The stars were back, and so were the protesters. Although the presence of A-list actors – who could not appear at the 2023 iteration due to industry-wide actor and writer strikes – helped to revive interest in the world’s largest public film festival, it was hard to navigate the few blocks of Toronto’s Entertainment District this year and not slam into honking controversy. Protesters interrupted the Toronto International Film Festival’s opening-night gala, targeting the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) with chants that the major sponsor “funds genocide” at the world premiere of David Gordon Green’s comedy Nutcrackers. (These protests echoed recent crusades toward divestment that have greeted other Canadian cultural bodies, such as the Giller Prize, which is no longer sponsored by Scotiabank.)

The dance between corporate commitments and cultural joie de vivre was a frequent tension during the 11-day festivities. It was also not uncommon to see TIFF programmers grimace through an acknowledgement that this year’s slate of Special Presentations was brought to you by TikTok.

But as the festival continued, the big story surrounded TIFF’s decision to premiere a documentary, Russians at War. For that film, Russian Canadian director Anastasia Trofimova captured the experiences of a Russian army unit at the front lines in Ukraine. However, local Ukrainian-Canadian activists deemed the film to be blatant “Russian propaganda.” On Sept. 10, the date of Russians at War’s press and industry screening, dozens of activists waved banners and Ukrainian flags in front of Toronto’s Scotiabank Theatre, blaming and shaming TIFF for programming a film that presented an alleged distortion of the conflict. That day, TVOntario (TVO), a co-producer of the film, announced they would not air the documentary on television and would soon “be reviewing the process by which this project was funded and our brand leveraged.” The fracas over Russians at War intensified further when, on Sept. 11, TIFF defended its decision to screen the film. According to a statement released by the organization, “Our understanding is that [Russians at War] was made without the knowledge or participation of any Russian government agencies. In our view, in no way should this film be considered Russian propaganda.”

Nevertheless, the following day, TIFF cancelled the film’s three public screenings. In what they cited as “an unprecedented move,” the decision to halt screenings was “in order to ensure the safety of all festival guests, staff, and volunteers.” Russians at War would screen publicly at the TIFF Lightbox on Sept. 17, two days after the festival ended, reigniting the furor. I have not seen Russians at War and cannot attest to whether the film’s portrayal of Russian soldiers crossed the line into a grotesque endorsement of their crimes against Ukraine. Beyond the protests, critics were mixed on the film. In a four-star review for the Toronto Star, Corey Atad insisted that Russians at War could not be deemed propaganda, calling it an “excellent and bracing documentary” whose greatest feat is how it honestly shares “the harrowing experiences of soldiers easily demonized in the West and glossed over by state media at home.” Meanwhile, journalist Justin Ling was more troubled by Trofimova’s film, citing the director’s lack of curiosity to challenge the ideological values of her militarized subjects.

Toronto (and Canada) Plays Itself

It's unusual to see such a volume of discussion surrounding a Canadian title at Canada’s largest arts festival. Outside the controversy, Canadian programming remained one of TIFF’s treasures in 2024. Unfortunately, one of the highest-profile Canadian entries – itself a blend of pageantry and politics – was a major disappointment. Rumours arrived in Toronto feted with kind responses out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, but I found the new collaboration between directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson to be a routine skewering of G7 leaders. The filmmakers are far from the first to observe the “photo-op” hollowness of political summits, or to lambast these occasions for doing little to solve existential calamities. In the thick of a barbed U.S. election season, where parallels between the HBO comedy Veep and current political theatre have been frequently observed, Rumours’s staleness seemed even more apparent.

