Undaunted film buffs prepare to unite online
We Are One festival full of screen gems
The lineup for the We Are One film festival has been released, and it’s a doozy. The 10-day online event will feature more than 100 films and film-related content curated by more than a score of international festivals including Berlin, Cannes and Toronto. There will be music, VR and Bong Joon-ho.
The festival, overseen by Tribeca Enterprises, announced itself one month ago, with little more than a Youtube site and a run date of May 29 through June 7. It also said all content would be free to access, although there will be a donation button with each video to give to WHO, UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders and other groups.
As befits a film festival, the lineup includes several premieres, including a short documentary about the making of Third Eye Blind’s cult hit Motorcycle Drive By; The Yalta Conference Online, which imagines the Allied meeting at the end of the Second World War as a dark satire; and the online premiere of Eeb Allay Ooo, a comedy about a professional monkey repeller, which won several prizes at last year’s Mumbai film festival.
There are also several VR titles in the mix, among them science- fiction — Alternation is about a dream experiment gone wrong — and documentary titles. Ivory Burn is a short by Nicholas de Pencier, Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky about the destruction of confiscated elephant tusks in a bid to stop the ivory trade. It was part of their Anthropocene project, which includes a film, book and gallery exhibit.
The Toronto International Film Festival has provided three titles for the festival. Crazy World is a Ugandan action flick that had its world premiere in the festival’s Midnight Madness program last year. There’s also a master class from Aboriginal actress and activist Tantoo Cardinal, recorded at TIFF in 2018, and a 2019 conversation between Viggo Mortensen and David Cronenberg about the film Crash.
Bong Joon- ho and Song Kang- ho, the director and one of the stars of the Oscar winning film Parasite, will be featured in a talk they gave at last year’s Locarno film festival. We Are One: A Global Film Festival begins May 29 at youtube. com/ weareone.