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toronto 2005

posted 17 years ago by godfather72
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Palestine

Waiting/Attente
(Rashid Masharawi, Palestine/France, 2005, 90m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2005, 121

Most prominent here is the revelation of the absurd conditions of Palestinian life at present. As Attente attests, Palestinian refugees in Jordan are perpetually waiting for their lives to continue, and all traditional comforts of everyday life such as art, are suspended. The film follows a renowned Palestinian stage director as he attempts to recruit the finest Palestinian actors for a new “national” repertory. With a makeshift crew assisting, he travels to Jordan to recruit, but the refugees have little interest – they want to use him to send messages to loved ones. He refuses and decides to audition these refugees in the act of waiting; they prove extremely telling of the frustrated national state.

Paradise Now/Al-Jenna-An
(Hary Abu-Assad, Palestine/Netherlands/Germany/France, 2005, 90m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2005, 232

This one you’ve heard of – it’s easily the highest profile film on either Toronto 2005 list, already having been released theatrically and distributed on DVD in North America. It’s a pretty simple story if you don’t already know it – two young Palestinian men exist precariously on the edge of society until their suicide bombing mission is delivered to them. Paradise Now follows them clinically through their preparation – “martyr videos,” time with their families, planning. Why do they do it? Even if this movie tells you an answer, it sure as *beep* won’t be definitive.

A Perfect Day
(Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joneige, France/Lebanon/Germany, 2005, 88m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2005, 311

A Perfect Day centers on three family members – a mother, a troubled son and a missing father. The father has been missing since a “conflict” 15 years earlier, and his clothes still hang in the house. The mother has finally decided to report him dead. Her narcoleptic son is obsessed with his ex-girlfriend, nearly stalking her whenever he can. In one 24-hour period, can the family begin to heal its destructive sense of loss or will they fall further into oblivion? (Apparently this film ends on a hopeful note – I’d like to see what that could be. Sounds pretty bleak to me.)

Israel

Free Zone
(Amos Gitai, Israel/France/Spain/Belgium, 2005, 90m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2005, 105

(Amos Gitai AND Natalie Portman? Should I be stoked or ashamed? Let’s wait for the summary.)
Gitai’s latest is, like Kadosh, an exploration of the female Israeli world and all of its grief, powerlessness and conflicting doctrine. The titular Free Zone is a region in northeast Jordan bordered by three war-torn countries where cars are sold. Portman, playing a visiting and despondent Jewish-American, and an Israeli woman, owed money by a mysterious man called “the American,” travel to the Free Zone. There the latter finds out, from a Palestinian woman, that the American and her money have vanished.
(OK, I can definitely go for this. Gitai’s camera is always fascinating, right?)

Live and Become/Va, vie et deviens
(Radu Mihalueanu, France/Israel, 2005, 140m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2005, 285

Live and Become tells the story of a young Ethiopian boy whose mother is Christian. Americans and Israelis are taking the famine-ravaged Ethiopian Jews to Israel (the movie is set in 1984), and his mother passes him off as a Jew to get him exiled. However, the promised land of Israel as idyllic as he’d hoped, even after his adoption by a Tel Aviv family. As he grows into a man, racism, the fear of his own lie and the gargantuan culture gap of his two homes all plague him. The bitter realities of immigration and Israel’s own adolescence seem to be on affecting display here.

Iran

The Willow Tree/Beed-e Majnoun
(Majid Majidi, Iran, 2005, 96m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2005, 228

(I don’t know whether this is my perverse side coming out, but I really want to see this. If only because it’s the new film by…)
Majid Majidi, perhaps the most humane and accessible of a loaded class of world-renowned Iranian directors, returns with Beed-e Majnoun, a story about the tricky, multifarious nature of sight and blindness. It’s a simple story, but this seems deceiving. Youssef, a well-to-do but blind professor with a loving family and an appreciative outlook on life, lucks into a sight-correction procedure. Amazingly, it works, but at a cost: Youssef turns unusually aggressive, irresponsibly lustful and bitter at the world he has missed out on. This struggle seems to come less out of a just-released true nature so much as an inability to comprehend his most peculiar predicament. (Kind of fascinating, if you ask me, attempting to depict a situation impossible to experience and yet so achingly human. A parable, maybe?)

