I: The city
If you traveled to Toronto for its film festival last week, you would have hardly known that the city’s arts institutions—chief among them, film—faced a very challenging year. The festival itself was the liveliest it has been in over half a decade: last year, celebrity appearances were hampered by the joint WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and the years before that, COVID was still wreaking havoc on our daily lives. Yes, if you were to walk down festival street on its first weekend, weaving through queues of people waiting to enter one of the four theaters congregated side-by-side, you wouldn’t question that Toronto was keen on conserving its cultural associations.
But one street and one week of the year are poor indicators of the larger picture—one that feels fairly dire. In May of this year, the Hot Docs Film Festival—the largest documentary festival in North America—announced that it would be temporarily shuttering its flagship theater and laying off its staff due to financial difficulties. This announcement came shortly after this year’s annual festival, where several of the festival’s programmers announced their resignation, largely attributed to issues with the festival’s upper management and leadership. The Hot Docs theater was the only cinema dedicated to screening documentaries in the city—earlier this year, it hosted an expansive Werner Herzog retrospective, resurfacing the documentarian’s earlier works like Fata Morgana (1971) and Land of Silence and Darkness (also 1971). While the city’s other independent cinemas periodically screen documentaries, Hot Docs was the only theater that reliably brought its audience new releases and older classics alike.
And then there’s the Revue, the oldest movie theater in Toronto. Roughly a month after Hot Docs announced their closure, the city’s most iconic repertory theater faced an existential threat: the building’s owner didn’t intend on continuing the lease with the current operating board, stating that the theater should switch to for-profit operations. This would mean fewer overlooked gems (like 2002’s Swimfan, which is screening at the Revue in 16 mm as I’m writing this dispatch) and more current releases carried over from the local multiplexes. The outcry in the city was resounding: petitions were organized, the mayor got involved, and Guillermo Del Toro—who has a residence in Toronto—spoke out about the theater’s value to the city.
Meanwhile, the provincial government has sold much of Ontario Place—an event venue and park on the waters of Lake Ontario—to an Austrian spa, threatening the future of the Cinesphere, a geodesic dome which stands like an enlarged golf ball in the complex and houses the province’s largest IMAX screen. In fact, one of the documentaries at this year’s TIFF—Ali Weinstein’s Your Tomorrow—charts, and effectively eulogizes, Ontario Place’s legacy.
So as many of us sat in the theaters on King Street, hearing of the wonders of cinema from the corporate advertisements that played before the films, our minds were instead turned to the state of the city’s film scene. Is it possible that, in coming years, the annual 10 days in early September set aside for TIFF will be one of our only opportunities to catch documentaries, international features, and restored classics on the big screen?
II: It all comes down to ice
Living in Canada, you warm up to ice and snow. For a country that is widely associated with uniformly tough winters, the nature of this season varies from coast to coast: the Atlantic provinces are regularly inundated with smothering blizzards, while Victoria and Vancouver, the largest cities on the Pacific Ocean, see more rain than snow. Whenever I’m asked about my childhood growing up in Winnipeg, I immediately turn to matters of the cold. The temperatures could easily reach sub forty with a windchill; one year, January was so cold, the heating system in our apartment froze over; you had to slather your face in vaseline just to go outside. Our summers in southern Manitoba were tough too—think blistering heat waves, swarms of mosquitoes, and tornadoes courtesy of the surrounding lakes—yet it is the winter that I base my answer, and most of my memories, on. Winnipeg’s winter is its strongest emblem of identity. It’s how Guy Maddin chose to introduce our shared hometown in My Winnipeg (2007): “always winter, always sleeping.”
And it is this sleepy Winnipeg, and its eternal-seeming winter, that is the setting for three feature films at this year’s TIFF: Universal Language, The Mother and the Bear, and Aberdeen.
Of the three, Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language was the buzz of the fest chiefly because it had been named Canada’s selection for the Academy Awards a week prior. Like Maddin’s My Winnipeg, Universal Language scours for the truth amongst fiction and fantasy. The Winnipeg in Rankin’s sophomore feature is a Farsi-speaking city, in a Canada whose two official languages are French and Persian. The plot unravels in ingenious ways as two sisters look for a way to retrieve a 50 dollar bill that they find frozen in ice. Their mission takes them all over Rankin’s exaggeratedly brutalist Winnipeg, whose cement buildings are only broken up by winding highway interchanges. The film’s offbeat humor is often geared at specifically Canadian absurdities: at one point, a Farsi-speaking tour guide takes his group to a briefcase left alone on a bench for many years, which has warranted it a historical designation—clearly a dig at Canada’s fraught cultural identity and uninspired self-mythologizing.
