By Ali Moosavi.
The Ukranian gem U Are the Universe is a prime example of a film where with little budget but bags of creativity and ingenuity a filmmaker can succeed where many mega-budget Hollywood movies have failed.”
Though Toronto International Film Festival was only founded in 1976, it has quickly risen to be come one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world. Though its top prizes are not as well-known as the Palm d´Or in Cannes, the Golden Lion in Venice and the Golden Bear in Berlin film festivals, it always draws a large number of celebrities, which then draws the world´s press into Toronto. The fact that many Hollywood movies are shot in Canada, has no doubt helped TIFF to be favoured by American producers.
The following are my brief reviews of some of the films shown at this year´s TIFF.
Seven Days / Haft rooz
Like The Witness, Seven Days also dispenses with the obligatory use of veil for women in Iranian cinema. Here the veil is ditched by Vishka Asayesh, a well-known and multi award winning (at both home and abroad) Iranian actress. This film is both based on and pays tribute to Iranian human rights activist and Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi, currently residing in an Iranian jail. Asayeh portrays an activist who is given a week’s release from prison to visit her family. She is taken through a hazardous trail to Turkey where her husband and two children are staying. This trip is hinted at being made with the implicit agreement of the Iranian Government who prefer her to be out of the country. Once reunited, she is faced with the most difficult choice in her life: family or cause? Would her children and her husband need her more or those in Iran, whose cause she has been fighting for? The affection and love between the mother and her children is so much that for most audiences the choice seems very simple, specially considering the hazardous trail that the woman has travelled to be with her children. There is also no gurantee of when they could be reunited again. The screenplay is by the famed and jailed Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof who recently fled from Iran, highlights this to emphasize the great sacrifice that people like Narges Mohammadi, herself with two children, have made in fighting their cause. Asayesh gives her best performance yet and the direction by Ali Samadi Ahadi is assured, greatly assisted by his cinematographer and editor.
U Are the Universe
This Ukranian gem is a prime example of a film where with little budget but bags of creativity and ingenuity a filmmaker can succeed where many mega-budget Hollywood movies have failed. Andriy (Volodymyr Kravchuk) is a Ukranian space driver, transporting nuclear waste from Earth to one of the other planets. Each round trip takes 2 years. According to Andriy, it’s dirty work for a clean planet. His sole companion on these trips is a robot called Maxim, which in behaviour bears more than a little resemblance to HAL from 2001. Andriy learns that Earth has exploded and he has no home to return to. He then starts a very lonely existence as a space wanderer. An unexpected call from a woman named Catherine, stranded in Saturn, changes things. Now Andriy has at least someone to talk to. Though he cannot see Catherine, he builds a head torso in her mage with plasticine. Will he risk all to fly 700 million Kilometers to Saturn to save her? Writer-director Pavlo Ostrikov has a few juicy twists up his sleeve. U Are the Universe pays tribute to both Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece and Tarkovsky’s Solaris. In Kubrick’s case, explicitly by showing an armchair stranded in space to the tune of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and implicitly in Tarkovsky’s case. With an inventive script, great production design and fabulous visual effects, U Are the Universe can have life way beyond the film festivals and could become a mainstream hit.
They Will Be Dust / Polvo Seran
The opening scene of this Spanish film sets the tone for the rest of the movie. We see an old woman screaming and running from room to room in her house while her family try to get hold of her and cool her down. A team of medics arrive and restrain her and then break into what can be described as slow motion operatics. This mixture of realism and surrealism is prevalent throughout the film and is a device that director Carlos Marques-Marcet uses to offset the film’s theme, euthanasia. Claudia (Angel Molina) is an actress whose greatest performances have been in films directed by her husband Flavio (Alfredo Castro); think Rowlands/Cassavetes. Being diagnosed with terminal cancer, Claudia has decided to go to a center in Switzerland where they will put you to the big sleep. Claudia is a larger than life character and treats life as a big stage and is always putting on an act. She definitely wields a lot of influence over Flavio, so such so that he decides to accompany her on her journey to the undiscovered country. This revelation is hard to take by their children and I found it hard to believe too. I imagined if Gena Rowlands had terminal cancer and told John Cassavetes that she wants to end it all, would Cassavetes join her? The explanation given by Flavio is that when Claudia’s sickness started during their rehearsals for Medea, he lost all ambition to direct anymore. Meanwhile the forays into surrealism continue, including one with a full-fledged Busby Berkeley style song and dance number, adding a much needed visual panache to the film.
They Will be Dust received the Platform Award which is given to movies with “high artistic merit and strong directorial vision”.
The Party Is Over
The recent wave of films about refugees and illegal migrants continues with this movie from Spain. We see a migrants’ boat landing on a beach in Spain and immediately being attacked by the border guards who chase all the people on the boat. An African boy manages to evade the guards and take shelter in a house whose gate was left open. The problem is that the house is next door to a police station. The boy is discovered by the lady of the house, Carmina (Sonia Barba), a divorcee who seems to have a good heart. In reality the African boy to her is like a toy, her little slave and sex toy that she can amuse her friends with. Her friends are no better, still exhibiting colonial attitudes. The boy’s only ally is the housemaid, Lupe (Beatriz Arjona), herself a victim of Carmina’s bullying and humiliations. Can Lupe succeed to help the boy escape from Carmina’s house and the police and continue on his journey to reach France? First time writer-director Elena Manrique explores themes of racism, colonialism, and touches on the current rise of anti-immigrants and the far right in Europe. She has also inserted doses of humour which provide a counter balance against the dark side of the movie. Manrique has a major twist in the tale which confronts the audience with a new challenge in their assessment of the situation.
Shepherds / Bergers
The theme of people quitting their white collar jobs in big cities and relocating to the nature is not new. One such person who did this and quit his copywriting job at an advertising agency in Montreal to relocate to France and become a shepherd is Mathyas Lefebure. He wrote a novel based on his adventures and Shepherds is a movie which Mathyas himself has written the script, “freely inspired” by his book. Felix-Antoine Duval stars as Mathyas, and is the narrator of the story. He is initially not taken seriously by the locals but one gives him a chance and takes him on as an apprentice shepherd. When we see Mathyas’s daily chores, we wonder how long he will last. The advertising job that he gave up seems a lot more rewarding and exciting than the laborious and rather monotonous job of shepherding. The film also starts to feel a bit monotonous and at this point get a welcome shot in the arm when Elise (Solene Rigot), a young girl that Mathyas meets in the employment agency, is inspired by Mathyas and gives up her job to join Mathyas as a shepherd! Director Sophie Deraspe makes good use of the picturesque locations to provide a visual contrast to the rather colourless herds of sheep! There are enough up and downs in Mathyas and Elise’s shepherding to keep the movie afloat. Whether Shepherds will inspire more people to give up their city jobs to try shepherding remains to be seen!
Shepherds received the Best Canadian Feature Film Award from TIFF.
Ali Moosavi has worked in documentary television and has written for Film Magazine (Iran), Cine-Eye (London), and Film International (Sweden). He contributed to the second volume of The Directory of World Cinema: Iran (Intellect, 2015).
Read M. Sellers Johnson’s coverage of TIFF 2024 here.