Toronto 2005
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Trailers





 

 

Walk the Line
Everything Is Illuminated
The Notorious Bettie Page
Where the Truth Lies: Egoyan admits. "I always saw this as a really sensual movie in terms of the sex in the movie. I wanted to create this world that was intoxicating. I never think about censors."

51 Birch Street - When it comes to your parents, maybe ignorance is bliss," observes filmmaker Doug Block well into this profoundly bittersweet exploration of his mother and father's fifty-five-year marriage.

7 Virgins - Tano's impoverished life at home is also depressing, a reality amply illustrated by his brother's wedding, one of the most miserable and stifling affairs imaginable. It seems that Tano is the only person in this environment who has the will to get out and change his destiny.

A Conversation with Basquiat - What would he be doing if he wasn't painting? "Directing movies, I guess."
Basquiat was just twenty-five at the time of the interview; two years later he was dead.

A Little Trip to Heaven - Gorgeously shot and distinguished by a flare for capturing the surreal nature of small-town America, A Little Trip to Heaven abandons noir genre conventions like the femme fatale, the easily corrupted hero and the pervasive sense of moral decay.

Amu - When she gets off the plane from Los Angeles, Kaju (Konkona Sensharma) has no idea what India has in store for her. She last saw Delhi when she was three years old. Now twenty-one, she arrives trying to reconnect with family, but her jeans, her video camera and her constant questions instantly mark her as American. She is such a curiosity that her own auntie asks her, “When you wear pants, how do you manage to pee?”

A Perfect Day - A Perfect Day begins with a simple, linear narrative that transforms into a full and vivid study of personal awakening. The film intimately chronicles a crucial twenty-four-hour period in the life of Claudia and her son Malek.

April Snow - As unexpected as a snowstorm in summer, the news of a car accident tears In-su away from his lighting gig at a Seoul rap concert and throws him into the unfamiliar environs of a nightmare.

A Simple Curve - Rebelling against one’s parents is generally considered a rite of passage for teenagers. Twenty-seven-year-old Caleb, however, has somehow missed this crucial step.

Bangkok Loco - Get a mop-top hairdo, steal some bellbottoms from your parents and travel back to Thailand, 1982, when the country was truly getting its groove on.

Beowulf & Grendel - Beowulf & Grendel powerfully entwines themes of vengeance, loyalty and mercy. The film strips away the mask of the hero myth, leaving a raw and tangled tale that rings true through the centuries.

Caché - In typical Haneke style, the film begins with the comfortable but complacent life of a bourgeois European family. However, someone has been videotaping their home from the street outside.

Dave Chappelle's Block Party - Chappelle can be brutally funny, but he often reserves his most searing lines for himself. As the concert begins, it becomes clear that he needs this party as much as his audience craves it.

Diameter of the Bomb - Steven Silver and Andrew Quigley's Diameter of the Bomb confronts the devastating aftermath of a 2002 suicide bombing in Jerusalem: twenty dead, fifty injured.

Dreaming Lhasa - Dreaming Lhasa is the first film to capture both the majesty of Tibetan Buddhist culture and the complexity of its ties to the outside world. Dub reggae, family honour and the CIA all have their place here.

Dreaming of Space - When the Soviet Union launched its first satellite into space in 1957, the Soviet people were filled with an immense feeling of optimism. Space represented freedom, an enormous realm of potential outside their own experience, one unburdened by paranoia or deception. Dreaming of Space is about the hope for the future that gripped a nation corroded by cynicism.

Everlasting Regret - Set in Shanghai, the film covers the period from 1947 to 1981 - from the tumultuous interval preceding the Communist Revolution of 1949, through the drastic changes imposed by the Cultural Revolution and its new leadership, up to China’s acceptance of modernization in the recent past.

Fallen - A moody, contemplative story of guilt and redemption set in the shadow of contemporary Europe, this is a film of sharply focused intensity - sparse yet precise and invested with a condensed, potent power

Fateless - Although he deftly handles sprawling themes, Kertész knows it is not grand gestures but private, intimate details that make this story visceral and potently devastating.

Festival - Topped off with some bawdy sex scenes and a dash of theatrical magic, Festival is a sprawling, marvellously enjoyable tour of the wide, wild world of the stage.

Fetching Cody - Art discovers there are different ways to measure love and that one of them is how much you're willing to sacrifice. Fetching Cody starts off on a deceptively small scale, but - like Art's love - it runs much deeper than we first realize.

Free Zone - Women are both central and powerless here, victims yet perpetrators. They are as conflicted as the region itself, carrying the pain and complexities of life in the Middle East within them. But they also carry a willingness to go beyond these struggles, to find some kind of common ground, and this is the space rendered in Free Zone.

Gentille - While the film is touched by a sort of delirium, it is a delirium of the gentlest kind (in the spirit of François Truffaut or Wes Anderson).

In Her Shoes - The incomparable talents of Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette as two sisters who could not be more different. Always squabbling about one thing or another, both are transformed when they find their long-lost grandmother, played by the vivacious Shirley MacLaine.

Iron Island - The title of Iron Island, a whimsical, inventive Iranian film, refers to an old, abandoned ship moored in the Persian Gulf that is crowded to bursting with homeless families.

John & Jane - In vast, fluorescent rooms, thousands of ambitious young Indians talk to people in Kentucky, California or Idaho. Bridging continents by telephone, they pitch products and soothe frayed consumer nerves. As they troubleshoot, they dream of America.