On the other hand, Johnny Ma’s debut feature, The Mother and The Bear, offers a more accessible view of Canadian life. In the film, a mother travels from Korea to Winnipeg to care for her daughter after she slips on an icy patch and falls into a coma. Amidst the typical newcomer hijinks—confusion at a corner store, mistaking weed gummies for a treat—come strikingly poignant moments of a mother coming to terms with her daughter’s immigration. She must both confront her child’s agency and also interact with the city and its residents not as alien entities, but as embodiments of a hometown.
Yet Canada does not have a monopoly on ice. Joshua Oppenheimer’s first foray into feature filmmaking in The End sees him packing a tight-knit family into a mansion built within an expansive icescape in a nondescript location somewhere in North America. This post-apocalyptic musical offers a surprisingly astute psychic evaluation of its characters, particularly in the way that Oppenheimer approaches the concept of the nuclear family. The nameless family at the center of this film (Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon portray the parents, George MacKay their son) choose to sequester themselves in this lair, leaving behind aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins in an apocalyptic above-ground world. The question of who is allowed in and who is not comprises both the dramatic tension and the philosophical musings of the film. Rife with extravagant musical numbers set to the backdrop of icicles and permafrost, the experience of this film is deceptively resonant; I found myself constantly returning to its musical soliloquies, interested as much with melody as they are with nihilism.
III: The promise of the drug toad
As the festival was winding to a close, I thought I would be writing more about poultry: the turkeys in Universal Language, the eagle in Bird, the chicken costume in The End. But the true animal winner of the festival has proven to be the psychedelic toad: Incilius alvarius, the Colorado River toad.
In Andrea Arnold’s brilliant coming-of-age film Bird, Bug (Barry Keoghan) is introduced to us in a state of euphoria, scootering towards home with his daughter and clutching a white plastic bag holding a wriggling something. That wriggling something is a toad, and Bug assures his daughter Bailey (Nykiya Adams) that its psychedelic secretions will make them money, enough to cover his upcoming wedding to his girlfriend. Bailey couldn’t care less about the cash or the upcoming nuptials; she’s caught in the transitory period between childhood and adolescence, and no celebrations can remedy her feelings of isolation and confusion.
Like many of Arnold’s previous films, Bird is set in an impoverished British neighborhood where families try to do the best they can for their kids, while up against youth delinquency and substance abuse, amongst other issues. Arnold’s portrait of Bailey and the friends and family that orbit her is nuanced in its preference for intimacy and affection, as opposed to antagonism and hostility. We see this most in the characterization of Bug, who is an imperfect father but tries his best to be compassionate to his children. In one touching moment, he expertly validates his son’s—Bailey’s half-brother—desire to become a teen parent, while also gently guiding him away from the decision by asserting that it’s a difficult life.
For Bug, the toad represents a promise of a new start. His relationship with his girlfriend and her young daughter is solid, and a marriage could mark the beginning of a new blended family, their new reality; he never prophesies that the toad will bring him significant wealth, only enough money to fund a night of celebrations.
Conversely, in Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship, a drug toad offers Craig (Tim Robinson) a chance to depart from his reality. To reveal more would be to spoil one of the film’s best gags. Craig’s desperation to escape himself, even temporarily, via this toad’s secretions is only one link in a chain of events that sees him exhaust his social wherewithal to befriend his neighbor, weatherman Austin (Paul Rudd). The comedy, whose entire premise is predicated on Craig’s desire to be buddies with Austin, takes advantage of Robinson’s repertoire of uncomfortable facial expressions and comedic timing that turns most social interactions into hilarious gaffs, and the textured cinematography—DeYoung has mentioned that he wanted to shoot it like The Master—make Friendship bound for a cult status designation.
IV: The middlemen
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s newest film Cloud begins with the paranoid tenor of his earlier films. Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is a dropshipper who buys out inventory from businesses and sells them online with an upcharge. He doesn’t concern himself with whether the technology or purses he sells are real or knock-offs—“if they’re wanted, they’ll sell,” he asserts—making him a true figurehead for the free market. But some of his swindles have made him enemies, and the first half of this tense thriller features him dodging anonymous attempts on his life, ones that infiltrate his daily sense of security (not unlike the disruption that comes to detective Takabe in Cure). Once those that want their revenge band together and capture Yoshii, the tone of the film shifts from one of subtle tension to overzealous carnage—think the entirety of Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire (2016) packed into the final two acts. Still, despite the hail of bullets, Kurosawa is able to weave in parables about retribution. Cheating comes in many forms (as Yoshii proves), and so does revenge—and the ideological differences of the vigilante group makes for a finale that is equal-parts fascinating and disturbing.
Yoshii inserts himself as the middleman between a business and a consumer; this kind of middleman, in varying forms, appears in several TIFF films. In Heretic, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’s newest horror, two Mormon missionaries arrive at the door of bumbling theologue Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant) to sell him on their vision of life (and death). Instead, it is Mr. Reed who is intent on convincing the two young girls about the value of religion—a capital-R Religion, in his absolutist view—as they descend into a battle of the wits in this single-location horror. While Heretic doesn’t quite live up to the weirdness and inventiveness of Malignant and Barbarian—two other films intent on merging comedy, body horror, and the psychological thriller into one neat package—its quick pace and stellar performances will prove to be riotous with a big crowd, even if, once those house lights come up, there won’t be much to take home with you in the way of terror.
