This year’s TIFF brims with issues buzzing in the news
High-profile movies about urgent topics
As the preeminent gathering for upscale fall cinema, the Toronto International Film Festival prides itself on relevance and social consciousness.
But few editions in the 42-year history of the festival compare to this one.
The combination of high-profile movies about urgent topics and the feeling of urgency in the world at large is set to give the annual September rite an unprecedented electricity.
It began Thursday night with a story of international rivalry and cult-of-hothead-personality (tennis drama “Borg/McEnroe” with Shia LaBeouf as John McEnroe) — and continues over 10 days with movies about race, environmentalism, globalism, feminism and politics.
“Our job is to try to rip down walls and start conversations, and this year’s festival reflects that,” said TIFF artistic director Cameron Bailey.
Charged social topics percolate through many of the fest’s North American premières.
David Gordon Green’s Boston Marathon-bombing drama “Stronger,” for instance, examines the nature of patriotism and heroism, subtly asking what it means to cheer on America at a time of crisis.
In “Disobedience,” the Argentine-Chilean director Sebastian Lelio investigates LGBTQ repression via a lesbian drama, starring Rachel McAdams and Rachel Weisz, set in the Orthodox Jewish world.
Topical ideas ripple under “Mother!” an ostensible horror movie that’s really a larger parable of environmental catastrophe (among other things) from the “Black Swan” auteur Darren Aronofsky.
And some hot-button issues take centre stage with “Mary Shelley,” a movie about the taboobreaking feminist author directed by Saudi Arabia’s Haifaa al-Mansour, a taboo-breaking feminist director.
“I understood deeply where Mary Shelley comes from — a young woman trying to be an artist and break away from a conservative world,” Al-Mansour said of the film, which stars Elle Fanning in the title role. “It’s very relevant because at a time when some want to take us backward.”
“Shelley” is one of many movies directed by women at TIFF, which organizers say for the first time ever counts more than onethird of its directors as female. (The slate, it should be noted, is also slimmed this year by about 15 per cent as programmers try to give the sprawling event a slightly more manageable feel.)
Documentaries will also confront newsy issues — sometimes head-on, sometimes with more nuance.
In “The Final Year,” Greg Barker offers an inside look at the Obama administration and its foreignpolicy team in the last 12 months of his presidency.
The movie follows the 44th president and a team that includes former Secretary of State John Kerry, ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power and senior strategist Ben Rhodes in the West Wing and around the world as they apply their brand of engaged globalism on issues ranging from climate change to Syria.
“Someone asked me right after election day, ‘How does this affect your movie?’” Barker said. “And I told them, ‘I think it just got more important.’
Jason Kohn’s tennis documentary “Love Means Zero,” focusing on the brash, victory-at-all-costs tennis coach Nick Bollettieri, offers implicit parallels to the current White House occupant. “I know every movie can be seen as an allegory for Trump,” said Kohn. “But I think that’s really the big theme in the movie and in our country right now: At what price winning?”
The explicitness of many directors on this subject represents a shift from just a few years ago, when many were loath to acknowledge political elements in their work for fear of dividing audiences. But with America already divided, they say, there’s no reason to hold back.
“What I see as the big topic in so many of these movies is survival,” said Piers Handling, TIFF’s director and chief executive. “I think they underscore what a lot of us are worried about, which is what the future will look like and what place we’ll have in it.”