TIFF '24: A Dozen Capsules and Final Farewells

by Cláudio Alves

PERFUMED WITH MINT was one of many gems in TIFF's Wavelengths section.

At long last, let's close this seemingly unending TIFF coverage, so that The Film Experience can move on to some NYFF reviews, maybe even some peeks into the Lisbon festival scene. Still, before bidding Toronto adieu, a dozen titles need assessment, even if it's through a cornucopia of capsule reviews, plus a personal top ten to close things off properly. Spread out through five different festival sections and four continents, these twelve final films span from the experimental to the conventional, from dreamy stylization to dry dreary realism. There are beautiful sights to appreciate and performances, too, including a pair of wildly different characterizations from Chilean actress Paulina García. 

To open the belated farewell, I propose a look at my favorite TIFF section – Wavelengths. Within its radical offerings, one can find pictures that look like none other, such unique visions as Muhammad Hamdy's Perfumed with Mint and Jessica Sarah Rinland's Collective Monologue…

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TIFF '24: From the River to the Sea

by Cláudio Alves

At the Berlinale, NO OTHER LAND won the Best Documentary and Panorama Audience awards.

The 2024 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival was marked by multiple instances of political protest. PETA came for Pharrell Williams, and the documentary Russians at War had its screenings delayed until after the official festival in response to the public outcry against it. While some organizers, guests, and audience members may have grumbled about it, one should expect such demonstrations at an event that purports "to transform the way people see the world" and lead in the "creative and cultural discovery through the moving image." Like every art form, cinema is political – everything is political – and a festival's program can delineate allegiances and avenues of dialogue. In its search for plurality, it can also illuminate contradictions of its own. 

In the realm of political cinema, No Other Land and From Ground Zero, two of the year's most essential films, were screened at TIFF. Both works deal with the plight of the Palestinian people…

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TIFF' 24: Three Documentaries, Three Portraits of Resistance

by Cláudio Alves

A moment of joyful defiance in SUDAN, REMEMBER US.

Documentary cinema tends to get the short shrift regarding festival coverage, unless one's dealing with a strictly non-fiction fest. It seems made-up stories and dramatized truths will always excite mainstream audiences in ways that documentaries won't. Perchance, it all comes down to the need for cinema as escape. Perhaps it's more about historical trends and industry prescriptiveness. Whatever the case, it's a pity because the medium's future is often found outside the confines of narrative filmmaking. Moreover, when looking at political cinema, the potential directness of documentaries cannot be overstated, charging at issues head-on rather than through the oblique avenues of fiction. 

At TIFF 2024, three documentaries felt especially urgent, even when regarding the historical past. They're stories of resistance in its many forms – Hind Meddeb's Sudan, Remember Us, Raoul Peck's Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, and Santiago Esteinou's The Freedom of Fierro…

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TIFF '24: "Mistress Dispeller" pours ice water over heated marital melodrama

by Cláudio Alves

Elizabeth Lo's latest documentary has one hell of a premise. In modern-day China, a middle-class, middle-aged couple is going through a commonplace crisis we've seen portrayed in cinema a thousand times before. Mr. Li is having an affair with a younger woman, becoming increasingly distant from his spouse. Faced with heartbreak, Mrs. Li won't take the situation with the resigned acquiescence of a long-suffering wife. She categorically refuses to. And here's where Mistress Dispeller takes an odd turn, for the jilted spouse hires the titular professional, Wang Zhenxi, who specializes in the dissolution of such affairs.

Infiltrating the family as a distant relative, the mistress dispeller spends months investigating and reconstructing a broken bond. And somehow, Lo's camera is always there to watch it unfold…

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TIFF '24: Wang Bing completes the "Youth" Trilogy

by Cláudio Alves

YOUTH (HARD TIMES) won a special mention at Locarno, the Junior Jury and FIPRESCI prizes.

Last year, Wang Bing presented Youth (Spring) at TIFF after the film's world premiere in competition at Cannes. It was to be the first part of an epic trilogy, one of a magnitude that's impressive even for such a grand muralist as the director is known to be. His filmography is full of works documenting the Chinese dispossessed, often curious about the labor forces whose strenuous efforts make the national economy work its exploitative, feverishly expansionist dream. For Youth, he focused his camera on the greener workers, a new generation consigned to a life of unfair garment labor, struggling to survive within the putative economic boom of modern China. Wang shot it between 2014 and 2019, dividing his findings between three films that collectively amount to a nearly ten-hour-runtime. 

At The Film Experience, we've already gone over Spring, so it's time to tackle Hard Times – competition in Locarno – and Homecoming – an erstwhile Golden Lion contender from Venice. The cumulative effect of these three monuments of cinema cannot be overstated…

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