And while the two ill-fated missionaries of Heretic act as the middlemen between God and man, in David Mackenzie’s film Relay, Tom (Riz Ahmed) acts as the in-between between a civilian and a different all-seeing power: the corporation. In this thriller, Tom facilitates payoffs between whistleblowers and the companies that they have information on, using analogue means to ensure his anonymity. The only way to contact Tom is to go through a talk-to-text service that allows deaf people to make phone calls, effectively allowing him to mask his identity and voice. When Sarah (Lily James) wants to return a scandalous report to her company upon feeling intimidated and unsafe, Tom finds himself crossing all the lines that risk revealing his identity. Though the premise of this paranoid thriller is intriguing, the execution proves dull, and it concludes with a twist whose premise feels like its sole intention is to shock rather than relay any kind of commentary about surveillance or ethics.
V: The city fights on
In David Cronenberg’s newest film The Shrouds, Toronto is an inevitability, both for its lead character and the director himself. Karsh (Vincent Cassal) is a gray-haired Cronenberg stand-in, inventor of a grave technology named the Shroud, which allows people to look inside the caskets of their loved ones as they decompose. Most of Cronenberg’s films—from The Fly to Videodrome and Crash—are filmed and set in Toronto, yet the city’s most iconic building, the C.N. Tower, is often kept offscreen to offer the city an anonymous, universal feel. In The Shrouds, Karsh has a clear view of the needle-like Tower from his condo window; it looms in the background as he attempts to discover whether there is a conspiracy to hack the technology he invented. He has offers from companies in Iceland and Hungary to erect graveyards in their cities, but while he entertains them, he doesn’t leave Toronto until the very final scene. There are two things keeping him close to home—a mystery and the grave of his beloved wife—and, as the film unspools, the two become inextricably linked.
The Shrouds is a film about grief that is equally tender and acerbic. The very basis of Karsh’s technology toys with the perverse nature of love; once someone dies and is buried, the only progress they experience is decomposition, and Cronenberg depicts the anguish that accompanies the knowledge that your loved one is changing—even if it’s through decay—without your being there to witness it. It’s a tactile and material sort of longing, as is to be expected from a director who has spent the last six decades creating films that examine our bodies in metamorphosis and disorder.
And it’s not just the Tower that hints at Toronto as a setting at this year’s festival. The city’s subways, suburbs, and downtown streets make their appearance in Sook-Yin Lee’s Paying For It, Amar Wala’s Shook, and Kazik Radwanski’s Matt and Mara—all films that investigate how we relate to one another, whether as friends, (former) lovers, or family. It’s fitting that these tales of belonging and self-discovery are set in a city that is constantly negotiating its own identity: is it a hub for culture, business, immigration? All three? None altogether?
This kind of cultural mediation is especially evident in the city’s portrayal onscreen. Its chameleonic nature—other than the C.N. Tower, there are few landmarks that hint at its identity—has made it the stand-in filming location for most major American cities: Baltimore in Hairspray (2007) is really Toronto’s west end, while the Chicago in Chicago (2002) is Toronto’s downtown core.
Yet, despite the inclination to masquerade Toronto as practically every city south of the border, Canadian directors like Denis Villeneuve, Atom Egoyan, and Patricia Rozema have allowed the city to shed its disguise and play itself. With the new cohort of Canadian directors exhibited at this year’s festival, there’s hope yet that the city will be able to chart its own identity on the big screen.
In that vein, Torontians have been fighting back to ensure that their film institutions stay up and running. Five days into TIFF, the Revue announced that it had signed a five year lease agreement with its landowner to continue usual operations. And as I was finishing the final edits on this dispatch, Hot Docs theater announced that it will be reopening in a limited capacity as it searches for new leadership.
Next year, TIFF will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Over the past half century, the city has faced many drastic transformations, as has the festival. When it was incepted in 1976, the festival was billed as a showcase of Canadian talent, and called “the people’s festival,” an appeal to everyday audiences instead of industry patrons. Today, it is one of the Big Five —the five most prestigious festivals in the world—and it, too, is facing a kind of identity crisis as it tries to maintain its grassroots associations while nurturing its international reputation. These kinds of negotiations—the ones that cities, films, and festivals have to make with regards to their identities—are not inherently negative. Quite the opposite: a fluid self-identity allows for reinvention. And the events happening during this year’s festivals, both within its theaters and throughout the city’s cinemas, prove that Toronto’s programmers, filmmakers, and audiences are not giving up any of their fights yet.