THE 31st Toronto International Film Festival kicked off last night with a massive programme of 261 feature films, many of them world premieres, including the opening presentation, the Inuit drama The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. No strangers to controversy, the festival organisers were defending the inclusion of one political hot potato even before the event opened.
English director Gabriel Range's D.O.A.P. (Death of a President) is set at a future time when a film crew is working on a documentary investigating the assassination of President George W Bush by an unknown gunman. In the programme brochure, festival co-director Noah Cowen declares that it is "easily the most dangerous and breathtakingly original film I have encountered this year".
A statement from the festival notes that the event is "committed to the free expression of ideas and engaging audiences in thoughtful discussion on the issues of the day", that "D.O.A.P. contributes meaningfully to the public discourse surrounding current social issues" and that it "is not exploitative in any way and treats what would certainly be a great tragedy respectfully and un-cynically."
Will Rome eclipse Venice?
As Toronto kicks off, the 63rd Venice Film Festival draws to a close tomorrow night with its prize-giving ceremony.
The world's oldest film festival, Venice has an Italian rival this year with a new festival starting in Rome just five weeks later, and the Venice organisers are not at all pleased that the competition between the two events has generated so much media coverage, distracting from the stellar line-up on the Lido.
Neither festival will screen movies shown by the other, and both admit that they squabbled over a number of titles. The controversy heated up when Venice director Marco Mueller said that Rome would be showing films that he had rejected, which the Rome organisers described as "an incredible offence to cinema". Rome, which has a bigger budget than Venice, is said to be spending "a mid-six-figure sum" just to bring Nicole Kidman and her entourage to the screening of Fur, starring Kidman as photographer Diane Arbus, which opens the Rome event on October 13th.
'Barley' in foreign fields
One of the biggest box-office hits in Ireland this year, with takings in excess of €3.5 million as it goes into its 12th week on release, Ken Loach's Palme d'Or-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley has its North American premiere in Toronto this weekend. It is one of three movies flying the Irish flag at the festival, although all three are co-productions and flying other flags, too.
From Galway-based Magma Films comes the animated feature, The Ugly Duckling and Me, which is listed as Irish-Danish-French-German. Shot primarily in Ireland, True North, a thriller featuring Peter Mullan and set aboard a Scottish trawler, is officially a co-production between Germany, the UK and Ireland.
Gil lives it up
Gil Rossellini, the producer-director son of the great Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, is touring the festival circuit with a pair of documentaries on how he dealt with a life-threatening illness and his subsequent "return to life", as he puts it. The documentaries are imaginatively titled Kill Gil, Vol 1 and Vol 2.
Mud-wrestling divas return
As ever, the Toronto festival is awash with movie stars from around the world. Intent on stealing some of their limelight are a couple of divas whose on-screen catfights in Dynasty sent TV ratings zooming in the 1980s: Joan Collins and Linda Evans who played sworn enemies Alexis and Krsytle, the wives of oil tycoon Blake Carrington. Their bitchy rivalry and occasional wrestling matches, most memorably one in a pool of mud, are the stuff of camp legend.
Collins (now 73) and Evans (63) tap into nostalgia for their TV duels when they co-star in Legends! - described as "a comedy about big stars and bigger egos" - which starts a six-week run at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto next Tuesday night. They play desperate, faded movie stars cast opposite each other in a Broadway play.
Michael Dwyer reports from Toronto next Tuesday in The Irish Times and next Friday in The Ticket
