Film Fest Part 2

I haven't had much time lately to write in here, but I wanted to finish off the list of what I saw at the Toronto International Film Festival. It was fun (mostly) to work at one of the film fest venues this year, and I hope to have the time to do it again next September. It was a very high-energy, high-pressure, fast-paced environment, for a very short time peroid.

Severance - a midnight madness quirky comedy action-gore thing... I wish I could tell you more but Lindsay and I (okay, I) had imbibed a little too voluminously beforehand for me to give you anything other than fuzzy recollections... But while it was at times amusing, it wasn't really my thing. The crowd was into it, though, which must have been nice for the UK director in attendance.

Jindabyne - an Australian film starring Gabriel Byrne, and based on Raymond Carver's story "So Much Water So Close to Home." The film powerfully depicts the emotional complexities of the various ways in which we deal with death, both on a personal and on a community level. But more than that, the pivotal discovery of the body acts as a catalyst for change in various characters and their relationships with themselves, their spouses, their friends, and their communities. Definitely worth seeing. I'm going to read this Carver short story and see how they differ.

A Grave-Keeper's Tale - an Indian mythic film, about a woman who tends the graves of children for a living, and is eventually cast out of her village as a "ghoul." Afterward, I learned it was also based on a short story, called "Baayen" by Mahasweta Devi. It was an interesting and vivid film, and I appreciated it's underlying message of how fear and ignorance can irrationally excise individuals or groups from their communities. Ultimately though, the film was just a little too melodramatic for me.

Khadak - a Belgium/German/Dutch film set in Mongolia, about a boy who is able to sense the suffering of animals over great distances, and convulses in seizures. Whether it's a mysterious power or epilepsy is unclear, but not entirely relevant to enjoy this highly imagistic and poetic film. The family is forced from their farm in the steppes to a mining town by a military convoy, and the allegorical and gorgeous film explores how this effects their pysche and community. Gradually the film becomes less linear and purely imagistic, which seemed to confuse and even annoy some viewers sitting near me, but I quite enjoyed it. Must be the poet parts of me. I did agree with one overheard conversation afterward, in which one viewer was saying that she wouldn't have minded the change in tone and style if it had been more consistent, rather than two thirds story and suddenly one third metaphoric images. That last third though was stunningly beautiful and evocative and I would see it all again.

Cheers.