CELEBRATING THE STRAUB-HUILLET INFLUENCE ON WORLD CINEMA
TIFF Bell Lightbox series focuses on French couple who created more than two-dozen films
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle
Huillet: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet first met in Paris as students in the 1950s and got married in 1959. Over the course of the 47 years until Huillet’s death in 2006, the duo created more than twodozen films together. Stylistically austere and intellectually rigorous, their work was not necessarily designed for mass appeal but their influence on world cinema is incalculable. Patrons of TIFF Bell Lightbox will surely realize this during a deep dive into Not Reconciled, the firstever local retrospective of the team collectively known as Straub-Huillet.
The series launches Friday with a 35 mm screening of Chronicle of Anna
Magdalena Bach, the duo’s 1967 music-filled masterpiece on the life of composer J.S. Bach. Other essentials include History Lessons (Thursday), a provocative adaptation of an unfinished novel by Bertold Brecht, and
Sicilia! (March 17), a stunning drama about a Sicilian exile’s fraught homecoming. Not Reconciled runs to April 2. Toronto Irish Film Festival: Also at the Lightbox this weekend is the seventh-annual edition of the Toronto Irish Film Festival, a showcase of new features, docs and shorts by Ireland’s filmmaking talent. A brandnew doc about the under-heralded connections between the Emerald Isle and Canadian hockey, Puck of the
Irish, plays the TIRFF’s opening night gala on Friday, with director Eamonn
O’Cualain in attendance. The program also includes Canadian premieres for The Flag (Saturday), a period comedy starring popular comedic actor Pat Shortt, and How to Defuse a Bomb: The Project Children
Story (Tuesday), a doc about a bombdisposal expert’s efforts to bring some peace to kids amid the Troubles (Liam Neeson serves as narrator). The TIRFF runs Friday to Sunday at TIFF Bell Lightbox. Malgré la nuit at MDFF: A cult figure among cinephiles thanks to uniquely visceral features such as 2002’s La vie nouvelle, French director Philippe Grandrieux made a typically startling return to the festival circuit in 2015 with Malgré la nuit, a moody psychodrama set in the most sordid corners of the porn industry. As usual, it’s not for the faint of heart, but regulars of the MDFF’s series at the Royal like risky cinema. It makes its Toronto premiere on Wednesday. Goethe Films: Heimat NOW: A popular genre with German-speaking movie audiences from the late 1940s to the ’70s, Heimatfilms were traditionally told tales of rural life. In the decades since, directors as diverse as Edgar Reitz and Michael Haneke have used the genre’s conventions for their own purposes. A series by the Goethe-Institut at TIFF Bell Lightbox, Heimat NOW consists of five recent cinematic representations of rural life in (and sometimes outside) postreunification Germany. The program launches Tuesday with the Toronto premiere of Grave Decisions, director Marcus H. Rosenmuller’s comedy about a boy with ambitions that may be too big for his small Bavarian village. Heimat NOW continues with Lightbox screenings on Thursday and March 14 and a talk by German author Frank Goosen at the Goethe- Institut on March 10.
Ban This Series: The Trump administration wants Americans to believe that any person from the seven Muslim-majority countries on its initial travel-ban list is a potential threat to the nation. As you might expect, many movies present a very different view of these people and the struggles they face.
A highly topical free screening series at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, Ban This Series comprises one film from each of the seven countries on the list. Selections include My
Country, My Country, a look at an Iraqi doctor and activist doing his best for Baghdad, by Citizenfour director Laura Poitras, and Stolen Seas, a guided tour of the treacherous world of Somali pirates. Both screen Tuesday.
Ban This Series runs Monday to Wednesday. Although tickets are free, donations will be happily accepted at the door for Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and the National Council of Canadian Muslims.
In brief
á The Carlton presents the Japanese grindhouse fave Shogun Assassin Saturday.
á A Few Good Men plays Cineplex’s Classic Film Series at participating theatres on Sunday and March 15.
á Ruth Wilson takes the title role in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in the latest National Theatre production to play Cineplex screens on Thursday.