Border Café/Café Transit
(Kambosia Partovia, Iran/France, 2005, 105m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2005, 236

Here’s the deal with an Iranian movie centering on a woman: you must address their plight in society, period. Most of the time (as with Tahmineh Milani’s Two Women or the more populist Tehran Nights) this involves direct oppression from men that either covet them or want them crushed – often both, alternately, in the same film. What fascinates me about Café Transit is that, unlike the movies mentioned and a great deal of Iranian “classics,” it incorporates the struggle alongside an acknowledgment of and struggle with the non-Iranian world. The central woman, who operates her dead husband’s border café (a taboo, apparently), must deal with a Ukrainian runaway needing to get to Italy and a nice Greek truck driver, her beacon of hope. On the flip side is Nasser, her brother-in-law, who at first wants to marry her out of tradition and then, once refused, attempts to destroy her (customarily).

Day Break/Dame Sobh
(Hamid Rahmanian, Iran, 2005, 84m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2005, 308

There is not much on paper to Day Break (as with many of these films, I must admit). A convicted capital punishment offender in Iran is subject mostly to the fate handed down from the victim’s family, and our protagonist, totally isolated in his frustrating cell, finds himself in this situation. As the family keeps continually pushing back his execution date, he agonizes. Are they screwing with him? Attempting to make him suffer for as long as possible? Will they pardon him? (Does the movie ever leave the cell? Should we care? Let’s hope the answer to both is a resounding yes.) This is Rahmanian’s debut.

Iran Island/Jazireh Ahani
(Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran, 2005, 90m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2005, 268

Now this is an interesting premise. An old-fashioned, vaguely tyrannical “Captain” Nemat is the head of a traveling ship-society of homeless families. Unlike Ahab, he searches for nothing, but he has all the hubris and false grandeur of older literary giants. Of course, he doesn’t live in the 19th century – he travels on the modern-day Persian Gulf, selling scrap off his ship for sustenance. The shipmates isolated on the “island,” with nowhere to go, follow Capt. Nemat’s every order faithfully, with the exception of a young man in love with a girl forbidden to him. The scraps being sold also lighten the ship and threaten to sink it. (Finally…I don’t know what to expect!)

Gilaneh
(Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Mohsen Abdolvahah, Iran, 2005, 84m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2005, 270

Gilaneh is the story of its title character, a mother caring for a family ravaged by war. She has two children, and we follow the family near the end of the Iran-Iraq War and at the beginning of the American invasion of Iraq. Her son Ismaeel goes off to the former in 1988, and in 2003 we see him damaged by chemical weapons, watching the new war. Her daughter Maygol, pregnant in 1988, tries to find her husband, who has deserted his post in Tehran. Amid her family’s struggle, Gilaneh is the unshakable rock for both the family and the film.

[–] godfather72 17 years ago

(You might want to read this before you press play…)

This isn’t Blake, Yeats, Whitman, Weird Al, whatever. I just love it.

These two yokels are two of my absolute favorites, but you can slag them if you want. It’s possible that you won’t like their voices. They are a bit abrasive at first, especially Dylan’s, if you haven’t heard them before. If so, give it a few listens (as I did). They’ve all been called non-singers, but for me this is about as expressive as pop music gets. (Imagine my surprise when I found I loved all this, after a high school experience filled to bursting with crass, *beep* radio rock.)

Anyway, there are only a few necessary tidbits to know. Track 3, “My Back Pages,” is basically Dylan’s shunning of the “protest music” approach/attitude he had when he first became famous, one so beautifully summarized in the opening track. The latter is a brilliant bit of retrospective self-criticism; he was JUST starting to trade the folkies for the hipsters at the time, so it was very fresh. And just because I have only one post-60s Dylan song is no implicit commentary on the rest of his career. For Dylan, there was just so much I had to cut from all his phases – you’re getting the absolute peak of his work, in my opinion. The same goes for Lenny. Cohen is just darker and less snarky in general, and when he tries for the latter it comes off as plain bitterness. My point is, it’s *beep* dark stuff by most standards, especially when you dig further into his work. It’s worth noting that he’s suffered from forms of recurring depression for most of his adult life. I don’t know if you frequent this sort of thing normally, but consider this fair warning if you don’t.

