Things seen and overheard, Day One of the Toronto International Film Festival:
Ads hyping the new hybrid Escalade are opening every screening of this year's Toronto Film Festival; whether that's a subconscious meta-commentary on the festival itself, a similar all-consuming mammoth that's uniting unwieldy pomp and flash with more down-to-earth concern, is entirely unknown.
While today was the official first day of the festival, Wednesday night featured a lovely "Programmers Gathering" for early-arriving festival heads, film society programmers, archivists, and museum curators. It's a nice touch for TIFF, one to make a generally overlooked section of the film world feel more at home...until the stars arrive the next day, of course. ("Enjoy it now, you'll never be treated this well again," one curator muttered as I reached for a mousse torte). The gathering has morphed from its genesis many years ago as a full-day conference, complete with presentations, case studies, discussions and arguments ("Why didn't that touring Rivette series work?" "Why does Celluloid Dreams charge so much" etc, etc). Needless to say, the new version, a free coctail-and-food gathering at an elegant hotel bar, has proven slightly more popular. (The flowing chocolate fountain might have something to do with that, too.)
The programmers meeting doesn't exactly provide much of a test for festival photographers, though. They could be seen taking a few half-hearted photos, mainly to test their lenses or experience shooting folks without burly bodyguards. One said it was a good way to get in the mood for the festival (i.e., by hanging around people who not only could name every film by Claire Denis, Lisandro Alonso, or James Benning, but actually would, and did).
The Hollywood brigade has yet to arrive, or possibly they're just practicing their "Well, to premiere here, and to already be discussed as an Oscar candidate..." speeches while they're stalled in Toronto taxi-limo traffic. Tonight the festival premiered the new
Guy Ritchie film
RocknRolla, one of those star-studded genre works that populate the line-up, but like all discerning citizens I had better things to do with my time: attend the world premiere of
$9.99 (pictured above), the new stop-motion animation film by Israel-by-way-of-Brooklyn-by-way-of-Australia filmmaker
Tatia Rosenthal.
A 25-New-Faces-of-Independent-Film veteran, Rosenthal's many-moons journey to bring this collection of Etgar Keret short stories to the screen took her from Brooklyn to Rotterdam (as part of the Cinemart funding conference), with an international-funding trail that landed her in Australia (courtesy of the Australian Film Commission and that country's Sherman Pictures), where she spent over two years animating the film.
Stop-motion animation is normally associated with Aardman's animal-based humors: Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, etc, or by others with the rich Czech tradition of filmmakers Jiri Trnka, Jan Svankmajer, etc. In both cases the animation brings to life a fantastic world: chickens talk and break out of a Nazi camp, tree stumps move and eat people, etc etc.
Rosenthal, though, has other goals for her animation: to recreate the real world, movement by movement, blink by blink, a world that may be tinged with surrealism and oddity (these are based on Keret stories, after all), but that is unmistakably recognizable. Here a father worries about his two sons, a child saves money for a soccer game; a couple split up, a lonely elderly man waits for someone to talk with. What's amazing about $9.99 isn't that it's filled with painstakingly crafted animation and figure design (it is, of course), but that its script could just as easily have been portrayed by "real actors." Its themes of loneliness, betrayal, worry, and love are light years from any other animation film in recent memory, and its script (by Rosenthal and Keret) could stand with any festival film here.
Oh, and one star present (besides Tatia, of course): Geoffrey Rush, who provides the voice for one of the characters, and whose genial and erudite presence certainly proved entertaining enough for the crowd.
# posted by Jason Sanders @ 9/05/2008 12:21:00 AM
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