The ICFF/Lavazza Film Festival: Three weeks of movies under the stars in cars
Toronto movie fans, who’ve been living in a no-theatre zone for most of the past year, have been travelling a half-hour or more to the nearest drive-ins (Oakville, Hamilton) to see Hollywood fodder like F9.
But the drive-in facilities at Ontario Place (soon to be used for the Toronto International Film Festival) will be up and running daily for three weeks starting Sunday, June 27, courtesy of the Italian Contemporary Film Festival and the international Lavazza Film Festival.
Micheál Richardson and dad Liam Neeson star as father and son in mourning in Made In Italy.
It’s a bigger, more ambitious version of the pandemic-response Lavazza drive-in festival that ICFF launched last year, mixing Italian theatre fare with global favourites from Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Turkey, India and more.
The 21-feature dual-festival debuts Sunday with The Comeback Trail by George Gallo, starring Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Tommy Lee Jones. It follows Monday with Alice Filippi’s Out Of My League (Sul più bello), a Young Adult tale that plays like a mashup of Pretty in Pink and The Fault in our Stars. It’s about an effervescent but (she thinks) plain young woman with Cystic Fibrosis, who decides her limited time makes it the right time to ask out the handsomest guy in school.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Tuesday’s feature, Made in Italy, teams Liam Neeson and his real-life son Micheál Richardson in a story about a widowed father and grieving son who overcome their estrangement in the process of preparing a family villa in Tuscany for sale. The movie resonates with the real-life accidental death of Neeson’s wife Natasha Richardson.
Canada Day celebrates an actual Canadian success story with the movie Peace By Chocolate, directed by Jonathan Keijser The drama is based on a Syrian refugee family that ended up in Antigonish, N.S., where they started a successful chocolate factory from scratch, becoming a major employer.
Other notable movies in the lineup include Lasciami Andare (You Came Back), a Venice-set ghost story with an earthbound twist (July 2), and (my favourite) the crazily-antic South Korean action-comedy Ok, Madam! by
Cheol-ha Lee, in which North and South Korean agents battle it out on a hijacked passenger jet. (July 7).
The line-up also includes audience-choice winners from previous ICFF festivals, including At War With Love (In Guerra Per Amore), a comedy-romance set amid the Allied invasion of Sicily in World War II, where Sicilian-Americans were conscripted to act as translators for the problematic dialect. Also having a return screening,
Mike van Diem’s Tulipani: Love, Honour and a Bicycle, a Dutch/Canadian/Italian co-production about a Dutch war survivor who introduces tulips to an Italian village and falls in love with the people and place.
Writers from Original-Cin - a festival partner - will host short, pre-show discussions of each night’s film, available on the cinema audio feed on your car radio, and simulcast on CHIN radio.
From last year’s experience, I can recommend this movie night under the stars. with smoothly directed traffic and food service delivery to your car, ordered from your smartphone.
CLICK HERE for schedule and ticket information.