Let me know what you think of all this! If you’re interested, there’s much more where this came from, be it info or music or whatever. Enjoy!

Bob Dylan
1. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963)
2. “To Ramona” (Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964)
3. “My Back Pages” (Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964)
4. “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” (Bringing It All Back Home, 1965)
5. “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” (Bringing It All Back Home, 1965)
6. “Like a Rolling Stone” (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)
7. “Visions of Johanna” (Blonde on Blonde, 1966)
8. “Just Like a Woman” (Blonde on Blonde, 1966)
9. “Tangled Up in Blue” (Blood on the Tracks, 1975)

Leonard Cohen
10. “Suzanne” (Songs of Leonard Cohen, 1968)
11. “The Stranger Song” (Songs of Leonard Cohen, 1968)
12. “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” (Songs of Leonard Cohen, 1968)
13. “Famous Blue Raincoat” (Songs of Love and Hate, 1971)
14. “Hallelujah” (Various Positions, 1984)
15. “Tower of Song” (I’m Your Man, 1988)

[–] godfather72 17 years ago

Considering my extremely limited experience with the theater, my comparative opinion on the production values of Thrush probably doesn’t hold much water. However, I think it was the brightest spot in Salvage Vanguard’s premiere production of the play, in addition to being one of the more intriguing spaces I’ve seen. Their alienating, rough-edged, deliberately spacey venue – an abandoned warehouse that apparently will be fully furbished come next year – would not seem like it could suggest an apocalyptic world, especially considering how prominent and visible the empty space is around the stage. The action of the play, especially in the final scene when Minerva and Keck escape, even drifts over outside the square patch of the dirt where almost all of the play takes place.
This is precisely what makes this production evocative and unique: a 20 foot by 20 foot (approximately) patch of mulch and dirt and a strange lighted, double-screen trash bin are somehow just impersonal enough to suggest a barren, jagged, hard-as-nails landscape. The lighting arrangement also helps vary the implied settings just enough to suggest city brightness, cold nights and oppressive daytimes. Unless they construct their own arrangements from scrap material (like Furst’s second incarnation), characters sit and sleep in the dirt, a possible gimmick that instead succinctly and beautifully symbolizes the backgrounds and mindsets of the characters. No personality or collective feeling exists, not to mention signs of life or history. Only the individual, at present, remains, and every other individual they encounter is a completely autonomous, and helpless, entity. More than externals, these qualities serve the dirtied actors indispensably.
Much of the production’s gritty, shape-shifting feel would not have worked in a bigger venue or even a conventional proscenium one. Take away the clearly grimy faces, visibly disgusting costumes and the actors’ raw emotion, and Thrush might seem emotionally garish and shrill. I find it odd to write that considering the intensity of the script, and thus conventional wisdom might say that a more distanced viewing would be pleasurable. The immediacy of the physical settings at Salvage Vanguard helps guard against that, and it actually enhances the overpoweringly dark mood given by the ambient noise and the actors. The folk-based music, jarring-but-brilliant use of “Saturday Night” and the musical performance numbers, for once, did more to augment the plot and themes rather than take us out of the play (something so many productions, both in theatre and film/TV, are guilty of). Best of all was the play-opening, recorded torrent of names that ended with Minerva; it wasted none of the play’s time in getting us to think not only of the play’s intentionally indefinite given circumstances, it also forces one to ponder the contemporary, real-world implications of the play throughout the next two hours.
Unfortunately, the actual content of the play turned out to be more of a mixed bag. This especially applies to the protagonist, Minerva (performed by Elizabeth Wakehouse). She is the overt emotional conscience of the play (at least until late in the second act), a naïve and put-upon girl looking for love and hope in a landscape inhospitable to them. Next to Jude Hickey’s thanklessly plaintive role of Keck, I thought that it was the second-most difficult part to play, and sometimes it shows. If you find her overpowering innocence and puppy-faced search for love grating after a while, the first act is excruciating. Granted, Minerva is raped, cut with a rock by the length of her arm and continually hinged on the verge of starvation during this time, but she never finds a way to modulate her essential actions enough to make her audience invested in her as a fully rounded person rather than a symbol. She spends most of her time attempting to wring every last drop of sympathy from the audience by coming up with frail facial expressions that all seem to come from a few set emotional states. Early on, there is little suggestion of a character that could hold our interest and full sympathy for two hours, mainly because she seems like a one-note figure.
To her credit, Wakehouse creates a constancy of character in Minerva, but her energy suffers as a result. She uses a uniform vocal cadence, a beleaguered lilt towards the end of many phrases that, unfortunately, comes off as artificial and slightly annoying. Her posture is persistently solid and upright despite the supposed weakness of her character. Except for an interesting sequence or two, such as her early attempts to seduce Bette, this Minerva’s choices seem static, strangely muted and calculated. Perhaps Caridad Svich’s script did the trick: as the second act plays, the script lets Minerva lighten up a bit. She has a scene where she shares a big laugh with Keck, not to mention scenes of seduction, action and strength. Finally, Wakehouse begins to open up the performance without being showy. While being true to Minerva and her decrepit condition, her performance begins to emanate from all corners of her body rather than a small section in her torso (as it seemed during the first act). She is equally interesting whether seducing Furst or listening to Keck lament, and suddenly she is even worthy of attention when not speaking. She chooses to tip her hand at these times by fidgeting with her arms or becoming more physically active, if only in small doses. What hooks you is when she expresses happiness or is in active pursuit of a known goal (as opposed to an action only known to the actor, even though it makes no real difference to the casual audience member). When she is happy in the second act, most notably as she dreams of Bette dancing, she simply beams her feeling from her face. Remarkably, when her performance didn’t try so hard, it worked like gangbusters. Thus, as we’re left to contemplate Minerva’s turning from a beaten ragamuffin to a source of strength (as she stands up for herself and helps Keck to their next destination), we reflect that Wakehouse’s Minerva, incredibly, has been both dismal and exceptional within Thrush’s two-hour time frame.

