In Memoriam

Angela Baldassarre 1957-2007

Angela Baldassarre — film critic, founding member of the Toronto Film Critics Association, wife, mother and a very good friend — passed away November 15th, 2007. I am writing this appreciation for her colleagues in FIPRESCI because, were it not for Angie, I wouldn’t know any of you.

Angie brought the Toronto critics into the organization, placing us on film-festival juries around the world and helping our fairly insular group make new connections and new friends. She was just that sort of person; inclusive and expansive, forever introducing people to one another. She knew everyone; she moved in more circles than I could count.

She'd written for virtually every publication in the city — papers like "Metropolis" and "Word" and "Tandem" and "Scene" and "Menz", and more besides. She spent the last few years reviewing films and interviewing filmmakers for "Sympatico/MSN"; you can her most recent work online at
http://movies.sympatico.msn.ca/features/ArchiveArticles.aspx.
She published a book of interviews with Italian directors, "The Great Dictators", in 1999.

Not too long after that, she produced her other great work, in collaboration with her husband Alessandro Cancian: A daughter, Arianna. And shortly after that, she got sick.

We hear stories about people who fight valiantly against terminal illness, and god knows we see a lot of movies about them; melodramas, mostly, told by people who surely have the best intentions.

The stories and movies get plenty of stuff right — the endless combinations of pills, the lulls and swells of fatigue and sickness, the inexorable progression of that filthy fucking disease — but fiction by its nature expands some realities and compresses others. And it's all over in a couple of hours, or a few hundred pages.

Angie was ill for most of the 21st century. She rebounded from that first bout, and believe me, that was one for the books — and then, in one of those horrible ironies we wouldn't accept in fiction but encounter in life all too often, she found out the illness was back just a few months after being ready to believe she was cancer-free.

Two years ago, she told me the cancer had returned; from then to the end of this summer, she fought all over again. She never stopped working; she never stopped being involved in the world. She was constantly around, constantly present — in the business of the Toronto Film Critics Association, where she served as vice-president since the organization's inception; in the lives of Alessandro and Arianna, who were just as unbending in their support of her during her illness; in the lives of everyone she knew.

She will be terribly, terribly missed.

Norman Wilner

Norman Wilner is the lead film critic for Metro Newspapers in Canada, and writes on film and DVD for "Sympatico/MSN". In 1998, he was invited into the Toronto Film Critics Association by Angela Baldassarre.

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