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Toronto Palestine Film Festival aims to look beyond the headlines

jasmine rezaee

While most Torontonians know about TIFF—the hugely publicized Toronto International Film Festival—very few have heard about TPFF, the Toronto Palestine Film Festival. Unlike TIFF, the TPFF isn’t attended by Hollywood stars, doesn’t receive much mainstream media coverage and has no paid staff. Despite these challenges, TPFF is an ambitious film fest that features over 40 […] More »

Sure, the Toronto International Film Festival is elitist—and we love it anyway

eva salinas

[Editor’s note: This Magazine columns editor Eva Salinas will be reviewing films and rounding up news about the Toronto International Film Festival over the next week. Visit us online next week for more of her dispatches.] And so it begins. This year’s edition of the Toronto International Film Festival kicked-off last night, a little later […] More »
September-October 2009

How film festivals like TIFF can end up hurting indie movies

Jason AndersonWebsite

It’s a familiar ritual in movie palaces and multiplexes all over the country. You find yourself in a lineup for a film that you know nothing about, aside from its reputation as a remarkable new work by a hot young director from the Carpathians, or maybe Polynesia. For sustenance, you have foregone popcorn in favour […] More »

Science fiction and the strange racial dynamics of District 9

Graham F. Scott

When I first saw the original two-minute teaser trailer, above, for District 9, the new science-fiction movie coming out in August, it was a few months ago and the huge, out-of-control advertising campaign promoting it hadn’t yet blanketed every bus-stop and billboard in the country. Though the subsequent advertising has dulled my interest a bit, […] More »
May-June 2009

The American Nightmare of Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Wendy and Lucy’

Soraya RobertsWebsite

How global recession, Hurricane Katrina, and social breakdown can strand one lonely woman—and her little dog, too In cinematic terms, the Great Depression is arguably best represented by Mervyn LeRoy’s 1932 classic I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Wrongfully convicted of robbery, First World War veteran James Allen is sentenced to 10 years […] More »

Big screen? Big deal, say today’s viewers

Jason AndersonWebsite

Crappy image quality. Tiny screens. Scratchy sound. No thanks The extent of my snobbery has wavered over my years of film-going, but I have always adhered to one fundamental principle. I was trained to believe that seeing movies projected onto a big screen was always the aesthetically correct choice, even if the conditions were less […] More »

Queerly Canadian #12: Coming out. And out. And out.

cate simpson

Coming out is a near-universal queer experience. The coming-out story recurs again and again in queer cinema: it’s our version of the coming-of-age tale. But where the traditional narrative and reality diverge is at the assumption that coming out is something that only happens once in a lifetime. In the movies, the quiet boy starts […] More »
March-April 2009

Found in translation

Navneet AlangWebsite

The web allows immigrants to straddle two worlds like never before As in so many immigrant families, weekend mornings in my house always meant one thing: “our shows” on TV. We are of Indian descent, and the sounds of the latest Bollywood hits were a staple of our Saturdays and Sundays, as much a part […] More »