October: A Month of Festivals to Improve the World - Planet in Focus, ImagineNATIVE, Rendezvous With Madness
By Liam Lacey
Let it hereby be declared that October be designated Toronto’s official Make the World A Better Place Film Festival Month, with three of the city’s long-running advocacy film festivals all beginning this month.
It starts this week with the environmentally themed Planet in Focus International Environmental Film Festival (Oct. 12-Oct. 22), followed by the Indigenous film and multimedia event, imagineNative Film + Media Arts Festival (Oct. 17-22), and the film and arts festival of mental health, Rendezvous with Madness (Oct. 27-Nov. 5).
Each festival offers between 10 and 20 feature films, mostly documentaries, along with shorts and ancillary events. Though all three festivals started in the 1990s with distinct mandates, the world has become increasingly aware of the intersection between environmental stewardship, Indigenous rights, and mental health care. (A special pre-festival screening of Atilla takes place tonight, October 10, at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema).
A scene from How to Blow Up a Pipeline, part of the Planet in Focus Film Festival.
Rendezvous With Madness:
Spotlight: Atilla, Rendezvous with Madness Special Presentation at Hot Docs
Though it comes last on the October calendar, Rendezvous With Madness, gets the jump with a special presentation on Tuesday evening of the film, Attlla, coinciding with World Mental Health Day.
IN Attila, director Stephen Holder goes on a journey with his friend, Richard, to find the circumstances leading to the death of Richard’s twin brother, Attila, who was found dead on a rooftop from an overdose of fentanyl. The story that unfolds is one of systemic failure, of foster home abuse, mental health and homelessness, and an intimate story of personal loss.
Planet In Focus
Spotlight: s-yéwyáw/Awaken
Filmmaker Liz Marshall collaborated with British Columbia-based First Nations artists and cultural activists, Ecko Aleck, Alfonso Salinas, and Charlene SanJenko, in documenting how traditional cultural teachings and ceremonies - including songs and drumming - can be used to heal and educate.
The lofty goal is to forge bonds between generations while restoring a traditional respect for the land and nature. Very much a team effort, the film emphasizes that film-making itself is part of the cultural work.
imagineNative Film + Media Arts Festival.
Spotlight: Tautuktavuk (What We See)
The winner of an Amplify Voices Award for a first film at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, Tautuktavuk (What We See) is the latest from the Isuma collective.
A recurring image shows a woman, co-director Lucy Tulugarjuk, wearing only shorts and a T-shirt, as she runs barefoot through the snow.
The film is co-directed by and co-stars Carol Kunnuk and Tulugarjuk as two sisters, one in Montreal and one in Nunavut, communicating by video during the COVID lockdown, and revisiting family traumas and histories of sexual abuse and - given limited resources - to heal.
Formally, the film breaks conventions, shifting back and forth between fiction and documentary. W see scenes of daily life in Nunavut during the pandemic, in a panoramic portrait of a community during COVID lockdown, working to keep traditional practices alive while healing from the recent past.
THE FESTIVALS
Planet in Focus (Oct. 12-22). Paradise Theatre, 1006 Bloor St. West. For more information, including the film schedule and tickets, go to https://planetinfocus.org.
Deep Rising, the opening night film, is one of severaL science-themed films on the schedule. It looks atthe dilemma of strip-mining metals from the ocean floor, needed in clean energy batteries used in solar and wind power.
Biocentrics is a look at the multidisciplinary practice of biomimicry, where technology mimics biological structures and systems. After Work, with interviews with Noam Chomsky and Elon Musk among others, explores the implications of automation replacing work.
In the film !AITSA; Indigenous and scientific cosmology meet in a desert region of South Africa, where the world’s biggest radio telescope is being constructed. Other African-based films include A Golden Life, a documentary about the life of a teen-aged gold miner in Burkina Faso. The Hearing looks at African migrants and Canada’s asylum system, following co-director Peggy Nkunga Ndona and her family’s struggle to find a home in Montreal.
Several films focus on social activism, including I Won’t Stand for It, which follows Miyawata Dion Stout, an adolescent First Nations advocate and climate change activist from Winnipeg. How To Blow Up a Pipeline, which had its premiere at at this year’s TIFF, is a thriller inspired by Andreas Malm’s book which argues for property destruction as a tactic in social justice movements.
Foragers, a hybrid docu-fiction, explores Palestinians’ efforts to find edible plants despite the Israeli government’s conservancy laws which prohibit them from foraging.
Two other films explore the role of plants in our lives. Light Needs, by artist Jesse McLean, is about people and their houseplants, while Silvicola looks at contemporary forestry practice in the Canadian Pacific Northwest.
In the miscellaneous category, Cabin Music is a mixture of biography and experimental film by pianist-composer James Carson. Carson built a straw bale cabin in Northern Alberta, a place to create music reflecting nature. The Climate Baby Dilemma looks at young people who cite climate change as their reason for not wanting to have families. Finally, Nuked looks at the environmental and social fallout from nuclear testing, including the Bikini Atoll, where 67 nuclear detonations took place.
ImagneiNative Film Festival + Media Arts (October 17-22). TIFF Bell Lightbox live, and Oct. 23-29 online. https://imaginenative.org
The opening night film, Fancy Dance, which debuted at Sundance earlier this year, follows an aunt (Lily Gladstone) and her niece from Oklahoma’s Seneca-Cayuga reservation on road trip to find the younger woman’s missing mother. The Hollywood Reporter declared it a “first rate feature debut” for Erica Tremblay, who has written and directed for the series, Reservation Dogs. (The festival also includes a three-episode binge party of Reservation Dogs).
Red White & Brass is a comic feature based on a real story about a man, desperate to get a ticket to the 2011 France vs Tonga Rugby World Cup, who comes up with a scheme to form a brass band and perform for the crowd as pre-match entertainment. This, despite the fact that neither he nor his friends can play at all.
Another film hailing from Oceania is the period drama, The New Boy, a drama which premiered at this year’s TIFF, about a nine-year-old Aboriginal with supernatural powers who comes to an orphanage in 1940s Australia, where the nun in charge is played by Cate Blanchett.
The closing night feature of imagineNative is another film that debuted at TIFF. Hey Viktor! Is a mockumentary comedy starring Cody Lightning, who as a child actor played a role in the 1998 hit, Smoke Signals, and who is determined to make a sequel, Smoke Signals 2.
Rendezvous With Madness. (Oct. 27-Nov. 5). Workman Arts at CAMH Auditorium, 1025 Queen Street West.Films and ticket information: https://workmanarts.com/rendezvous-with-madness/schedule
Atilla (see above) is one of several films in this year’s festival about filmmakers and their complicated family bonds. The festival’s opener is Back Home, by Nisha Platzer, whose brother, Josh, took his life at 16, when the filmmaker was 11.
Two decades later, she interviews his friends, in a film that uses abstract processed images to represent the experiences of grief and depression. Chinese-born, Brooklyn-based filmmaker, Siyi Chen’s film, Dear Mother, I Meant to Write About Death, deals with her role as her physician-caregiver after the mother’s cancer diagnosis.
Other family films include Because We Have Each Other, Australian director Sari Braithwaite’s well reviewed five-year cinema verite study of a working-class blended Australian family with a variety of neurodivergent issues.
Iranian filmmakers have often used children, and struggling marriages, to talk about deeper problems in the culture. Like A Fish on The Moon by filmmaker Dornaz Hajiha, follows a four-year-old boy’s decision to stop speaking, a therapist’s suggestion that the parents reverse care-giving roles, and the subsequent cracks that appear in the once stable marriage.