TIFF13: Recap/Top 5 Faves

I recently did my annual TIFF wrap up with TMTM regulars, Kirk Cooper, founder of Film Market Access (http://filmmarketaccess.com/), and blogger, Heidy M. (http://hyemusings.blogspot.ca/). I look forward to this discussion every year because our perspective of TIFF is so different. This year because of her schedule, Heidy M, did mostly public screenings; Kirk was busy with his Toronto Program at TIFF, so saw some of the bigger films in between taking care of his clients (he also so some films at Cannes); and I attended media screenings and a few public ones, which I always love because of the feedback from the audience. To hear the complete discussion, click here.

Here is my Top 5 out of the 19 feature films that I saw. 

Concrete Night MASTERS -Pirjo Honkasalo

A fourteen-year-old boy in a stifling Helsinki slum takes some unwise life lessons from his soon-to-be-incarcerated older brother, in Finnish master Pirjo Honkasalo’s gorgeously stylized and emotionally devastating work about what we pass on to younger generations, and the ways we do it. 

-Steve Gravestock

Click here to read my interview with Pirjo and my thoughts on the film.

Heart of a Lion-CONTEMPORARY WORLD-Dome Karukoski

The leader of a gang of racist skinheads finds his prejudices and misplaced loyalties pitted against his desire for love and family when he falls for a waitress whose son is of African descent. 

-Steve Gravestock

Click here for my thoughts on this film. 

A Touch of Sin MASTERS-Jia Zhangke

Internationally acclaimed Chinese master Jia Zhangke (The World) won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes for this startling — and startlingly violent — modern wuxia tale of four outcasts on the margins of a rapidly changing China who channel their underclass rage into a bloody and murderous rampage. 

-Giovanna Fulvi

Pioneer SPECIAL PRESENTATION -Erik Skjoldbjærg

Erik Skjoldbjærg (Insomnia) directs this gritty drama about the risky experiments and shady dealings that led to the birth of the Norwegian oil-drilling industry in the early 1980s. 

 -Steve Gravestock

 

Le Weekend SPECIAL PRESENTATION-Roger Mitchell

Revisiting Paris for the first time since their honeymoon, a long-married British couple (Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan--Laurence Olivier Award twice, Tony nom, CommanderOBE for drama) run into an old colleague (Jeff Goldblum) and discover a new vision of what life and marriage might be, in the new film from director Roger Michell (Notting Hill) and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette). -Cameron Bailey

HONORABLE MENTION

Witching and Bitching MIDNIGHT MADNESS-Alex de la Iglesia

Fleeing through the impenetrable forests of the Basque countryside after a jewel heist, a hapless band of robbers runs afoul of a coven of witches, in this madcap supernatural spectacle from Spanish genre specialist Alex de la Iglesia (The Last Circus). 

-Colin Geddes

  

Heidy's Top 5 Faves 
 

1. The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears
2. Concrete Night3. Rhymes for Young Ghouls
4. Pioneer
5. Cannibal

To read more about Heidy's picks, please visit: http://tinyurl.com/m29xcng

Kirk Cooper's Top 5 Faves

1. 12 Years a Slave

2. Prisoners

3. Omar

4. Stranger By the Lake

5. Dallas Buyer's Club

My other film screenings included the following:

1. A Promise
2. Brazillian Western (my review of this and iNumber Number)
3. Cold Eyes
4. Face Of Love
5. Hi Ho Mistahey (my review)
6. Hotell (my review of this and Sex, Drugs & Taxation)
7. iNumber Number
8. Metalhead
9. Mystery Road
10. Sex, Drugs & Taxation
11. The Invisible Woman
12. This Is Satlitun
13. What is Film?

"Firecrackers", a film by
Jasmin Mozaffari

For my thoughts on the Short Cuts Canada Programmes, please click here.