Toronto 2008

"Disgrace" (Steve Jacobs)

"Lymelife" (Derick Martini)

Launched 32 years ago as a festival showcasing the best films from other festivals around the world, the Toronto International Film Festival was originally known as "The Festival of Festivals" to signal its cinephiliac agenda, which it retains in many ways. Held in a Canadian city whose film audience is already quite large, the festival has grown substantially in size and perceived importance at the same time that it has gradually become more mainstream. Its overall focus is still on international and independent filmmaking, although significantly the only programs that are denied press screenings and repeat screenings for the public are experimental films. Very much a populist festival according to the vision of its co-founder, the late Dusty Cohl (1929-2008), and boasting exceptional crowd control, it continues to flourish—currently spread out in many different parts of the city, but eagerly awaiting more centralized headquarters at the downtown Bell Lightbox, a huge building still under construction.
    Today movie stars dominate the press conferences along with directors, and despite the absence of competitive prizes (apart from an Audience Award and a couple of juries, devoted respectively to Canadian films and films by promising filmmakers), the festival is widely considered to be the most important high-profile film festival in North America — less prestigiouse than the one in New York (though generally showing over ten times as many films), and less industry-oriented than the one in Sundance, but still the central film event of the year for a good many people.  (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Toronto International Film Festival (September 4-13, 2008), www.torontointernationalfilmfestival.ca
FIPRESCI Prize (Special Presentations): Disgrace by Steve Jacobs (Australia, 2008).
FIPRESCI Prize (Discovery): Lymelife by Derick Martini (USA, 2008).
Details of the prizes

Reports

History and Egotism: "Me and Orson Welles". Jonathan Rosenbaum reviews Richard Linklater's film, "the story of a fictional high school teenager (played by Zac Efron) in 1937 who by sheer chance lands a bit part as a lute player in Welles's famous stage production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar."
Coming-of-Age Movies. Nick Roddick reviews two films talking about a contemporary youth culture, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist and Lymelife. The Toronto Festival shows, he writes, "a renaissance in American coming-of-age films — a genre that has, in the past, offered occasional greatness and a number of solid pleasures."
The Inner Hurricane Is Coming. Pablo O. Scholz reviews Disgrace by Australian director Steve Jacobs. "His protagonist is a fallible white man (played by an entirely believable John Malkovich) who has been charged with taking sexual advantage of a black student, and was also arrogant enough to defend his actions before his university."
Oh, The Vanity. Kim Linekin reviews Management, an indie romantic comedy in the now-shameless tradition pairing uptight career women with doting yet hopelessly underachieving men. Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn play.
The Films Nobody Talks About. Élie Castiel reviews Greek cinema at Toronto and notes "that the contemplative cinema of Theo Angelopoulos is being replaced by a new cinema. It is in fact a new cinematic gaze that evolves around the individual rather than the collective; the inner self rather than the social; the ambiguous rather than the explicit."
Diaries of Conflict. Ranjita Biswas writes about two stories of women, A Woman in Berlin (Germany), and The Stoning of Soraya M (Germany, Poland). The films, she writes, "have something in common: The exploitation of women in conflict situations, and the women's ability to cope and find a way out."

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