Ganja Chakado, left, and Kamal Ramadan in aKasha (TIFF)
At any given time during the Toronto International Film Festival, such high-profile films as ROMA and A Star Is Born are playing at the same time. With some 255 feature films screening, the options offered to filmgoers are endless, but for those who could wait to see a movie that will play in thousands of theaters within a month, Toronto offers a chance to take in films from countries that are sometimes not well represented outside of the festival circuit, and to see these movies with few, if any, preconceptions. The following itinerary of international films were a leap of faith and ultimately were rewarding, each in its own unique way. For their originality, either in theme or story, these movies are worth keeping an eye on throughout the coming year.
This winning, pranksterish antiwar farce set in war-torn 2011 Sudan is the first feature film by documentary filmmaker hajooj kuka. (I think I can safely say that it’s not every year that a movie made in South Sudan is selected in a major festival.) The rains have stopped, and now that the roads are no longer muddy, the civil war resumes in the Nuba Mountains. Rebel soldiers are on the prowl in a village to nab young men to fight, but Adnan (Kamal Ramadan, with charm to spare) is more a poser than a fighter.
He adores his AK-47, which he has named Nancy (a beautiful name for a beautiful body) and polishes it lovingly—he’s famous for downing a surveillance drone. Yet he’s mainly a lover boy, which will get him in trouble with at least three local women while he takes a replenishing break from wartime and avoids the rebels; on the run, he can barely run away and keep his oversized fatigues from falling down. To evade the round-up (the “kasha”), he and his sidekick, Absi (Ganja Chakado), at one point put on women’s clothing, an effort which fools no one. Characters pop in and just as quickly disappear, like the country bumpkins in As You Like It’s Forest of Arden, and the energy never flags. While on a psychedelic trip, Adnan receives a profound revelation, all thanks to a talking flower—making this perhaps the first Sudanese stoner comedy ever.
For her first feature film, Syrian-born, French-based writer/director Soudade Kaadan was inspired by photos of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, where only shadows remained of the casualties, not the corpses. Regarding the ongoing Syrian civil war, Kaadan reverses the image: for Syrians who may not realize until much later that they have been traumatized by conflict, they have no shadows though they are still living.
Set in 2012 Damascus, her debut centers on a single mother’s nightmare-in-daylight trek through the countryside, with a tone that is a cross between documentary and magic realism. The director cast non-professional actors from all over the world and filmed on the border of northern Lebanon and Syria and in the outskirts of the city of Douma, conveying the war through symbolism and magic realism. The screenplay intentionally doesn’t analyze history or politics. At the post-screening Q&A, Kaadan stated that she felt that if she were to represent the war closer to reality, it would be too graphic to depict.
Judith Hofmann in The Innocent (TIFF)
The wildest film seen at Toronto, Swiss director Simon Jaquemet’s dreamy and bewildering film is purposely enigmatic and consistently compelling. There are so many mixed signals here that there is not just one takeaway, especially regarding what the movie has to say about faith, Christianity, and science, when Ruth (Judith Hofmann, a find) is confronted with the inexplicable.
Ruth and her family are evangelical Christians. As portrayed here, when one of their own falls from grace, it means either engaging in premarital sex or in an orgy out of Eyes Wide Shut. In the beginning, Ruth, a scientist and a married mother of two teenage girls, stops in her tacks on a city street: she thinks she sees her ex-lover, Andreas, who was jailed 20 years ago for murdering his aunt for money. Days later, she discovers him sitting in her living room at dusk (most of the movie is shot in twilight), yet there are news reports that Andreas has been accidentally electrocuted in India. Nothing is clear-cut here. Like the story line, Ruth moves to and from extremes. The audience won’t know what is in store from one scene to the next. Hofmann, the main reason to see the film, delivers a contained and an alternatively feral performance, a la Isabelle Huppert.
Cécile de France and Edouard Baer in Mademoiselle de Joncquières (TIFF)
This is a welcome return to the sexual/romantic machinations of Dangerous Liaisons, though, unlike the latter, no scorecard is necessary for this compact and sumptuous film, also set before the Revolution. French director Emmanuel Mouret has mounted a grand showcase for his cast, especially for the imperious and scheming widow Madame de La Pommeraye (Cécile de France). She has come up with an elaborate and foolproof plan to humiliate the infamous libertine Marquis de Arcis (Edouard Baer), who wooed a once indifferent de la Pommeraye, won her, and then slowly tired of her. Now she pursues her special brand of justice, a way to enlighten his blasé mind. The dialogue tosses off epigrams with ease (“Happiness that doesn’t last is called pleasure”), and the production design re-creates a world that is, according to one put-upon woman, built on lies. Based loosely on a short story by Denis Diderot, this is decadently delicious and was among the top three films seen at the festival.
The inclusion of Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam’s film in the Contemporary World Cinema section is an example of a work that stands out for its political and cultural significance, as it deals with the Tibetan diaspora. One of its two twisting story lines concerns the disastrous journey of a young girl and her father through a treacherous mountain pass from Tibet to India to seek a better life. In the Himalayas, she, her father, and others face two adversaries: the weather and the Chinese military. Roughly 20 years later, the girl, Dolkar (Tenzin Dolker), now works in a New Delhi beauty salon. At a refugee settlement community, she recognizes a new arrival, Gompo (Jampa Kalsang), who was supposed to guide her and her father to safety in India, and she seeks to unmask his real identity. She’s not the only one who recognizes the older man: two Tibetans who work for the Chinese security force blackmail him into becoming an informant. Made in northern India, this beautifully shot film has genuine moments of tension and an engrossing story.
A scene for The Sweet Requiem (TIFF)
In a cross between Tootsie and Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three, director and co-writer Sameh Zoabi sends up soap operas and an entrenched hardline political divide, here on the West Bank. A gawky, thirtysomething slacker, Salim (Kais Nashef, with the deadest of pans), lands a job as a production assistant and then stumbles into becoming the head writer on his uncle/showrunner’s evening serial, Tel Aviv on Fire.
The TV show follows the romantic entanglements of Palestinian spy Miral, who goes by the Israeli alias of Rachel (played with diva-like abandon by Lubna Azabal); her Palestinian comrade/lover; and the Israeli general she seduces to nab military plans right before the 1967 Six-Day War. The extremely low-budget series offers revisionism through romance and is a sensation among both Palestinians and Israelis, who can overlook the anti-Israeli slant.
However, Salim lives in Jerusalem, but the show is taped in Ramallah. To get to work on the West Bank, he has to go through a check point, and he can only do so if he agrees to the demands of a military officer, Assi (a swaggering Yaniv Biton), to make sure the TV Israeli officer becomes more assertive and winds up with Rachel (“Women don’t like boring men”). As Salim discovers, everyone has an opinion about who Rachel should end up with.
This satire is an all-out crowd-pleaser.
Kais Nashef, left, and Yaniv Biton in Tel Aviv on Fire (TIFF)
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