Peter Howell explains why controversy and film festivals go hand in hand,
Observing that the Toronto International Film Festival will be showing a potentially controversial film is like predicting that a politician will stretch the truth.
It should go without saying, although it often has to be said, that TIFF exists to provide moviegoers with “Infinite Views,” to quote its pithy slogan for next month’s festival, which runs Sept. 8 to 18. It’s absolutely not the fest’s mandate to seek out the most bland and inoffensive cinema possible.
Piers Handling, TIFF’s director and CEO, offered a timely reminder of this reality when I sought his reaction this week to the uproar over Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation, a Sundance-lauded slave drama now burdened with rape allegations from Parker’s past.
TIFF is standing by plans to screen the film three times, two of them on Sept. 9 as part of its international premiere, although there are no plans for a festival press conference for the film.
“You never want the festival to turn into a safe festival that’s unafraid of controversy,” Handling said.
Handling and his staff have stared down many protests during TIFF’s 41-year history. The most vociferous I’ve seen was the 2004 furor over a documentary called Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat, which merely described the fatal torturing of a cat on video by three Toronto men who were trying to pass themselves off as artists. To say that cat lovers were outraged is putting it mildly.
The actual killing wasn’t shown, but the TIFF programmer who selected the doc received a death threat at his home and the festival screening had picketers outside the theatre, demanding the film not be shown. It was shown, and civilization survived.
It’s almost a tradition at TIFF that some film will upset somebody. Just last year, Aretha Franklin managed to block the world premiere of the music doc Amazing Grace, due to a long-standing legal embroilment between the Queen of Soul and film producer Alan Elliott.
What’s unusual about The Birth of a Nation fracas is that there’s no apparent public alarm over the film’s content, despite its visceral take on America’s tragic history of slavery.
It’s the fact that Nate Parker, the film’s director, co-writer, co-producer and lead star, was charged with raping a fellow Penn State University student in 1999, along with his then-roommate Jean Celestin. Parker was acquitted in a subsequent trial but Celestin — who later helped co-write The Birth of a Nation — was found guilty and sentenced to six months in prison, a verdict that was overturned on appeal. The woman who accused both men was never satisfied with the judicial outcome and committed suicide in 2012.
TIFF wants us to judge The Birth of a Nation strictly for what’s on the screen, an eminently reasonable but difficult proposition, given Parker’s huge involvement with the film. His face is also on the posters, including one showing him being hanged with a noose fashioned from the U.S. flag.
The heat proved too much for the American Film Institute in L.A., which announced it is cancelling this Friday’s scheduled screening for students of The Birth of a Nation, which was to have included a Q-and-A with Parker. But Handling insists TIFF is sticking to its screening plans, and he points out that it’s by no means the most difficult film chosen for the fest this year. “We are showing many more controversial films, to be honest. There are so many films that deal with the radicalization of youth. When you see Nocturama, the Bertrand Bonello film that deals with youth in Paris, just the context within which he has made his film is designed to be controversial,” Handling said. “And I think Mathieu Denis’ film, Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves, is also quite controversial.”
I mention to Handling two other films coming to TIFF likely to provoke strong debate, these ones over issues of gender and sex: Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, in which Isabelle Huppert plays a rape victim who seeks unorthodox revenge on her attacker, which alternately delighted or dismayed viewers at its Cannes premiere; and Walter Hill’s (Re) Assignment, in which Michelle Rodriguez plays a male murderer who is turned into a woman by a vengeful cosmetic surgeon (Sigourney Weaver), a plot device the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) has objected to, sight unseen.
“Filmmakers should be provocative,” Handling argued.
“They should be pushing their noses into difficult issues. We’ve always welcomed that, and in some cases, filmmakers have actually changed history.”
As examples of this, he pointed to Joe Berlinger’s Paradise Lost trilogy and Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, documentaries about wrongful arrests and convictions that were subsequently overturned after films about the cases prompted new investigations.
It remains to be seen what the public reaction will be to The Birth of a Nation and other uncompromising films at TIFF 2016., But it’s unlikely to be indifference, a reaction no serious filmgoer or festival programmer ever wants to see. Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column runs Fridays.