TIFF '23: The Best International Film Oscar Race

by Cláudio Alves

The Toronto International Film Festival represents an excellent opportunity to get in touch with cinema from all over the world. For Oscar obsessives, it provides a great chance to catch up with Best International Film submissions, especially as they're announced throughout the festival. I already covered some of them – Australia's Shayda, Bhutan's The Monk and the Gun, Brazil's Pictures of Ghosts, Chile's The Settlers, Finland's Fallen Leaves, Germany's The Teachers' Lounge, Romania's Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, South Korea's Concrete Utopia, and Turkey's About Dry Grasses. However, there are still some more TIFF titles to review.

They are the Netherlands's Sweet Dreams, Tunisia's Four Daughters, and Morocco's The Mother of All Lies. Though they haven't been officially selected, I also saw two of Norway's three finalists, A Happy Day and Songs of Earth…

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TIFF '23: Queer Way of Life

by Cláudio Alves

The 48th Annual Toronto Film Festival may have ended already, but my coverage here at The Film Experience is still going for a few more days. This time, let's talk about the program's queer offerings, highlighting three projects that range from an award-winning World Premiere to a beloved Spanish auteur's first foray into the Western genre. They are the dragged-up double feature of Sophie Dupuis' Solo, which took the Best Canadian Feature prize, and Unicorns, directed by Sally El Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd. Finally, there's Pedro Almodóvar's Strange Way of Life, bound to hit American theaters on October 4th, released by Sony Pictures Classics…

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TIFF ’23: Baby, It’s Cold Outside

by Cláudio Alves

In narrative constructs, intense emotions, especially romantic ones, tend to be associated with high temperatures. It’s as if the feverous feeling escaped the body into the atmosphere. Or, maybe it’s the other way around, hearts and libidos inspired by the surrounding heat to burn hotter than ever. And yet, there’s something deceptively powerful about the flame of attraction sparking alive within the bitter cold. In those cases, one almost desires human connection as a physical need. The body calls for the warmth of another person. The mind yearns for companionship, a panacea to the frozen solitude of every day.

At this year’s TIFF, two films explore this dynamic, allowing the frigid climate to become as strong a force as human arrogance or the heart’s most ardent desires. In both examples, a love triangle emerges from the snow. They’re Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses and Anthony Chen’s The Breaking Ice…

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TIFF '23: "The New Boy" and "Kidnapped"

by Cláudio Alves 

A boy contemplates Jesus on the cross, the figure's perpetual suffering a striking sight. Because he's not been raised Christian, the youth relates more to the depicted pain than the iconography's meaning. In a show of naïve empathy that others would read as sacrilegious, he frees Christ, ripping the nails out of the cross. Whether the son of god's body tumbles a wooden fall or walks away reborn depends on the film, but the basic premise of these scenes ties Warwick Thornton's The New Boy and Marco Bellocchio's Kidnapped together. 

Both films consider historical atrocities done in the name of good, unmoored children at the center of a religious storm. Thornton sees a fictional aboriginal boy as a synecdoche for his colonized people, while the Italian master dramatizes the real-life episode of a Jewish boy taken from his family…

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TIFF '23: Zar Amir Ebrahimi mesmerizes as "Shayda"

by Cláudio Alves

"Shayda" is coming to US theaters on December 1st from Sony Pictures Classics.

Though I've hardly been running after Oscar contenders while at TIFF – apologies if that's what you wanted out of this coverage – the Best International Film race remains at the forefront of my mind. With new daily announcements, the festival's an excellent opportunity to catch some titles that could be hard to track down later in the season. So, a lot of my scheduling has been built around productions that might end up in that race or have already been confirmed for the 96th Academy Awards. Not all of the experiences are positive, but  a few of them are revelatory.

Such is the case of Noora Niasari's feature debut, Shayda, representing Australia. If you thought Zar Amir Ebrahimi was remarkable in last year's Holy Spider, wait to see what she does here…

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