Original-Cin TIFF 2020 Picks: Monday, September 14
By Jim Slotek, Liam Lacey, Kim Hughes, Karen Gordon, Linda Barnard, Bonnie Laufer, and Thom Ernst
180 Degree Rule (Discovery)
Mon. Sept. 14, 12:30 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox; Wed. Sept. 16, noon, TIFF Bell Lightbox; Thurs. Sept. 17, online at Bell Digital Cinema starting at 6 pm.
The 180-degree rule relates to camera placement, a filmmaker’s tool to avoid confusing the audience by not crossing sightlines. Iranian writer-director Farnoosh Samadi’s 180 Degree Rule adopts thriller-like urgency in exploring the crossing of other lines: the fallout from even understandable lies and secrets. Tehran teacher Sara (Sahar Dolatshahi) is excited about an upcoming family wedding. Her husband Hamed (Pejman Jamshidi), prone to bullying and belittling, refuses her repeated requests. When Sara grabs an opportunity to head to Northern Iran with their young daughter for the celebration without Hamed’s knowledge, a tragedy traps her and those around her in grief and escalating anxiety about keeping Sara’s secret. Often set in claustrophobic car interiors, Samadi weighs the whys behind Sara’s deceptions and the untenability of keeping even reasonable secrets for a woman living in a society where men have the upper hand in all things. - LB
76 Days (TIFF Docs)
Mon. Sept. 14, TIFF Bell Lightbox, 5 pm and 5:15 pm; Tuesday, Sept. 15, TIFF Bell Lightbox online, 6 pm, Thurs. Sept. 17, TIFF Bell Lightbox, 4:30 pm.
While we’re still in the throes of the COVID-19 crisis, it feels disorienting to watch 76 Days, a documentary of the early months of the shutdown in Wuhan, China, the city of 11 million where the epidemic originated and about 80 percent of China’s deaths happened. The lockdown, from January 23 to April 8, was apparently successful though this still feels a little too close to call.
What we have is a remarkable record of the first traumatic moments, battleground scenes in emergency rooms and ICUs, as medical staff held hospitals double doors to stop a stampede of patients. Director Hao Wu assembled footage remotely from the United States, as the camera operators put themselves in harm’s way to record the frontline workers. After the initial shock, the extreme circumstances become the new normal. Nurses, including support staff from other hospitals, wrote their names on their protective gear to be able to identify each other, They bond with the patients, especially a “grandfather” with dementia who keeps wandering around the halls with his mask down. Near the end a conscientious nurse scrupulously cleans the ID cards and phones of the dead, before phoning their families to ask about returning their belongings. - LL
Ammonite (Gala Presentations)
Mon, Sept. 14, TIFF Bell Lightbox, 12:30 pm.
Writer/director Francis Lee based Ammonite on a real person. Mary Anning was a fossil hunter, dealer, and a self-taught palaeontologist in 1840s Dorset, who became famous for her incredible knowledge. But her gender meant she was denied proper acknowledgement in her lifetime and lived in relative poverty. Little is known about her real life, so Lee has taken liberties and imagined a life for her.
Kate Winslet plays Mary, a gruff and testy woman, isolated by her gender and her sexual orientation, who runs a shop with her mother in Lyme Regis, Dorset. Saoirse Ronan is Charlotte, the refined young wife of a rich London man, who is grieving the loss of a child. Her husband, who is fascinated by Mary’s work, pays Mary to let Charlotte spend a month with her, hoping the open air and perhaps a new hobby will bring his wife back to life. The two women seem like opposites, but shifts happen, as they say, and they fall in love.
The film has been hamstrung by comparisons to last year’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which also featured two women falling in love in an isolated cottage by the sea. But Ammonite, with its quiet tone and fine performances, can stand on its own. -KG
The Inheritance (Wavelengths)
Mon. Sept. 14, TIFF Bell Lightbox, 5:30 pm; Thu. Sept. 17, TIFF Bell Lightbox, 5 pm; Thu. Sept. 17, Online at Bell Digital Cinema starting at 6 pm.
An engaging drama-documentary hybrid, The Inheritance claims two sets of inspirational ancestors in its exploration of contemporary politicized young Black Americans. One is French director, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 didactic fiction, La Chinoise (in turn, loosely inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1872 novel Demons) with its bright painted backdrops and long discussions among five young Parisians in a Maoist cell about culture and politics. But the biggest source of inspiration in Black civil rights movements and protest art.
