Toronto 2005: Day Five - Confessions of a Festival Junkie

Day Five

Maybe it just isn't a great time for cinema.

That's the direction the conversation headed toward as I gabbed with Geoff Gilmore of the Sundance festival. He seemed more than a bit weary as we passed in the streets between screenings. His event, much like Toronto, has an attendant media circus that goes along with the programming. They share on-going problems in the area of screens and venues that require split second timing to get from often far flung locations. Sundance is just a little more weather sensitive.

And while both run about 10 days, Toronto screens about twice as many features. Gilmore isn't critical of the glut of product on view in the Canadian capital; he just knows how daunting a task it is to find 125 features of quality, currency and distinction. About 25% of Toronto's program is comprised of first features while Sundance's percentage of neophyte talent can climb to close to half its program. While American independent production remains the soul of Sundance, the event has inched year-by-year to expand its international selections.

But for a generation raised on the New Wave, Kurosawa and Fellini, it's difficult to replicate that global explosion of talent and ideas that sprang up following the Second World War. There's no longer a cadre of filmmakers - foreign or American - that can be counted on to provide the bedrock of innovative filmmaking year after year after year. In recent time, Asia - and particularly China - and South Korea have been fertile areas of creativity but there remains a lingering frustration that budding talents from Latin America or Eastern Europe don't appear to be supported creatively and financial at home and wind up working in American of European systems that strip them of their identity.

Gilmore thought the new crop of Canadian films were encouraging and certainly that's been my experience viewing most of the 27 that are part of the jury itinerary. I've been arguing with one jury colleague about Canada, as in English Canada's, inability to establish its own popular cinema in the three and a half decades since the government decided to establish a bureau to fund and promote feature filmmaking. It's not much of a secret that, with rare exception, American mainstream movies dominate multiplexes from Beijing to Brazil and all stops in between. But in just about any country with even a modest film industry, movies are produced that play to the masses and are often more popular than Hollywood blockbusters.

In Quebec there are currently more than a handful of local movies that are in wide release in the province and three have grossed in excess of $3 million apiece. By contrast, an English Canadian film that grosses $1 million (in a population two and one half time greater than Quebec) is a raging success. The top grossing English Canadian film so far this year is Saint Ralph with a gross of about $250,000 and last year it was the teen comedy Going the Distance with a box office of slightly more than $1.2 million. (It opened to surprising success in Russia in early August). Quebec supports its artistes as well as embracing dumb ass comedies, historical sagas and melodramas. English Canadian cinema has never had any type of on-going popular movie genres and I'm hard pressed to think of a comparable situation worldwide with the single exception of Portugal.

The new crop of Canuck movies in the broadest possible strokes seem to have a more acute sense of humor and a sexual frankness that belies such national character caricatures as "nice" and "dull." There's a generation of up-and-comers that one senses is tapping into the country's zeitgeist in a way that might also speak to other cultures. But the first hurdle is to connect at home with popular local actors that have yet to be established.

Canadian cinema stars are its directors and they're better known than seen. Two days prior to the Toronto curtain raiser the country's only national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, ran an entertainment cover story that continues to be the major talking point for local production. Writer Rick Groen did a focus opinion piece about filmmakers David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan whose latest films are being screened as festival galas. Groen indulged in a lot of pop psychology to get under the skin of the two men and concludes that one is an artist and the other just wanting. Apart from the inauspicious timing of the piece, no one can understand how the section editors would allow such a piece to run. Both directors apparently were outraged by the piece and its observations but have refrained from comment.

Thinkfilm has decided to release Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies "unrated" in the U.S. following the loss of an appeal to lower its industry NC-17 tag. The company went the same route on its non-fiction The Aristocrats and according to the company's Mark Urman when they polled theater owners, the vast majority preferred no rating to one they felt carried negative baggage. Urman doesn't foresee problems in securing primary screens or in the area of print and television advertising. His experience is simply to provide all the cautions and explanations one would have were it using the ratings administrations formal guidelines.

by Leonard Klady