Les Amants Réguliers - Les Amants réguliers is masterly in every respect. Garrel shot the film in black and white and very much in the film style of the day; we can literally feel Godard, Rohmer and Bresson looking over his shoulder.

Manderlay - But whereas Dogville took xenophobia as its subject, Manderlay offers a withering and disturbing look at race relations, liberalism and nation building (specifically the type of venture currently underway in Iraq), and may prove even more controversial and shocking than its notorious predecessor.

Mavericks: Albert Maysles
- "The most exciting thing in life is to watch the meeting of two strangers, to see how they communicate."

Metal: A Headbanger's Journey - Journeying through America and Europe, following tours and attending open-air metal fests, the filmmakers document people’s opinions about the scene. Fans weigh in, as well as metal gods including Rush’s Geddy Lee, Ronnie James Dio, Alice Cooper, Motörhead’s Lemmy, musician and horror icon Rob Zombie, Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil and Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson.

Mother of Mine - Klaus Härö’s heart-wrenching Mother of Mine recounts a momentous event in Finnish history. During World War II, eighty thousand children were sent to neighbouring Sweden and Denmark for their protection.

Noise - Frustration turns to rage and the parent-child dynamic is upended. Noise's mature script and natural performances create a powerful examination of modern parenthood.

One Last Thing . . . - Dylan (Michael Angarano) is a sixteen-year-old boy in the late stages of terminal cancer. He still looks well enough, has a caustic wit and delights in sharing his medical marijuana with Slap (Gideon Glick) and Ricky (Matt Bush), his hilarious best friends.

River Queen - Dylan (Michael Angarano) is a sixteen-year-old boy in the late stages of terminal cancer. He still looks well enough, has a caustic wit and delights in sharing his medical marijuana with Slap (Gideon Glick) and Ricky (Matt Bush), his hilarious best friends.

Six Figures - A finely tuned study of the nature of brutality and trust, Six Figures asks that simple, maddening question: how well can we ever really know someone?

Stranded in Canton - The trademark colour of Eggleston’s photographs is replaced here by that odd, eerie black and white (well, greyscale) of early video, but the feeling of languorosness and observational breadth remains.

Summer in Berlin - Andreas Dresen fashions a fascinating microcosm of contemporary urban life, using his characters - and the improvisatory abilities of the talented Uhl and Friedrich - to hold a mirror up to our own all-too-human foibles

The Grönholm Method - In his new film, which is loosely based on a very successful play by Jordi Galcerán Ferrer, Piñeyro explores the dark inner workings of the corporate world.

The Last Hangman - A large, somewhat awkward man of simple manners, Albert Pierrepoint is like just any other decent, working-class fellow when we first encounter him. Then he goes for an interview at the local prison to become a hangman.

The Proposition - The Proposition is an anti-Western, a profane genre that resurfaces when society is weary of war and violence to interrogate the intentions of the Cowboy and the nobility of the Savage.

The Shore - But The Shore’s overriding strength is in placing its narrative at the service of its characters. Zervos concentrates on creating mood, tone and atmosphere, evoking a psychological state of mind and probing into an intimate, interior landscape of absence.

The White Masai - At once a captivating romance and a breath-taking travelogue into the Kenyan outback, The White Masai carries us on an epic journey.

The Willow Tree - The Willow Tree challenges the viewer to wrestle with our most primal fears and visceral desires. Dare we risk everything of value in our lives for something - literally - yet unseen?

Tideland - The film is finally pure Gilliam, an assault on the senses, feverishly ambitious and full of the comedy and weirdness that has won him a deserved reputation as an anarchist and artist of uncommon vision.

Trust the Man - Bart Freundlich’s latest film boasts a phenomenal cast - Julianne Moore, David Duchovny, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Billy Crudup, Ellen Barkin, Bob Balaban and Eva Mendes among them - in a fantastic romance for the twenty-first century.

Tsotsi - Tsotsi means “thug” or “gangster” in the street language of South Africa’s townships. In director Gavin Hood’s new film about the legacy of that country’s deprivation and violence, it is the only name by which we know the main character,

Twelve and Holding - Twelve and Holding is seen through the eyes of people who are no longer children but not yet adults. Their motivations are frank, somewhat primordial and often frightening, yet these young people never become symbols of moral nihilism.

Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela - In 1960, while apartheid was shoring up its foundations, a group of young activists from the African National Congress decided to fight back from outside South Africa.

Un Couple parfait - While there may be something endemic to Japanese cinema in the film's obsessions with public embarrassment and private emotional imprisonment, Suwa's anatomy of a dying relationship could not be more universally understood.

Vers Le Sud - Vers le Sud sees Cantet explore a different kind of dynamic, that between three women and their young lover. Sounds like more familiar French cinema, except in this case the three women are all North American sex tourists in eighties Haiti and the young man in question is a local Adonis: teenaged, gorgeous, wily – and accidentally mixed up in the cruel political world of “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s murderous regime.

Wah-Wah - Because Wah-Wah draws from Grant's recollections, it offers an intimate perspective on Britain's imperial venture. But, above all, this is one boy's coming of age and aesthetic awakening.

Whole New Thing - Whole New Thing is the delightfully unconventional coming-of-age story of one rather exceptional thirteen-year-old boy.

You Bet Your Life - You Bet Your Life, the first feature by Austrian director Antonin Svoboda, is an intense examination of what happens when a man stops playing by society’s rules and leaves his fate to chance.


 

 


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