Director-writer Ephraim Asili created what he calls a “speculative re-enactment” of his experience in a Black Marxist collective sharing a house, with the usual romantic and housekeeping complications, which tends to make this feel, in its lighter moments, a little like a woke, Black version of Friends. Along the way, the group shares with each other, and the audience, a lot of knowledge about Black culture and politics. Specifically, the commune explores its own parallels to the MOVE liberation group, who lived as an extended family in a communal house in Philadelphia until, in 1985, the city police bombed their home and let the fire burn, causing the death of five children and six adults and destroying more than 60 homes. Among the richest moments are the conversations with three survivors of MOVE, telling their stories to the young activists and passing on the legacy of protest. - LL
Lift Like a Girl (Ash Ya Captain) (TIFF Docs/TIFF Next Wave)
Mon. Sept. 14, 6 pm online at Bell Digital Cinema; Thurs. Sept. 17, 9 pm West Island Open Air Cinema at Ontario Place.
A dusty vacant lot in Alexandria, Egypt is the “factory of Olympic champions” where coach Captain Ramadan pushes young women to ascend weightlifting podiums in Egyptian filmmaker Mayye Zayed’s debut feature documentary. Shot over a four-year period, Ramadan’s makeshift outdoor gym is a far cry from slick Olympic training facilities. But the bow-legged coach gets results. It’s where he trained his daughter, Nahla Ramadan, to a world championship and quiet 14-year-old Asmaa (nicknamed Zebiba, “raisin” in Arabic, by Ramadan) shows the potential to be his next star. A former Olympic weightlifter, Ramadan says prioritizing boy athletes is outdated. He trains kids of all ages, many of them free of charge. He isn’t one for coddling. Zebiba is called a piece of shit — and worse — when she fails to lift 75 kg. Victory earns her his raspy chorus of a nursery song about a mother duck. Her devotion to Captain is sometimes tested, yet Zebiba is devoted to him and achieving her goals, even as she’s shaken by a difficult loss. - LB
The Father (Special Presentations)
Mon, Sept 14, RBC Lakeside Drive-In at Ontario Place, 9 pm; Tue, Sept 15, Online at Bell Digital Cinema from 6 pm.
The horrors and indignities inflicted by dementia on both sufferers and those caring for them are grimly explored in this drama from director Florian Zeller adapted from his 2012 play. It all starts out well enough. Elderly Anthony enjoys an afternoon listening to music in his well-appointed London flat. Daughter Anne comes to visit and bring news. She is moving to Paris, and failing Anthony’s care must be reassessed, especially since ongoing hostilities have produced a stream of quitting in-home carers. What follows is a kaleidoscopic shifting of settings and characters — is that Anne or nurse Laura? Which Laura is nurse Laura? Whose husband is that? Where does that door lead anyway? — mimicking the destabilizing impacts of dementia. Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman are reliably excellent as father and daughter, but the real star is the script which leverages its nefarious core character for maximum effect. - KH
Quo Vadis, Aida? (Contemporary World Cinema)
Mon. Sept. 14, Bell Online Digital Cinema from 6 pm; Sat. Sept. 19, TIFF Bell Ligthbox, 12 pm.
Jasmila Žbanić, the Bosnian director who won Berlin’s Golden Bear in 2006, succeeds where many films fail in conveying the human dimensions of a mass war atrocity. Quo Vadis, Aida? shows the 1995 massacre of more than 8,000 civilians, mostly boys and men, in the town of Srebrenica, which was ostensibly under United Nations protection. The film focuses on Aida (Jasna Đuričić, powerful) a local middle-aged translator at the Dutch-run UN base, who has access to the official channels and information, but also has a husband and two adult sons she needs to protect.
When the UN fails to deliver promised air-strikes against the surrounding Serb army if they break the temporary truce, General Ratko Mladic (Boris Isakovic) swaggers into the town and begins dictating the rules of surrender. Aida is forced to convey the official falsely calming message to the refugees while struggling to save her family. Tautly edited by Jaroslaw Kominski (Ida, Cold War), the film proceeds at a thriller’s pace, immersing the viewer in a personal, first-hand experience that, while harrowing, feels vital to understanding and remembering. - LL
Violation (Midnight Madness)
Mon, Sept. 14, 9 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox; Thu, Sept. 17, Online at Bell Digital Cinema starting at 6 pm.
Directors Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer’s unsettling thriller, Violation, gives cause to reconsider the adage that dying is easy, comedy is hard. And while there is no comedy going on in Violation, there is dying, and it is far from easy. What amounts to a revenge drama becomes so much more in the hands of these filmmakers. Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer resist any inclination to exploit the crime to justify the punishment. Instead, the offense, played intermittently between scenes of revenge, is underlit and clumsily executed, as to edge dangerously close to being falsely misunderstood as innocuous. Sims-Fewer plays Miriam, a woman whose failing marriage feels like further evidence of her sister’s more charmed life. But when that charmed life shows its cracks, Miriam begins calculating an act of vicious and untidy revenge. - TE
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