Excitement around the satire was buoyed by its strong international ensemble, including Cate Blanchett (playing the German chancellor), Roy Dupuis (as the Prime Minister of Canada), and Dénis Menochet (Prime Minister of France). Set against the backdrop of a global summit, its comedy arises from numerous communication breakdowns. As the leaders work haphazardly to draft a few paragraphs on a “present crisis,” the actors mine easy laughs from the stilted boilerplate language of diplomacy, and the endless delays it takes to craft a vague mission statement. Rumours benefits from off-kilter aesthetics that add a weird haze to the proceedings: the G7 leaders keep wandering off into the woods to encounter… some sort of nefarious force that further paralyzes their already-languishing diplomatic powers. The thrust of the comedy’s sociopolitical critique is that the pablum of “progress” has nothing on extant horrors. But its satirical jabs are too inoffensive to be memorable, while the handful of arresting B-movie images – a hatchback-sized brain, or bog-peopled debauchery around a glowing campfire – promise something stranger or more macabre than the trio’s screenplay can encompass. The ensemble cast commits happily to the oddball comic tone. One of the film’s best running gags is how the snoozing, over-the-hill American president, played by Charles Dance, keeps speaking in English aphorisms and is barely trying to hide his British accent. There is something charming about a gravitas-filled ensemble committing to an oddball comic tone, but one wishes Rumours’ silliness added up to something fresher.

As for a politically-charged gag that did land: in an early scene from Ali Weinstein’s Your Tomorrow, an observational documentary about Ontario Place, new employees watch an orientation video that speaks to the institution’s purpose as “a place to grow.” However, when premier Doug Ford appears in the video, the projection screen momentarily glitches. (I cannot blame the filmmakers for keeping such a perfectly-timed joke in the final cut.) Once a glimmering symbol of leisure and local creativity – home to numerous rides, waterslides, and pavilions; an amphitheatre for concerts; and Canada’s first permanent IMAX cinema – Ontario Place’s vitality has faded, its iconicity a mystery for the handful of teens employed there during summer hours. But the lakeside institution’s future is uncertain, especially with a privately-funded “revitalization” at work that has since closed much of the public space. Instead of showcasing activist efforts to save Ontario Place (although there are glimpses of these communal protests), Weinstein focuses on Torontonians interacting with the parks and facilities, often reminiscing about the changing site, a place they no longer recognize.

Ontario Place began as a project for identity-building, a site for ingenuity and progressive values that could shape Toronto similarly to how Expo ’67 helped define Montreal. At its best, Weinstein’s film is a Wiseman-esque study of a city going through a cultural upheaval – and something of an identity crisis. (TIFF is far from the only local icon facing existential questions, especially as Toronto becomes a more inhospitable city for artists and working-class denizens.) In contrast to the burgeoning metropolis of expensive, gentrified downtown Toronto, its skyline cluttered with condos, Ontario Place sits mostly vacant, with a quiet and spareness that makes it seem even more idyllic. In a conversation with Weinstein the day before the film’s premiere, I mentioned how the appearance of the Cinesphere, the domed one-screen IMAX cinema, made me weary of another absence in the city’s arts and culture scene. At its most poignant, Your Tomorrow captures Toronto in a way that a partially-closed ghost park cannot: its diversity, its community, its bittersweet nostalgia for a city in its past glories.

Elsewhere at the festival, other Toronto neighbourhoods and local landmarks provided the setting for several appealing Canadian comedies. Kensington Market is the main habitus for Chester Brown, the protagonist of Sook-Yin Lee’s Paying for It. The film, which premiered in the Platform programme, offers an alluring hook: the comedy is based on Brown’s 2011 graphic novel, one where Lee is a central character, and charts the end of Brown and Lee’s relationship after they decided to open it up to include other romantic partners. (Brown and Lee are played by Dan Beirne and Emily Lê, although the latter goes by the character name “Sonny.”) This intimacy and frankness were refreshing for the time, but Lee has expanded the world of Brown’s text to more directly explore her own experiences of sexual ecstasy and confusion navigating the world of polyamory. Paying for It is an honest look of a man navigating the boundaries of intimacy – especially during the halcyon days of online classifieds – and enduring stigmas around sex work. Given that Lee is the film’s author, co-writing the comedy with Joanne Sarazen, it is odd that Sonny ends up in a largely peripheral role. (Those familiar with Brown’s graphic novel have defended Lee’s adaptation for giving more room for the protagonist’s female lovers and partners to speak frankly about their experiences.) Nevertheless, as Brown, Beirne is an engagingly sweet presence, one whose softness is refreshing for a sex comedy, and who ensures the audience doesn’t feel as if they are leering at the protagonist’s bedroom bliss.

