Film Journey

This should wrap up my quick takes on the films I watched at the Toronto International Film Festival. I fully intend to revisit several of these films at length in the future.

Bamako
One of the highlights of the Los Angeles Film Festival this summer was the revival screening of Abderrahmane Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness (2002), a beautifully elliptical film about a teenager drifting through a coastal Mauritanian town and encountering various local inhabitants. What I most appreciated about the film was its silence and ambiguity; what I most appreciate about Bamako, Sissako’s newest film, is its passionate voice. …

I’m back in Los Angeles, but I’ll be posting the rest of my TIFF impressions this week. Including The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, these are the documentaries I screened:

Manufactured Landscapes

This film introduced me to the work of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian large-scale photographer whose primary subject is industrial wastelands. From massive technological vistas to mountains of debris to oily vistas stretching off into the horizon, Burtynsky’s photos are startling in their scope and dystopian detail.

The film also provided my first look at one of the unexpected motifs at the festival this year, the Three Gorges …

Continuing with the Toronto International Film Festival ’06 coverage…

Offside

Jafar Panahi–known for his controversial and hard-hitting dramas The Circle and Crimson Gold–has crafted his most vibrantly energetic and entertaining film to date, without compromising his social vision one iota. Various young Iranian women individually attempt to sneak into the 2005 World Cup qualification tournament between Iran and Bahrain but are arrested and detained because of an Islamic convention that only allows men to attend sporting events. (Ostensibly, the fear is that women might be exposed to harsh language.) What proceeds is a film shot with great immediacy with …

TIFF has been a fine, blustery week, with temperatures hovering in the 60s with occasional showers. After the heat records in Los Angeles this summer, this feels like paradise, and standing in line at midnight for The Host in a torrential downpour with lighting crashing around us was an atmospheric high point of the festival. The films and company have been terrific–I’ve only seen one movie I ultimately disliked, and so far I’ve seen about 20 of them (not including the Wavelengths program of shorts).

Here are my impressions of the films, which I hope to add in six- or …