A.k.a. The Toronto International Film Festival
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Well, TIFF lives up to its international name.
The winner of the Festival is a film by a Canadian director, whose story is based in London (England, that is, not Ontario) about a Russian mafia group, with an unwatchable fight scene in a Turkish bath. This from the director who gave us The History of Violence in last year's festival.
We were also graced with a new film by Ang Lee (of Brokeback Mountain fame). But this time he comes to Toronto with a Venice Festival win of a Chinese crime story set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, with more unwatchable scenes.
There is also the $10,00 winner of the Telefilm Canada Pitch 2005 which is an incomprehensible, Hindi, film set in India directed by an "Indo-Canadian." The director, Ritchie Mehta, is no relation of Deepa Mehta, whose film Water was chosen as the "Canadian Film" gala opener at TIFF 2005. Water is about the fate of Hindu widows in the holy city Varanasi, with an Indian cast, and in Hindi. Real Indians protested to its filming on location, calling it sacrilegious, and shut down the production, so Mehta had to film it in Sri Lanka.
Modern films have no sense of place. They instead resort to violence, fantasy, or sacrilege to fill in the empty gaps. If the audience can be thrilled or transported, then reality and geography can be ignored without anyone missing them, or recognizing their absence.
Toronto is becoming exemplary at showing us films with these deficits. But, of course, to the film goers and filmmakers, this is no deficit. Film, after all, to them, is the ultimate fantasy.