Paying for It is a vivid snapshot of a Toronto era when MuchMusic reigned and artists could co-habitate comfortably in one of the city’s trendiest enclaves. (That a cartoonist with a cult following like Brown’s can spend lavishly on sex work certainly marks that comedy as a period piece.) Toronto-based class concerns texture the background of Amar Wala’s winning feature début, Shook, which features Scarborough in a key supporting role. (The Bloor line of the Toronto subway, with a schedule that often spoils the late-night outings of Ash, played by Saamer Usmani, could be the film’s antagonist.) Beyond adding to a bubbling canon of Scarborough stories about second-generation immigrants, Shook is also a strong entry into quarter-life-crisis cinema. It follows Ashish, a recent MFA graduate and struggling author yearning to find a publisher so he can finally afford to move into a downtown Toronto apartment. Creatively uninspired, he soon becomes enamoured with barista Claire (Amy Forsyth). However, before their courtship can deepen, Ashish discovers that his father, Vijay (Bernard White), has Parkinson’s. Wala and Adnan Khan’s screenplay has roots in the filmmaker’s experience: the director’s father received a similar diagnosis to Vijay, and some of Shook’s most affecting scenes portray the enervating experience of caring for a loved one as they begin to fade away. Watching a quarter-life crisis tale of a man balancing personal and familial obligations, I kept waiting for Shook to settle into familiar, sitcom-y rhythms. I was mostly surprised by the perceptiveness of Wala and Khan’s screenplay: the situations feel true, while the jokes, which rely on the cultural disconnect between immigrant children and white Toronto hipsters, were charming without feeling overdone. (There is a great running joke around South Asians never revealing their full name to baristas.) It helps that Usmani and Forsyth have terrific chemistry, to the point that a first-date dinner, which could have sunk under clumsy character exposition, sizzles with romantic promise. Shook captures something true and recognizable in both its urban geography and the character dynamics, and I expect its word-of-mouth will carry it beyond Canada’s borders.

Reality and fiction also mix with haunting clarity in Sofia Bohdanowicz’s Measures for a Funeral. It is the latest in a series of mystery films about the fictional character Audrey Benac (Deragh Campbell), a sleuth whose archival investigations and discoveries are based on Bohdanowicz’s family history. In this installment, Benac examines the life of a mostly-forgotten Canadian violinist, Kathleen Parlow – also her grandfather’s violin teacher. The instrument’s residue is also linked to Benac’s mother, an ailing woman and failed musician who instructs her daughter (via opening voice-over) to “scatter the violin’s ashes.” This violin is a talisman for numerous histories; beyond its linkage to a slighted legend of classical music, it remains a totem of an unfulfilled life.

The drama oscillates between the oppressiveness of the violin, a symbol of struggle and emotional decay for Benac’s ancestors, and the richness of the character’s historical and geographic journey. As the drama progresses, we receive more aural clues about Parlow’s artistry (heard through a wax cylinder phonograph Benac listens to in London) as well as physical ones (a couple of sequences of Bohdanowicz’s film were shot at Parlow’s real house in Meldreth, England). There are also shades of horror: early in the film, as Benac researches in a university library, an electronic source whirrs to life nearby, suggesting a ghost in the machine. The film culminates with an orchestral rendition of “Opus 28,” a recently unearthed concerto that was dedicated to Parlow. Measures for a Funeral is a stirring, slippery mystery that explores how numerous pasts – musical, cultural, emotional – reverberate in the present, and it remains another vehicle for Campbell to demonstrate her power as one of Canada’s most indelible actors. (For another sublime rendering of internalized chaos, see Campbell’s tour de force in TIFF ’19 selection Anne at 13,000 ft.) Despite the character’s wanderings through numerous cities, which contributes to the 142-minute runtime, I found Measures to be completely absorbing. 

Speaking of requiems, death has been on David Cronenberg’s mind even more potently as of late. The Shrouds, which screened to a TIFF audience salivating for their hometown body-horror maven to make an appearance, premiered to knowing and sometimes derisive laughter, depending on the scene. As Cronenberg ventures go, this one isn’t too much of a tricky proposition – especially if you understand the personal angle behind this story, made in the wake of Cronenberg’s wife’s death after a long-term illness. Vincent Cassel, a dead ringer for the director with his taut black suits and silver hair, plays Karsh, a tech entrepreneur whose newest venture is a high-tech cemetery that allows mourners to view a scan of their deceased’s decomposing body. For a storyteller as consumed with the corpus as Cronenberg, it is fitting that the body’s lack has become such an elemental focus of this new work. There is also something bruising in how nakedly The Shrouds embraces its status as its auteur’s quasi-biography. (In one knowing instance, a character tells Karsh that he’s “made a career out of bodies.”)

