Beautiful Soul Touching Movie

The First Grader

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Toronto Film Festival's Hottest Tickets

Toronto International Film Festival

By Bruce Kirkland - The Toronto Sun

The Toronto International Film Festival turns 35 on Thursday. With 2010 as a transition year, this is a milestone birthday that marks a new era.

An extra day has been added to the traditional schedule, turning the 10 days into 11 that co-directors Piers Handling and Cameron Bailey hope will again shake the world of cinema. More than 300 films have been selected by a stellar team of 19 programmers, including prime-time entries launching their Oscar campaigns. The guest list is the envy of every other filmfest. Plus TIFF opens its swanky if risky new home, the Bell Lightbox, which fronts King Street in the Entertainment District. Bailey jokes that it is about time that the adult-aged TIFF moved out of its parents’ basement into its own house. There is a downtown shift out of Yorkville and the festival is looking to become a 365-day player in the Toronto arts and culture scene.

But the core festival remains the showpiece event on the calendar. Line-ups for tickets stretched two blocks in the sweltering sun on Peter Street this week. Patrons are still looking for the breakout titles. So we offer our annual Hot Tips selection, gleaned from personal experience and insider information. At least one essential film is named from each program, from the mainstream to the esoteric. Enjoy.

GALAS

Score: A Hockey Musical: Foster Hewitt might be spinning and grinning in his grave. Michael McGowan’s playful, populist movie turns Canadian junior hockey into a musical extravaganza for Opening Night.

Black Swan: American Darren Aronofsky shifts from the ring (The Wrestler) to the classic ballet stage, cranking up the psychological tension like an early Polanski. Natalie Portman co-stars.

The Housemaid: Hyped as “elegant, sexy and dangerous,” this is South Korean filmmaker Im Sang-soo’s controversial re-make of a 1960 erotic thriller, with the victimizer of the original turned into the victim for the inverted contemporary version. It is rife with socio-political overtones.

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

Biutiful: As one of the finest from the Cannes’ contenders, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s harrowing film chronicles a marginalized Spaniard, played by the brilliant Javier Bardem. He shows how even a petty criminal can find moral redemption.

Another Year: This is another stunner from Cannes. Mike Leigh intimately explores a group of Britons in the twilight of their complicated lives.

The Trip: Switching genres and tones again, prolific British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom takes Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on a giddy English road trip as themselves, sort of.

Mumbai Diaries: Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan, under the direction of his wife Kiran Rao, opens a new chapter in his career with an acclaimed slice-of-life drama. No music, no dancing!

Blue Valentine: Meticulously crafted and brutally honest, Derek Cianfrance’s film is a study of a broken marriage. Both Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are brilliant in their portrayals.

Other titles to consider in this rich program: Milcho Manchevski’s Mothers; Julian Schnabel’s Miral; Sturla Gunnarsson’s Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie; Richard Ayoade’s Submarine; Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story; Tran Anh Hung’s Norwegian Wood; Stephen Frears’ Tamara Drewe; Nigel Cole’s Made in Dagenham; Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies; Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours; Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist.

MASTERS

The Sleeping Beauty: France’s Catherine Breillat, a true poet of cinema, re-invents and modernizes the familiar fairytale.

Essential Killing: Poland’s Jerzy Skolimowski challenges viewers with a mysterious, nearly silent film tale of a Middle Eastern terrorist (Vincent Gallo) who is captured and taken from desert to a snowbound landscape. When he escapes he becomes the one seeking real freedom.

DISCOVERY

Girlfriend: Justin Lerner’s first feature is a discovery, in style and content. Lerner explores an unlikely, maybe impossible relationship between a young man with Down Syndrome and a single mom and renegade whom he has loved since early childhood. Money figures into their lives.

REAL TO REEL

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: Werner Herzog plumbs the depths of prehistoric cave art in France, giving TIFF its first 3D documentary.

Pink Saris: Briton Kim Longinotto again explores the world of women, this time finding an activist who specializes in empowering females from India’s Untouchables class.

VANGUARD

Our Day Will Come: Romain Gavras, Paris-based son of legendary Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras, emerges as a vibrant filmmaker himself. This unique tale - an alternative reality in today’s messed-up world - slyly positions redheads enemies of the state, the “them” who must be persecuted.

SPROCKETS FAMILY ZONE

Little Sister: American Richard Bowen works in China to re-tell the original Cinderella story, which originated centuries ago in that culture. Bowen, a cinematographer as well as director, gives TIFF one of its most visually splendid films and provides older children with an elegant tale in Mandarin and English.

MAVERICKS

Bruce Springsteen and Edward Norton: In a rare public appearance off the concert stage, The Boss will be interviewed by actor pal Norton in TIFF’s newly expanded Mavericks program. This could be a singular highlight of the 2010 filmfest. The session is a spin-off from the world premiere of the Springsteen doc, The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town (playing as a Gala).

CITY TO CITY

Turkey’s Reha Erdem perfectly captures the pulse of his city, Istanbul, which is the focus of this year’s City to City. The film is positioned as “a mix of hard truths and stark poetry” as it balances the forces of ancient Istanbul with the modern.

CONTEMPORARY WORLD CINEMA

Aftershock: Chinese director Feng Xiaogang’s drama covers three decades, beginning and ending with devastating earthquakes. It is already a mega-hit of the Chinese cinema, one of its most successful homegrown films ever.

The First Grader: Englishman Justin Chadwick found an inspirational true story in Kenya. It is the saga of an 84-year-old man who goes to class for the first time when the country offers free primary schooling for all.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame: With Saigon-born director Tsui Hark in charge, Hong Kong cinema fully integrates with mainland Chinese culture, bringing kinetic energy and sophistication to the old ways of the mainland.

Of Gods and Men: Frenchman Xavier Beauvois’ period film is stark, contemplative, haunting and perfectly timely because it explores how religion, race and colonialism collide - with tragedy looming.

CANADIAN PROGRAMMING

Daydream Nation: While Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies (from Special Presentations) is the must-see Canadian film of the featival, Mike Goldbach’s quirky drama is the class of the Canada First! program (part of the Canadian Programming section). Kat Dennings is a teen facing her worst nightmare: Dad is moving her to a tiny nowhere town. The horror!

VISIONS

Promises Written in Water: American actor-filmmaker Vincent Gallo is a certified cinema eccentric, and not just for the transgressive effort, The Brown Bunny. He won’t even let TIFF publish a photo in the program book for this new opus, his third feature. And he will deliver the screening print himself, then shuffle off to Buffalo with it afterwards. Makes you curious.

WAVELENGTHS

Ruhr: American James Benning turns his rigorously artful camera on Germany’s industrialized Ruhr Valley for an arresting visual portrait of a man-made landscape. There is beauty in the beast.

MIDNIGHT MADNESS

The Butcher, the Chef and the Swordsman: Let programmer Colin Geddes describe one-named filmmaker Wuershan’s martial arts whimsy: “A tale of revenge, honour and greed, lightly tossed with scallions and sesame oil and served on a tender bed of steamed pea shoots.” The witching hour is tasty this year.

Other titles to consider: James Gunn’s SUPER with Ellen Page.