Untold Stories: The 49th Toronto International Film Festival

The 49th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival was not without its controversies. 

By far the biggest story to come out of TIFF 2024 was not what the audience got to see on screen – let alone any of the “buzzy” titles Hollywood’s hype machine was peddling to festival-goers – but what they were prevented from seeing. 

Midway through the festival, in what would prove to be a highly contentious move, TIFF suspended all three screenings of Anastasia Trofimova’s Russians at War, surely the most controversial title in the entire line-up, citing “significant threats” the organisation had received.

Well before the red carpet rolled out and the festival got underway on September 5, the selection of Trofimova’s documentary, a Canadian-French co-production, stirred up intense debate in domestic Canadian media, even sight unseen. 

And the reason was simple. For her first-person documentary, the Russian-Canadian documentarian travelled to occupied eastern Ukraine to embed herself within a group of front-line Russian soldiers, purportedly to tell their side of the war – a perspective largely underreported in Western coverage of the war.

Rumours and accusations began to circulate, branding Trofimova’s doc as “Russian propaganda” just as her past stint working for RT’s documentary division – a state-run broadcaster viewed as a Kremlin mouthpiece and banned in Canada – came to light. Even Canada’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, weighed in on the matter, questioning TIFF’s decision to screen the film and voicing “grave concerns” over $340,000 of “Canadian public money” in the form of a grant that went into financing Trofimova’s doc.

Russians at War

For her part, Trofimova naturally defended her film, letting it be known that, far from being propaganda, Russians at War, which was filmed without authorisation from Russian authorities, is “an antiwar film made at great risk to all involved, myself especially,” and stressing in interviews that her doc presents a picture of Russian troops in disarray with flagging morale among their ranks.

But a huge vocal contingent of pro-Ukraine protestors who showed up outside the fest’s main venue, Scotiabank Theatre, ahead of its press and industry screening on Day 6, had other ideas. Decked out in Ukrainian colours, they chanted in unison: “Shame on TIFF! Shame on TIFF!” At least one protest sign labelled Trofimova the “Leni Riefenstahl of the 21st century”.

Two days later, apparently bowing to external pressure, TIFF issued a statement announcing the fest is “pausing” all screenings of Russians at War pending further notice.

While TIFF may have had the best of intentions to ensure public safety and the wellbeing of its staff and volunteers, one of the unintended consequences of the cancellation of Russians at War was that it set an unfortunate precedent. And the optics were not great: if enough pressure is applied, TIFF would be cowered into abandoning some of its core values stated as its “Mission,” namely to defend its “curatorial independence” as well as the “artistic freedom” of each of the films it selects.

To their credit, TIFF eventually reversed course, showing Trofimova’s film at the Lightbox, its sleek arthouse multiplex, albeit two days after the fest’s conclusion. But by then the press had packed up and gone – including this writer – and the damage was done.

To be sure, there is much to sympathise with the demonstrators exercising their rights by making peaceful demands, and handing out leaflets at Scotiabank Theatre that called      out: “First, stop war crimes! Then make movies about war criminals!” And one may also argue that chiding TIFF organisers is misdirected and that it is the anonymous horde threatening acts of violence, and politicians interfering with the festival’s autonomy, who are the real culprits to be blamed for this whole affair. Not to mention that attempting to suppress a film simply because a filmmaker shows a viewpoint they do not like, is anti-democratic, not wholly dissimilar to the repressive tactics employed by the Kremlin to crackdown on free speech, and contrary in spirit to Ukraine’s struggle to rid itself of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian aggressions, as he is hell-bent on putting a stop to Kyiv’s determination to ally itself to the pro-Western bloc.

Moreover, isn’t cinema’s very purpose that of bringing to light “untold stories,” from a wide spectrum of angles and across ideological divides, so that we, as movie-goers, can allow ourselves to assume, if only for a couple of hours, the perspectives of others? So that we are able to expand our narrow perception of the world, often prejudiced with our unconscious biases to being with? Isn’t that what the role of cinema, and by extension that of film festivals, is all about?

Many of the standout titles from this year’s festival, in fact, underscored cinema’s unparalleled capacity to reveal insights into the lives of others, by projecting their desires, despairs, and hopes, and in some cases even to penetrate into their innermost psyches.