The film’s opening sections are grimly funny and even poignant, as Cassel describes Karsh’s macabre schemes in a way that will resonate with Cronenberg’s obsessives (and other sickos). I was less taken by clunky plot machinations in the second half that kept one adrift from the sly, if sensitive emotional tenor of the early scenes, as digital terrorists target Karsh’s enterprise. I’m also undecided on Cassel’s performance, which falters most when he tries to work his way through clunky dialogue when his character ruminates on grieving. Even when The Shrouds only partly coalesces into a dramatically satisfying whole, its beguiling themes and cracked emotional tenor make it a companion piece to large portions of Cronenberg’s oeuvre. When Karsh fantasizes about his late wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), and we see her contorted body, a moment of intimacy between the two doesn’t break apart when we audibly hear her bones snapping. Karsh yearns to be next to Becca in all her damaged glory, and these moments of tenderness carry the drama through more-inert portions.

Grief’s lingering impact also bears thematic weight in Can I Get a Witness?, Anne Marie Fleming’s intriguing if didactic climate-change fable. The film opens with an image of blazing forests in the B.C. interior, the startling crackles of a besieged forest holding a stark impression throughout the feature. The film is set a couple of generations in the future, when teen protagonist Kiah (Keira Jang) has only known a world protected by an act of radical sacrifice. As the fable goes, in 2025, a global declaration was ratified to ensure the Anthropocene could survive; however, every person must agree to end their life at age 50. Now Kiah is starting a new job – as a witness – where she and new co-worker Daniel (Joel Oulette) orchestrate end-of-life rituals. I found myself fascinated but more flummoxed by the premise, wondering how this solution to a climate emergency could have been enforced. Sadly, to reckon with this emotional dilemma, Fleming’s screenplay expresses this history through flat exposition. In a scene where young adults talk about what predated the end-of-life mandate, I couldn’t help but wonder why so many characters were ignorant or unaware of these developments. Despite some unpersuasive world-building, dramatic heft does eventually arrive with the aid of Sandra Oh performance. As Kiah’s mother, Oh wrestles with her upcoming expiration date, wordlessly expressing her regret in quiet, solitary moments.

The best Canadian entry I saw (from a strong festival slate) was Universal Language, the new film from director Matthew Rankin. Recently selected as Canada’s submission into the International Feature race at the next Oscars, it stands an admirable chance to be the first Canadian title to be nominated in that category since 2012’s War Witch – although it will require Academy voters to be on its witty, idiosyncratic wavelength. Its setting is wintry Winnipeg. Amidst the town’s brutalist architecture (which provide Rankin with a wealth of poetic, controlled images) is a community of raucous Farsi-speaking schoolkids who don’t let the crisp temperatures dilute their sense of adventure. (The neighbourhoods are nicknamed the Beige, Brown, and Grey Districts; although the décor is drab, I found the composition as richly layered as a Roy Andersson tableau.) Winnipeg is also the home destination for a man named Matthew Rankin (played by the filmmaker), who is returning from Québecois exile to tend to his sick mother.

Canada is a country that frequently touts its multicultural ethos, and Rankin’s sly comedy conceives of national identity in ways both offbeat and warm. (I refuse to describe the film’s spirit of togetherness as syrupy, and not just because it lobs some good jokes at the maple-syrup haven of Québec.) Universal Language reconceives of its nation as one where the two national languages are Farsi and French, and this fusion of West and East is exemplified further through Rankin’s embrace of Iranian filmmaking sensibilities and storytelling approaches. Many prominent works of Iranian cinema, such as the films comprising Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy, are self-reflexive blends of fiction and documentary, and often focus on children as representative allusions for the nation. Rankin’s portrayal of Winnipeg is thus appropriately, exquisitely stylized. He envisions Canadian identity through its parallels with other Middle Eastern cultures. After a while, who’s to say whether the inflections of the score and the bazaar settings have more of an Iranian or Canadian influence? Yet Universal Language is tinged with the sadness of exile, as if one is experiencing a foreign land for the first time.