[–] godfather72 17 years ago

Toronto 2004 – Middle East/North Africa/Southeastern Asia

Morocco

LE GRAND VOYAGE
(Ismael Ferroukhi, France/Morocco, 2004, 108m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2004, 346

Israel

WALK ON WATER/LALEHET AL HAMAYIM
(Eytan Fox, Israel, 2004, 104m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2004, 241

PROMISED LAND
(Amos Gitai, Israel, 2004, 88m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2004, 145

Iran

10 ON TEN
(Abbas Kiarostami, France/Iran, 2004, 87m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2004, 89

STRAY DOGS
(Marziyeh Meshkini, Iran/France, 2004, 93m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2004, 201

TURTLES CAN FLY
(Bahman Ghobadi, Iraq/Iran, 2004, 95m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2004, 209

Have you seen this? It’s definitely gotten a significant major-studio-subsidiary release on DVD (from someone near MGM, I think), and it deals with…

Afghanistan

EARTH AND ASHES/KHAKESTAR-O-KHAK
(Atiq Rahimi, France/Afghanistan, 2004, 110m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2004, 217

Thailand

RAHTREE: FLOWER OF THE NIGHT/BUPPAH RAHTREE
(Yuthlert Sippapak, Thailand, 2003, 109m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2004, 405

THE OVERTURE/HOAM RONG
(Itthi-sunthorn Wichilak, Thailand, 2004, 104m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2004, 275

TROPICAL MALADY/SUD PRALAD
(Apichatpong Weerasethakul, France/Thailand/Italy/Germany, 2004, 118m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2004, 123

Philippines

EVOLUTION OF A FILIPINO FAMILY
(Lav Diaz, Philippines, 2004, 540m)
Print source: [email protected]
Toronto 2004, 110

OK, we can’t show this. Just too long, although it sounds fascinating as hell. But as I’m sure you know, it will be at the Austin Asian Film Festival soon.