April

Take, for example, April, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s breakthrough sophomore effort, for which the Georgian filmmaker picked up a major prize at Venice (which happens concurrently to Toronto). With April, Kulumbegashvili paints a hyper-subjective, hair-raising portrait of an obstetrician in rural eastern Georgia pockmarked with muddy swamps, and who runs a risky side business providing illegal abortions to local women in need. But rather than conforming to the social realist mould the thorny issue addressed in the film seems to call for (think, for example, Cristian Mungiu’s brutalist Romanian abortion drama, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, 2007, which divulges an ample amount of socio-political context), April concentrates squarely on its heroine Nina’s (Ia Sukhitashvili) subjectivity, both real and imagined. Kulumbegashvili’s audacious approach makes for a terrifying psychological journey that probes into some dark recesses of Nina’s subconscious, by veering so closely to body horror, beginning with its pre-title cold open depicting a hideous humanoid wading through the darkness (which may or may not be a figment of Nina’s fears of aging and mortality) to the startling subjective shots of nocturnal country roads where she cruises in search of one-night stands, before the film reverts to her hard reality of being a vilified figure as an illicit countryside abortionist in a deeply religious society.

Meanwhile, Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias goes even one step farther in the direction of subjectivity with his ambitious, mesmerizing modern-day fable, Pepe, by assuming the point-of-view of its nonhuman, mammalian titular hero.

Pepe

As in another of the fest’s highlights, Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Monólogo Colectivo (Collective Monologue, a Wiseman-esque freeform documentary on the anatomy of a Buenos Aires zoological garden), the human-animal encounters constitute a crucial component of De los Santos Arias’ project. Appropriately programmed in the avant-garde Wavelengths strand, in the Dominican filmmaker’s radical, magic-realist retelling of the life and times of Colombia’s notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar, the subject himself remains in the shadows (in fact, Escobar does not even appear on screen). Instead, De los Santos Arias introduces an unreliable four-legged narrator in the form of the eponymous talking hippo who self-narrates his strange adventure of being uprooted from his native habitat in Africa, then smuggled out to Latin America by Escobar’s henchmen, where Pepe becomes a newest prized addition to the cocaine kingpin’s exotic private menagerie housed at his vast Colombian estate. There, the beast’s outsized presence as “the most dangerous animal in the world” elicits curiosity as much as hostility from the local population following his escape from Escobar’s hacienda, first arousing the attention of Candelario (Jorge Puntillón García), an eccentric fisherman, and eventually, Señor Heribert (Wolfgang Fuhrmann), a German wildlife hunter on the payroll of the Colombian military.

By retracing the trail of Pepe the Hippo’s meandering transatlantic journey (whose name ironically conjures alt-right memes) from his childhood in the wetlands of the former German colony of Namibia (where the 20th century’s first genocide was perpetuated by the colonial rulers) to his captivity in a Latin American narco-state – a movement that not coincidentally replicates the slave trade route that once propelled the prosperity of the colonial Americas – De los Santos Arias’ perpetually shapeshifting travelogue of a hippo moves freely from being a biting critique on colonialism to a commentary on late capitalism and its shadow economy of globalised drug trafficking.

***

The “Trofimova affair” notwithstanding, TIFF’s programming team led by Anita Lee should nonetheless be applauded for programming as many as four titles by filmmakers of Palestinian origin, which encompassed both narrative features as well as hard-hitting pieces of nonfiction, each of which explored the question of Palestinian identity by telling the stories of their plights from their diaspora in Europe to Gaza’s bombed-out “open-air prison.” While not all of these efforts may have been perfect, taken together, the quartet of films offered a broad overview of contemporary Palestinian existence as one of perpetual exile and displacement.

In To a Land Unknown, for instance, the Danish-Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel’s gritty, if slightly predictable, thriller set in Greece, a pair of undocumented Palestinian refugees      stuck indefinitely in Athens (the birthplace, ironically, of democracy) fend for themselves by resorting to petty crimes. The duo eventually plots to undertake one last desperate scheme to reach their dreamland, Germany, which inevitably goes wrong.

Happy Holidays

Meanwhile, with Happy Holidays, Scandar Copti unfurls a deftly structured family drama set in Haifa, pertaining to one upper-class Arab household experiencing severe financial strain while also trying to navigate fractious interactions with their Israeli neighbours, in the days leading up to Israel’s Memorial Day. Out of this family snapshot, a larger and more topical picture of fraught Arab-Israeli coexistence begins to emerge, symbolised by the film’s subplot concerning the eldest son Rami’s (Toufic Danial) interfaith, norm-defying dalliance with Shirley (Shani Dahari), a Jewish flight attendant, which results in her pregnancy. Though Shirley is initially determined to keep the baby against Rami’s opposing judgement, she is nonetheless forced to terminate her pregnancy once the doctor fails to detect a heartbeat in the foetus, which just about seems to sum up the current state of the two-state solution: stillborn.

