Canadian Films Tonight at TIFF
by Ralph Lucas – Publisher
(September 6, 2018 – Toronto, ON) You would think when film festivals launch with all the hoopla surrounding a special opening Gala screening, it would be the very first film on the schedule. Not so at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). In fact, the very first film to screen is the World Premiere of the USA-Ireland co-production, Greta at 5:45PM. The real opening Gala, the World Premiere of Outlaw King starring Chris Pine as the legendary warrior Robert the Bruce is still more than two hours away at 8:00PM at Roy Thomson Hall, or maybe it’s just a few minutes away when the film first screens at 6:30PM at the Princess of Wales Theatre. Confused…? So are we. But this is about Canadian films, so let’s move on.
While which showing of the Outlaw King is the real opening Gala, before either of them hit the screen, Denys Arcand’s marvellous The Fall of the American Empire screens at the Elgin Theatre at 6:00PM. The Fall of the American Empire is the thematic successor to The Decline of the American Empire and The Barbarian Invasions and centres on a young man whose life is changed when he finds two bags of cash after an armed robbery. It has already been in distribution in Québec, but it’s always great to see this filmmaker’s work in a festival setting.
Thirty minutes later (6:30PM) at the Winter Garden Theatre, housed right above the Elgin, the important documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch has its World Premiere. This is the third collaboration between award-winning photographer Edward Burtynsky and acclaimed filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier following Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark. In breathtaking tableaus, their latest documentary continues their exploration of industrialization and extraction in astonishing scale and perspective and warns in not so subtle ways that we cannot survive if this sort of global destruction is allowed to continue.
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is followed at the same theatre at 9:15PM by the World Premiere of Patricia Rozema’s Mouthpiece, which is an adaptation of the award-winning two-woman play by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, about an aspiring writer attempting to reconcile her feminism with the conformist choices of her mother following her mother’s sudden death. The playwrights and stage actors make their film debut in Mouthpiece.
There are six other films on tonight’s schedule and chances are ticket availability will be slim. Click here for more information about tonight’s films, as the 43rd Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) gets underway.
Ralph Lucas is the founder and publisher of Northernstars.ca. He began writing about film and reviewing movies while in radio in Montreal in the mid-1970s.