As in his eye-popping Expressionist fantasia The Twentieth Century, which premiered at TIFF five years ago and farcically portrayed the life and times of a young William Lyon Mackenzie King, Rankin’s latest delightfully plays with his country’s iconography. The film skewers the kitsch of Canadian sites – roadside memorials of Métis leader Louis Riel, the unmistakable iconography of Tim Hortons – in ways that invite its audience to both laugh and reckon with the emotional resonance of these symbols. It remains to be seen if international cadres of voters are as charmed by Universal Language’s visual wit and themes of cross-cultural unity.

From Turtle Island to Palestine

Amidst the various controversies that dotted this year’s festival was TIFF’s decision to screen an Israeli film, Bliss. As with Israeli titles that have previously appeared on TIFF’s slate, director Shemi Zarhin’s drama benefitted from government funding. Shortly after the beginning of the war between Ukraine and Russia, TIFF announced it would “suspend participation by film organizations and media outlets supported by the Russian state.” (Russians at War, meanwhile, is a co-production between France and Canada.) While many Canadian arts institutions have adhered to a cultural boycott of Russian artists, many of those organizations continue to promote Israeli projects despite the current war.

Nevertheless, a few of this festival’s most riveting and wrenching titles came from Palestinian directors. The Canadian premiere for one of the year’s most-acclaimed documentaries took place in one of the smallest auditoriums at TIFF – Lightbox 4, which seats around 150 at capacity – at 10:00 p.m. on a weekday night and featured a more thorough security check than other public screenings I attended. As documentary programmer Thom Powers noted during his introduction to the film, No Other Land would usually not play Toronto due to its wealth of previous festival screenings. However, the circumstances were special: despite rousing critical acclaim, as well as jury and audience prizes at Berlin, a film examining Israel’s military occupation in the West Bank had not yet secured North American distribution. (Writing on Oct. 15, that is still the case.) A boutique buyer would be wise to pick up this film, a searing document of resistance made by two Israeli and two Palestinian directors. Of that small collective, two filmmakers and journalists – Palestinian Basel Adra and Israeli Yuval Abraham – are also the central figures in the documentary, one that examines the role of bearing witness. (The film was mostly shot before the events of Oct. 7, 2023.)

As Adra explains near the start of No Other Land, he grew up surrounded by filmmaking, when family members pointed their cameras at Israeli soldiers to document their intimidation. (Adra’s father was arrested during one demonstration.) A spectator of Palestinian activism, Adra fastens his lens here to show military incursion in the southern West Bank, specifically the case around his community of Masafer Yatta. The documentary explores the dehumanizing enterprise of occupation, as settlers encroach on that region and the Israeli government plans to bulldoze homes to make way for training sites for its military forces. Abraham, an investigative journalist from nearby Be’er Sheva, Israel, also wants to chronicle the injustices Palestinian face in that community. He is met with initial skepticism from Adra and other Palestinians, who find his enthusiasm to fight oppression a bit naïve (“…like you want to end the occupation in 10 days,” one character mocks). Abraham also finds his Jewishness repeatedly questioned during on-air skirmishes on mainstream news with other Israelis.

The documentary is clear-eyed about the lack of Western interest in the plight of Palestinians. One flashback reveals that after British prime minister Tony Blair visited a school in Masafer Yatta, that building’s destruction did not occur, a rare moment of solace amidst frequent conflict. For its stunning clarity of vision and compelling view of evolving collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian anti-Occupation activists, No Other Land feels like a movie of the moment, one teeming with raw, unfiltered rage. In moments when soldiers are pushing cameras away, threatening to break them, this documentary (and its disquieting lack of a release strategy in North America) becomes an even more vital text.