While skilfully directed, if Copti’s metaphor for the current state of affairs in the state of Israel comes across as somewhat contrived and lacking in subtlety, the same subject is explored with far greater acuity and intensity in No Other Land, a searing work of nonfiction by a collective of four Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers.

On one level, No Other Land is an unflinching look at the Israeli military’s ongoing encroachment and expropriation of Palestinian lands in the occupied West Bank, in this case, the small community of Masafer Yatta, made up of about 20 villages, whose inhabitants are forcibly evicted to make way for an IDF training ground. Perhaps more significantly, No Other Land is also about a moving, unlikely bond that develops between two men from opposite sides of the geopolitical fault lines (who are also two of the film’s four co-directors): Basel Adra, a son of a long-time Palestinian activist who takes up his father’s baton to resist the demolition of his community, and Yuval Abraham, an idealistic Israeli journalist who periodically travels to Adra’s village to report on his nonviolent struggle. 

From Ground Zero: The Teacher by Tamer Nijim  

Out of the quartet of Palestinian films in the line-up, the most impactful one turned out to be an anthology film, From Ground Zero, which is comprised of 22 short films by Gazan filmmakers shot on the ground in the Gaza Strip, under the most trying of circumstances amid Israel’s relentless bombing and punishing blockade.

Filmed in extremis with very limited resources, but with unshakable urgency and so much to say, From Ground Zero, subtitled “Untold Stories from Gaza” and produced by Rashid Masharawi (the filmmaker who directed 1994’s Curfew, the first-ever feature film to come out of Gaza), could be described as beyond reproach, even beyond criticism. Who are we in the West, with the luxury of being able to jet in and out of Toronto with ease, to pass judgement on films from a besieged war-torn enclave some refer to as an “open-air prison”?

With that said, across this collection of nearly two dozen shorts – some slices-of-life docudramas, some on-the-ground reportages, and anything in between – common motifs begin to crop up, forming a mosaic panorama of life in Gaza that goes beyond the headlines.

From Ground Zero: “A School Day” by Ahmed Al Danaf

In Ahmed Al Danaf’s short, “A School Day”, for example, a grade-schooler proudly packs his textbooks every morning, only to commute through a nest of makeshift tents to a rubble-strewn field where his school once stood. 

Most impressive are miniature narratives, such as one about a displaced teacher’s daily struggle to provide for his children the most basic of life’s necessities, which Tamer Nijim’s “The Teacher” depicts with a wry sense of humour. Nijim shows a market bustling with the internally displaced where impossibly long queues are being formed. And the teacher must muster enough strength – or patience – to wait in line to procure bread and water.

Contrastingly, in “Taxi Waneesa”, one of the most heartrending episodes of this omnibus film, the filmmaker Etimad Washah abruptly cuts short her neorealist drama about a donkey cart driver, only to announce to the audience by addressing the camera that she has lost the will to continue filming her story, having just learned of her brother’s death.

From Ground Zero: “Recycling” by Rabab Khamis    

From Ground Zero’s most memorable episode was, unexpectedly, one of the more modestly shot efforts, if only in appearances. “Recycling”, by Rabab Khamis is a work simplest in conception and execution. In her short sketch free of dialogue, Khamis shows a mother in her damaged shelter with a bucketful of fresh clean water – a luxury in besieged Gaza – which she first utilises by bathing her daughter. Then, wasting not a drop, she “recycles” the same water the girl had bathed in to wash up a pile of dirty clothes. Finally, the mother makes further use of what is left of the now-turbid water to flush down the toilet.

Necessity, the saying goes, is the mother of all inventions. And with only a humble bucket as her prop, and by using not so much as a word, Khamis, a first-time director, distils in purely visual terms the idea of scarcity that prevails in the Gaza Strip, in a matter of a few short minutes and without any sentimentality, in the process bearing witness to the repercussions of Israel’s unlawful blockade on the beleaguered territory. And if that is not the uncontroverted proof of a real talent, then we do not know what is.

Toronto International Film Festival
6 – 15 September 2024
https://tiff.net