DOCTORS, DONKEYS AND GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S HEROES
Movie options range from Eisenstein’s October to Repo Man to a Filipino masterpiece of cinema
Bending the Arc + Do Donkeys Act? Though the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema will be thick with Tragically Hip fans for the release of Long Time
Running, the theatre has several more notable new additions to its schedule, including this month’s selection for the monthly Doc Soup series. Screening three times Wednesday and Thursday, Bending the Arc depicts the history of Partners in Health, a non-profit organization founded on the radical notion that even the world’s poorest communities deserve modern health care. Executive produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, the film delves into the past and present activism of the group’s Rwanda-based founder, Dr. Paul Farmer, and others who’ve strived to make a positive impact. Co-director Pedro Kos appears along with another of the film’s subjects — Dr. Fernet Leandre, coexecutive director of Partners in Health in Haiti — at the post-screening Q&As. This week also sees the return of one of the Hot Docs festival’s most enjoyably peculiar selections: Do Donkeys
Act, a British film that invites viewers to look at the world from its lowly subject’s point of view, albeit with some help from narrator Willem Dafoe. Co-directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, Do Donkeys Act runs Friday to Sunday.
Guillermo del Toro film series: The love affair between this city and a certain Mexican director has reached a new degree of intensity with the rapturous reception of his new Toron- to-shot film The Shape of Water at TIFF and this week’s opening for the AGO exhibition of his spooky ephemera. Along with the show comes three related screening series.
Beginning this weekend at the Lightbox, Guillermo del Toro: Influences includes many of the movies that scared, delighted and inspired him the most. It launches with a double shot of crackpot Terry Gilliam movies, namely Time Bandits (Friday) and
Brazil (Saturday). The AGO follows suit with Nightmare on Dundas Street Movie Nights, a selection of terrifying films as selected by the man himself, starting with Psycho on Oct. 6. Jackman Hall is also the place to see showings of Del Toro’s own movies in October and November, beginning with his eerie Spanish Civil War tale The Devil’s Backbone on Oct. 11 and 13. Remembering Harry Dean Stanton: A man who truly put the character in the term “character actor,” Harry Dean Stanton passed away this month at the age of 91. It was the end of a career that had stretched all the way from TV dramas and movie westerns in the 1950s to this year’s appearances in David Lynch’s Twin
Peaks: The Return and the indie drama Lucky. The Royal honours him by screening a movie that features one of his most memorable roles: Bud, the relentlessly foul-mouthed but code-abiding mentor to Emilio Estevez’s L.A. punk in Repo Man. Alex Cox’s scrappy cult favourite plays Tuesday and Wednesday.
Soviet, German and Filipino cinema
at the Lightbox: This week’s schedule at TIFF HQ also sees the launch of three different programs of essential cinema from different corners of the world. The Heart of the World: Masterpieces of Soviet Silent Cinema includes many landmarks in the history of film, including Dziga Vertov’s spellbinding 1929 “city symphony” Man with a Movie Camera — local duo Spectrum provides the live accompaniment for the Friday screening of a new digital restoration. Other highlights of the series’ first week include Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth (Sunday) and Sergei Eisenstein’s
October (Tuesday). Also at the Lightbox, the Goethe-Institut celebrates director Margarethe von Trotta’s decades-long collaboration with actor Barbara Sukowa with screenings of Marianne and Julianne (Tuesday), Rosa Luxemburg (Thursday) and
Hannah Arendt (Oct. 12). Finally, the TIFF Cinematheque’s People Have the Power: Resistance in Filipino Cinema begins Thursday with a showing of Lino Brocka’s 1976 masterpiece Insiang with an introduction by the University of Toronto’s Robert Diaz.
In Brief:
Other new movie imports in GTA cinemas this week include the Hong Kong crime drama Chasing the Drag
on, Chinese director Feng Xiaogang’s recent TIFF selection Youth and the Hindi-language action-comedy Judwaa 2.
Ghostbusters (the 1984 one) plays a weeklong run at the Carlton starting Friday.
A rumbling showcase of twowheeled cinema, the Toronto Motorcycle Film Festival runs to Sunday at the Revue.
The Toronto Film Society’s Monday Night Film Buffs series continues Monday at the Carlton with two vintage thrillers with occidental settings: Josef von Sternberg’s 1932 hit Shanghai Express and Lewis Milestone’s The General Died at Dawn from 1936.
John Carpenter’s The Thing is this month’s pick for NOW magazine’s Monday Free Flick program at the Royal on Monday.