The clarity of fury also emerges in Palestine’s submission to this year’s Oscars, a collection of 22 short films made by filmmakers in the Gaza Strip since Oct. 2023. From Ground Zero is the first project of the Masharawi Films Fund, an initiative to provide Gazan artists with a canvas through which they can capture their lives under siege. Unsurprisingly, one common thread across these brief stories is an expression of cinema’s inadequacy to document the current war. Directing is a distant dream for Ahmed Hassouna in “Sorry Cinema”; in 2019, he made a film that traversed the international festival circuit, but he cannot treasure that memory now that, in his words, his only chance of survival is “luck.” In another heartbreaking entry, “Taxi Wanissa,” a donkey wanders through the streets in search of its owner. However, before the story’s tragic conclusion, director Etimad Washah interrupts her story to reveal how the punishing realities of war halted her effort’s production. “I could only finish it with my testimony,” Washah explains. This narrative disruption is not a barrier for experiencing From Ground Zero, merely a metatextual revelation of the peril that surrounds contemporary Palestinian artistry.

The shorts, which range between three and seven minutes, are a mix of fiction and documentary; sometimes, it is hard to determine which is which. Many are bracing glimpses of the metastasizing nature of living through war, the way its bruises and burdens become normalized. In “Selfies,” director Reema Mahmoud reflects on what used to be, using her camera and a letter (a literal message in a bottle, dropped into the Mediterranean) to depict the numbing stasis of war. Other filmmakers use their environments – the debris from destroyed buildings, cramped refugee camps with a surfeit of power outlets – to enhance the realism of fictional stories. Many of the most shattering efforts focus on children: in animation-doc hybrid “Soft Skin” from Khamis Masharawi, young Palestinians working at an animation workshop are forced to ponder death, grappling with having to write their names on their bodies in permanent marker, in case they are victim to Israeli bombardment. (Many of the children in the film, according to the press notes, are newly orphaned.)

From Ground Zero marked one of the first instances I could remember of an “Active Listener” being present during the screening. Before the film began, a programmer noted that the film could elicit strong emotional responses. One could hear uncontrollable sobs in some corners of the auditorium during the screening, so the presence of a trauma-informed listener to support spectators in the lobby was a canny curatorial choice. Nevertheless, the compilation contains glimmers of hope. The title of Hana Eleiwa’s “No!” is a direct rebuke of death, of “everything that goes against humanity,” and instead chronicles a collaborative singing, of a melody meant to encompass hope and joy. In “Flashback” (director: Islam Al Zeriei), a woman takes refuge in her headphones and dances to combat pervading sorrow. Other films are tributes to the fallen, like “School Day” (director: Ahmed Al Danaf), which reflects on the connection between a hard-working student and their teacher. Especially when one considers the largely impractical circumstances of their production, the shorts in From Ground Zero provide an exquisite archive of grief and generosity, of anguish and artistry.

For audiences craving more conventional dramatizations of the Palestinian plight, albeit with a similar urgency, To a Land Unknown fit that bill. The first narrative feature from Danish-Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel, the thriller tracks the increasingly desperate moves of two Palestinian men stuck in limbo between a Lebanese refugee camp and a new start in Germany. Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbagh) are cousins who have temporarily made Athens their home, but restlessness has set in. The money they’ve accumulated to pay for passports and to ensure safe passage from Greece is running low, due to the impulses of Reda, a recovering heroin addict. The financial answer may have dropped into their laps, when a Palestinian boy, orphaned and hoping to reach an aunt in Italy, befriends them. The first half of Fleifel’s thriller keeps us mostly with Chatila as he puts a plan together, matching the boy with a Greek woman (The Lobster’s Angeliki Papoulia) who can accompany him on a flight to avoid scrutiny. Shot with a frenetic, mobile 16mm camera, To a Land Unknown empathizes with the refugees’ plight in its neorealist visual palette. The thriller has a clear vision of the circumstances of those on the margins: Chatila and Reda are often morally compromised, but that is a far thornier and dramatically complex manner through which to explore feelings of shame. These men are not passive victims, although their agency often leads to immoral decisions. As narrative tensions mount and plans go increasingly awry, Fleifel refuses to judge his characters for resorting to dark, inhumane schemes to support their own journeys to freedom.

Volume 28, Issue 8-9-10 / August 2024 Festival Reports   canadian cinema   documentary   israeli cinema   palestinian cinema   tiff