Another Tiffing Year (Updated 9/15 - final) (Patreon)

Once again, I am not attending. While this has mostly to do with discomfort with the prospect of getting Covid in what could possibly becomes a super-spreader event, it's also not the most tantalizing line-up they've ever assembled. To be fair, 2022 has been a pretty bunk year for cinema, likely owing to the pre-Covid cache of major projects having petered out. 

Anyway I am once again writing TIFF capsules for Cinema Scope, and I invite you to check them out. As a teaser, here is a bit of what I've produced.

Tora's Husband (Rima Das, Platform)

"But as the pandemic creates friction between Jaan and his wife Tora (Tarali Kalita Das), the film goes out of its way to marginalize her perspective. She confides in a friend that Jaan is drinking too much, only to be told, “we live in a patriarchal world,” and that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle." [full review here]

Joyland (Saim Sadiq, Pakistan, Special Presentations)

"In fact, practically every character in the film is defined either by symbolic castration or the inappropriate claim of sexual power." [full review here]

Hunt (Lee Jung-jae, South Korea, Gala Presentations)

"Despite making very little sense, Hunt is never less than diverting. No one ever got bored inside a tornado, after all." [full review here]

Horse Opera (Moyra Davey, U.S., Wavelengths)

"However, Horse Opera was made between 2019 and 2022, and is uniquely constrained by the COVID-19 quarantine. Although Davey is no stranger to enclosed domestic spaces and their semi-intentionally assembled minutiae, this work is explicitly about the divide between sociality and isolation, the home and the world." [full review here]

My Imaginary Country (Patricio Guzmán, Chile / France, TIFF Docs)

"As we now know, voters in Chile rejected the new constitution by a 2-to-1 majority. Predictably, the global press celebrated this loss. The editors of the Economist nearly wet themselves with delight, and the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post went out of its way to defend the corporate interests that helped engineer the defeat. You see, Chile is home to one of the world’s largest reserves of lithium, and the current president, Gabriel Boric, wants to partially nationalize those reserves. This would help the poorest Chileans, but it would hurt Elon Musk, and drive up the price of batteries. It’s almost as though the citizens of Chile forgot that their neoliberal function is to suffer for the greater good of first-world convenience." [full review here]

Falcon Lake (Charlotte Le Bon, Canada / France, CWC)

"Falcon Lake, the feature debut from actress Charlotte Le Bon, is an above-average mood piece that represents a reconceptualization of the adolescent coming-of-age story. In this regard it certainly feels familiar. In broad outline, it’s quite similar to a classic of the genre, but to say which one would be a spoiler. (Think Anna Chlumsky and a beehive.)" [full review here]

Domingo and the Mist (Ariel Escalante, Costa Rica / Qatar, CWC)

"And so, Escalante introduces a wrinkle of complexity that many such films do not. That’s because the director realizes that two things can be true at the same time. On the one hand, Domingo has his rights, and ought not to be trampled by so-called progress. On the other hand, he is delusional." [full review here]

Under the Fig Trees (Erige Sehiri, Tunisia / Switzerland / France / Qatar, CWC)

"As Brecht always observed, pairing a dramatic performance with some routinized action helps actors concentrate and mitigates their tics and habits. In this case, we see them climbing trees, packing crates, or using crooks to gently pull high branches down without breaking them, and this helps Sehiri elicit solid performances from the entire cast." [full review here]

La Jauría (Andrés Ramírez Pulido, Colombia / France, CWC)

"What makes Ramirez’s film uniquely troubling is that, with a set of character and plot decisions involving Alvarez, La Jauría strongly suggests that attempts at reaching juvenile offenders are just so much wrongheaded liberal hooey, and that boys this broken really only respond to the thud of the baton." [full review here]

Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (William Kentridge, South Africa / U.S., TIFF Docs)

"But Kentridge had a lot of time and charcoal on his hands, and so, in addition to some very interesting moments examining his working method, Kentridge filmed himself having long chats with his double (there is nearly always more than one Kentridge on screen), dabbling in music and dance, and even engaging in a rather long riff on the Harpo Marx mirror bit. In short, it’s all Kentridge all the time." [full review here]

Broker (Kore-eda Hirokazu, South Korea, Special Presentations)

"Broker finds the Japanese master transplanting his standard  template with little in the way of cultural specificity or variation.  His recent popularity has been directly proportional to his open embrace  of schmaltz, and despite some surface alterations in narrative, Broker is yet another of the director’s musings on the concept of family, biological vs. circumstantial or chosen." [full review here]

Leonor Will Never Die (Martika Ramirez Escobar, Philippines, Midnight Madness)

"Following a highly symbolic accident – getting hit on the head by a falling television – Leonor finds herself suspended between life and death, having been transported into the universe of one of her own films. At first Leonor is excited by the apparent omnipotence she exerts in this world. (Cf. Emma Thompson’s novelist in Stranger Than Fiction.) But she soon discovers she may be a prisoner of her own commitment to B-movie mayhem, and be forced to watch Ronwaldo die all over again." [full review here]

And stay tuned for more!