exactly the kind of stuff that’ll tug at your heartstrings if you’re at all human. I don’t know that it’s a great film. There’s a version of this that is actually a dialogue-free film, but this being an American kids movie, that was never gonna happen. Instead, it’s perhaps too talky, and too frenetic, never quite letting the majesty of its images linger as long as they really should. It’s the imagery, though, that is the true selling point of the movie. It looks god damn beautiful, styled to look like a moving painting, the people Dreamworks have really outdone themselves for once, crafting something where every frame is a thing of colourful beauty. I saw it in IMAX, and that was a perfect way to take it in.

Heretic

In a big change of pace, my next film was Heretic, from directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who also wrote A Quiet Place. It stars Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East (The Fabelmans represent!) as two young Mormons who knock on the door of one Hugh Grant, after he has apparently expressed interest in learning about the Church of Jesus Chris of Latter Day Saints. After being invited in, the pair soon discover they’re trapped in the house, where Grant’s character proceeds to play a series of intellectual games with them about the nature and truth of religion. Glibly, it’s a terrifying horror movie about being trapped in a house with Richard Dawkins. It’s tense, and exciting, and very funny. I’m sure the film will garner eyerolls from some, but I was into it from jump, largely thanks to a trio of very good performances. Grant is having an absolutely terrific time as the villain, while Thatcher is very good, and East totally knocks it out of the park as the more naive of the two.

Pepe

Next was the Wavelengths entry Pepe, from Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, about a hippo that, according to legend, was brought to Colombia by Pablo Escobar, and is the only hippo to have been killed in the Americas. The film tells Pepe’s story through a hilarious vignettes about the people who brought him there, the community that later found him in the wild, and the authorities who shot him. Over all of that is poetic and often funny narration in the voice of the hippo himself, done to mimic the sounds of the animal. It’s an odd, compelling film, and one I could have watched for all the hippo footage alone, but which gains power in the way it illustrates a web of connections, both real and perhaps fantastical, between nature and civilization. From Africa, all the way to rural Colombia. Plus, have you ever seen a baby hippo? Cutest thing of all time.

To a Land Unknown

There are several films by Palestinian filmmakers at the festival this year, and I’m making an effort to see them all. The first I managed to get to was Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown, his narrative feature debut, about cousins stuck in Athens, trying to find a way into Germany without any papers, having been smuggled out of Lebanon. It’s another great highlight of the festival, honest in its depiction of the moral degradation encouraged in existing without a country. Petty crime becomes the only real option, and eventually petty crime turns into more serious crime, as we watch the two cousins struggle with all that they’re doing in order to achieve some measure of dignity and liberty, including hurting their Palestinian brethren in the process. Solidarity dying at the hands of survival.

Gülizar

Keeping up the heavy material, I went off to see Gülizar, from Turkish filmmaker Belkıs Bayrak, about a woman who goes off to Albania for marriage and during a stop along the way is assaulted by an unknown man. She manages to escape relatively unscatched, just some bruises, but the mental toll is deep, and made deeper when the bruises are discovered by doctors and her new husband makes attempts to set things right. His intentions are good, but the divide between them grows anyway, and things begin to spiral. If perhaps a little too staid at times, rather than intensely quiet, the film nonetheless achieves power in a largely silent performance from lead actress Ecem Uzun, and some subtly odd and interesting camerawork.

Else

Finally, feeling a bit like an idiot once again, I venture off to the Royal Alexandra to see the Midnight Madness offering, Else, from French director Thibault Emin. His intro made clear that he’s a character, and the film he made is one of those attempts at trippy, LSD fever dreams. Honestly, that’s just not my kind of movie most of the time. I struggle to care. And it doesn’t help when that trippy imagery is largely generated with AI. You know, when Stanley Kubrick made 2001—a film Emin referenced in his intro—he had people actually coming up with creative engineering solutions for creating its incredible images. AI may be cutting edge, but it’s lazy, and while I’m sure the rest of the film took a lot of effort and creativity, it reeks of bankruptcy in the end.