GRAB A CHAIR AND WATCH A MOVIE AL FRESCO THIS SUMMER
At the Harbourfront, Christie Pits and beyond, outdoor films are now a regular Toronto pastime
Blankets, lawn chairs, tasty snacks, hip flasks — whatever it is that you need to complete your al-frescocinema experience this summer, it’s time to have it ready because this week sees the start for many of the city’s most popular outdoor screenings programs. Once a relatively minor entertainment option, it’s now grown into a regular pastime for Torontonians who can enjoy a movie under the stars nearly every night of the week (provided it’s not pouring).
Offering both live music and a hip new movie, the Open Roof Festival begins its seventh season on Tuesday at 99 Sudbury St. with a performance by intergalactic robo-funk combo Matrox and a screening of Richard Linklater’s brah-fest Everybody Wants
Some! The series continues on Tuesdays (and sometimes Wednesdays) until the end of August — among the highlights when it comes to the bigscreen fare are Sleeping Giant (July 13) and the new Nick Kroll comedy My
Blind Brother (Aug. 17). Always a big draw, Harbourfront Centre’s Free Flicks gets rolling on its Wednesday-night lineup of “fun and inspiring” movies at the WestJet Stage on June 22 with Mean Girls. The series — which runs to August 31 — makes room for two quintessentially Canadian crowd pleasers, Strange Brew (June 29) and The Grand Seduction (July 20). Though the Christie Pits Film Festival doesn’t kick off until June 26, the organizers at the Toronto Outdoor Picture Show present an off-site screening this weekend at Queensway Park. In an encore of an event that slayed moviegoers at the Pits last July, Toronto band Del Bel performs its original live score for F.W. Murnau’s silent horror classic Nos
feratu on Saturday. The Rezonance Baroque Ensemble performs excerpts of other famous film scores as a prelude to the fang-y goings-on.
Alas, TIFF in the Park will not be back this summer but the City Cinema series at Yonge Dundas Square is set to start June 28, St. James Park hosts movies on the last Thursday of every month and Sugar Beach’s Sail-in Cinema will be back in August. So feel free to fill your pockets with Junior Mints and go wherever the night takes you.
Female Eye Film Festival: The 14th annual edition of the Female Eye Film Festival continues to Sunday with screenings, panels and classes that celebrate (and foster) achievements by women filmmakers in Canada and internationally. On Friday, the Theatre Centre with three programs of shorts plus new features such as The
Birdwatcher, a drama by B.C. director Siobhan Devine about a single mother with a terminal illness who tries to reconnect with her birth mother. The slate on Friday includes a spotlight on aboriginal filmmakers and a latenight program of genre and experimental fare. Many, many more films screen on the final day on Sunday, though perhaps the most keenly anticipated is the latest by Deborah Kampmeier, the American director who made a big stir with her 2007 drama Hounddog and elicited a breakthrough performance by future
Mad Men star Elisabeth Moss in 2003’s Virgin. The story of a young actress who uses theatrical masks as a means of confronting inner troubles, SPLiT plays the Female Eye Film Festival’s closing gala on Sunday.
Toronto Korean Film Festival: A showcase of worthy new work by one of Asia’s most robust film cultures, the Toronto Korean Film Festival returns for its fifth edition. The TKFF launches Friday at the Toronto Centre for the Arts with two free screenings. Along with a program of shorts by Korean-Canadian filmmakers, the fest presents The World of Us, a first feature and recent Berlin festival selection by director Ga-eun Yoon about turmoil in the life of an 11-yearold girl. The TKFF then shifts to Innis Town Hall for a slate that includes the North American premieres of Trou
blers — a new documentary about the discrimination and violence faced by LGBTQ people living in South Korea — and Stop — a recent drama by Kim Ki-duk, the much-decorated if critically divisive director of Pieta and
3-Iron. Both play Sunday. More fine shorts play the competition showcase on Tuesday. A wild comedy thriller set in a karaoke complex that won fans at SXSW last year, SangChan Kim’s Karaoke Crazies makes its Canadian debut on Wednesday. The TKFF wraps up on June 24 with
Dong-Ju: The Portrait of a Poet, a biopic about one of South Korea’s best loved literary figures.
Cheryl Dunne on The Watermelon Woman: TIFF Bell Lightbox continues its spate of Pride Month events with a 20th-anniversary screening of a key work in the New Queer Cinema movement of the ’90s. The Watermelon Woman stars Cheryl Dunye (also the film’s writer and director) as a documentary filmmaker whose quest to discover more about an anonymous African-American actress from the ’30s sparks a burgeoning and — at least to the filmmaker’s friends — controversial romance with a white video-store patron played by Go
Fish’s Guinevere Turner. Dunye visits the Lightbox to present a new digital restoration of the film on Thursday.