Take One (Dec 2003 - Mar 2004)

Toronto International Film Festival (9/4-14/03) By Kathleen Cummins There were 42 Canadian features, including co-productions, and 39 Canadian shorts in this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. There were the usual themes of fear, paranoia, death and sexual anxieties. There were a few hits, particularly from Quebec. However, the real story for Canadian cinema at this year’s festival may have more to with the programming rather than the films. One couldn’t help but notice that a significant number of Canadian films were not featured in the Perspective Canada program. Many of our key filmmakers such as Guy Maddin, Deepa Mehta, Ron Mann and Allan King were featured in other programs, for example Special Presentations, Galas and Masters. What does this tell us about Perspective Canada’s present role in the festival? Would Maddin and Mehta say they are no longer in need of the program? Should we ask if Perspective Canada is even necessary anymore? Yet, what about our emerging filmmakers? Where would they be without Perspective Canada? Everyone agrees that highlighting Canadian voices is valuable and even necessary. The question is how. How will the Canadian presence be preserved and protected in a healthy and respectful manner without the risk of being ghettoized? Perhaps the PC program is experiencing a similar trend to that of women’s film festivals, once in abundance worldwide but now a testimonial to the past? Is this what Perspective Canada has become? No one would argue the PC program has done a great service to Canadian cinema, particularly because TIFF has grown to such international prominence. Like those women’s film festivals, it’s a cultural marker of how far we’ve come in the past 20 years. Now it may be time to look beyond the past and establish where we are going with this little engine that could. THE DOCS This year, two Canadian documentaries were honoured by the AGF People’s Choice Award; Ron Mann’s Go Further and Mark Achbar’s and Jennifer Abbott's The Corporation. As first runner-up, Go Further is an entertaining and fun film about a very serious topic: environmental sustainability. The publicity surrounding Go Further made much of Woody Harrelson’s presence, but the film never falters off its course, deploying Woody as more of a device to promote its message about alternative living and our mainstream drive toward the death of the planet. The second runner-up, The Corporation, is a dense exploration into the meaning, the power and the future of corporations. Based on the book by the same title, the film is a damning investigation into how and why corporations function the way they do. Everyone has blood on their hands in this film, especially us, as Achbar and Abbot reveal Woody Harrelson in Ron Mann’s Go Further. TAKE ONE