This year it seemed that the Toronto International Film Festival's notable controversy would be Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore's first-person tour of an imploded Wall Street. Now Moore and the some 300 other filmmakers from 64 countries at North America's most important film festival are sharing the public's attention with a protest over a collaboration between TIFF and the Israeli city of Tel Aviv.
It concerns the selection of Tel Aviv as the focus for the first edition of the City to City programme, which presents 10 Israeli films that festival programmers say "[explore] the evolving urban experience by immersing audiences in the best films from and about a selected city". Signatories to an open letter called The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation - among them the filmmaker Ken Loach, the actors Jane Fonda and Danny Glover, the singer David Byrne, the Canadian writer Naomi Klein, the US playwrights Eve Ensler and Wallace Shawn, and the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman - complained that the selection contained no Palestinian filmmakers and linked the programme to an Israeli government promotional campaign. (The festival insists the selection was made independently.)
"We protest that TIFF, whether intentionally or not, has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine," they stated in the declaration, which was also signed by several Israeli filmmakers and by the Canadian director John Greyson, who withdrew his short film, Covered, from TIFF. TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey defended the choice of Tel Aviv as inaugural partner "because the films being made there explore and critique the city from many different perspectives". Bailey noted: "Tel Aviv is not a simple choice and that the city remains contested ground." He also stressed that TIFF was showing two Palestinian films and other features from Egypt and Lebanon.
Despite the protest, the festival will get under way today with world premieres, new Hollywood movies, an expanded documentary section, and discoveries from throughout the world. TIFF has evolved into a launching site for autumn films in North America. As the last major festival before Oscar nominations are announced, Toronto's films seem positioned to stick in the mind of Academy members - or at least filmmakers hope so.
Eyes at TIFF this year will be on a mix of new pictures, by such veterans as Todd Solondz, Bruce Beresford, Bruno Dumont, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Atom Egoyan, Jon Amiel, Rodrigo Garcia, Moore and dozens of newcomers. Toronto has a sizeable chunk of historical dramas. Creation, by Amiel, examines the life of Charles Darwin, the biologist and evolutionary theorist. Starring Paul Bettany as Darwin and Jennifer Connelly as his wife, the film follows Darwin's struggle to finish his 1859 work, On the Origin of the Species.
Meanwhile, Emily Blunt stars as Queen Victoria in The Young Victoria, TIFF'S closing-night film, with Bettany as Lord Melbourne and Rupert Friend as Prince Albert. The Young Victoria reinvents the notion of "Victorian," in this case as romantic and fun, says the film's distributor, Bob Berney of the newly created Apparition Films. "This is the real partnership in marriage and the real love affair," he explains.
In the festival's Real to Reel section of documentaries, which sets Toronto apart from its peers at documentary-deprived Cannes, Venice and Berlin, stories from the headlines will share the bill with personal films. In How to Fold a Flag, Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein follow US soldiers as they return from Iraq to America. Bassidji, by Mehran Tamadon, an Iranian living in France, examines the volunteer forces who supported troops on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War and, more recently, attacked protesters in the demonstrations that followed Iran's elections in June.
Meanwhile, in Cleanflix, Andrew James and Joshua Ligari document Mormon movie fans taking on Hollywood after the studios sue them for distributing movies edited illegally for Mormon audiences. Two documentaries that premiered in Toronto last year, Food Inc and Valentino, have led the box office for non-fiction films this year. Indeed, Toronto has pointed consistently to trends and winners in the marketplace, even though the festival itself gives no prizes except an audience award and a Canadian competition honour. Toronto's audience award has gone to three recent films that won Best Picture at the Academy Awards - American Beauty (1999), Crash (2004) and last year's Slumdog Millionaire.
Everyone in the film industry remembers Slumdog Millionaire's effect on audiences last year in Toronto and TIFF's September programme includes several aspirants to that status. Road, Movie, by Dev Benegal, is an adventure in Rajasthan that lurches from one village to the next in a battered truck filled with Bollywood classics. Bangladesh's Golam Rabbany Biplob offers a moral tale of village corruption by the temptations of the city in the world premiere of Beyond the Circle. And Kolkata becomes a complex character in The Waiting City, by the Australian Claire McCarthy, in which Radha Mitchell and Joel Edgerton play a foreign couple eager to adopt a child but forced to endure bureaucratic chaos.
Obviously, everyone is going to have to look at these this year, says Bob Berney. "Hopefully, they're going to be something unique, and not Slumdog wannabes."
