Exclusive articles:
25 Alternative 2011 TIFF Picks: Lav Diaz’s Century of Birthing
The guy known for the longest average film-length of any active filmmaker may have actually lowered said average with this relatively modest six hour-long film, but it's awfully dismissive to simply write him off as a high-brow spectacle. Combining performance art, an utmost humanism, and the frankest portrayals of duration that the cinema has ever seen, Lav Diaz is the Thanksgiving meal of film festival offerings.
25 Alternative 2011 TIFF Picks: Ermanno Olmi’s The Cardboard Village
With his origins and legacy primarily dating back to the latter years of Italian Neorealism, Olmi has gone on to further iconic status via a Palme d'Or for The Tree of Wooden Clogs and his Golden Lion for The Legend of the Holy Drinker. He vowed that his 2007 film One Hundred Nails would be his final fictional feature, but lo and behold, here he is again.
25 Alternative 2011 TIFF Picks: Must See Films Flying Low on the Radar
Single tickets for films showing at TIFF officially go on sale tomorrow and before you consider paying for an overpriced, over-hyped, red carpet Gala screening of a film that will be out in theatres week later, we suggest you mix it up a bit and consider the alternative. Joined by our own Toronto based critic Blake Williams (who is also presenting his latest short entitled Coorow-Latham Road in Wavelengths 4 this year), we've complied a 25-list of invigorating films from pioneering master filmmakers who still don't get enough cred to visionaries making their first contributions to cinema. We begin the countdown with...
TIFF 2011: The Rest of the Canadian Line-up Brings Maddin, Vallée, McDonald, Pool, Veninger, and A Wealth of Shorts and First-Timers
With big names like Cronenberg and Polley already announced a couple of weeks ago, it came time this morning to announced the rest of the home team for the Toronto International Film Festival. This morning, they filled in some of the gaps in the Special Presentations, Vanguard, and Real to Reel sections, and at the same time presented the full line-ups for their Canada First! and Short Cuts programmes, the former highlighting feature debuts, and the latter comprised of a whopping 43 Canadian short films running anywhere from 4 to 28 minutes long.
Toronto’s Lightbox Gets Real With Italians Not Named Fellini, Too
Beginning July 28 and running until the end of August, Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox are complimenting their Fellini bonanza with a concurrent programme that spotlights perhaps the purest, most stripped down movement in film history: Italian Neorealism. For Fellini, La Dolce Vita signalled a gravitation toward his thematic and stylistic tendencies for excess and the fantastic; with later films like 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits dominating the canon, it is easy to overlook the more timid first decade of his career. The juxtaposition of Fellini's Double Bills with this showcase for Neorealismo serves not only as a logical contextualization for Fellini, but also it offers a chance to see rare prints of monumental Italian classics, many shipped straight over from Italy.
