TIFF Preview: Canada and Beyond

Beginning with her first feature, Never Eat Alone (2016), Bohdanowicz has worked closely with Campbell to cocreate the evolving character of Audrey Benac, a deeply curious researcher delving into the life stories of poets, artists, and musicians that often have a real-life connection to Bohdanowicz’s own family history. Audrey’s investigations have taken us through the 2018 short film Veslemøy’s Song; MS Slavic 7, a full-length feature; and another short, Point and Line to Plane (2020).

All of these films—and a few more—are featured in our Criterion Channel program Directed by Sofia Bohdanowicz. In 2022, Audrey reappeared, somewhat lost and lonely in Paris, in A Woman Escapes, a multiformat collaboration between Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, and Blake Williams. The deepest roots in this year’s Measures for a Funeral, though, reach back to Veslemøy’s Song and Audrey’s fascination with Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow, whose soaring career was cut short by the outbreak of the First World War. Parlow wound up teaching, and one of her students was Bohdanowicz’s grandfather, who played with the Toronto Symphony.

In an engaging interview for the film’s press kit, Bohdanowicz tells Beatrice Loayza that the Audrey films leading up to Measures for a Funeral are “about a kind of detective work; about trying to shape things into language or a form that feels whole and legible. Yet that’s a goal that’s never really achieved in any of these films, and that’s intentional. I tried to keep things very loose and open, whereas Measures for a Funeral is a departure from that approach. I decided to continue Audrey’s journey because I felt she needed to officially end her odyssey; finally finish her work and put a cap on all of her research. We go on this journey with her where we really feel her suffering and deep isolation and disconnection from others, but also see that she’s succeeding in something marvelous. She’s finally able to hear the voice and output of this incredible artist who was long forgotten.”

Radwanski’s films are “freedom in its purest form, or the purest this particular medium can contain,” wrote Savina Petkova at the Film Stage when Matt and Mara premiered in Berlin earlier this year. “Being the opposite of prescriptive, they sculpt themselves according to interpersonal dynamics that can otherwise be invisible, and by doing so, give shape to parallel emotional worlds, extensions of a protagonist’s psyche. That goes for Derek (Derek Bogart), the impulsive lead in Tower (2012), sleep-deprived gamer dad Erwin (Erwin van Cotthem) from How Heavy This Hammer (2015), and for the chaotic Anne (Deragh Campbell) whose quarter-life crisis makes a delightful whirlpool out of Anne at 13,000 Ft.”

Campbell’s Mara in the new film once had aspirations to write and has wound up settling down with her husband (Mounir Al Shami), an experimental musician, and their baby daughter (Avery Nayman). She’s teaching a writing class in Toronto when an old friend pops up, Matt, played by another strikingly singular Canadian filmmaker, Matt Johnson, who is probably best known now for BlackBerry (2023). Matt left Toronto years ago for New York, where he’s published a well-received collection of short stories.

As Matt and Mara bumble around Toronto, “the pair fall back into an easy friendship, bickering like no time has passed at all,” writes Hannah Strong at Little White Lies. “Radwanski’s charming, well-observed dialogue reflects the experience of plenty of elder millennials, caught between the unrealistic expectations of aging parents and the realization that creative possibility under the constraints of capitalism is harder and harder to achieve. Matt briefly represents the possibility of another life to Mara—one where she feels more creatively compatible with her partner. But while Matt is charismatic, he’s also selfish and patronizing, stuck in a state of arrested development. Perhaps it isn’t so much Matt, but what he represents, that Mara finds enticing.”

Toronto’s forty-ninth edition opens tonight with David Gordon Green’s Nutcrackers, a comedy starring Ben Stiller as a dedicatedly single real-estate developer who suddenly finds himself in charge of his sister’s four unruly boys. Other Gala Presentations include Better Man, which IndieWire’s David Ehrlich calls “a long-overdue corrective to the wave of fully authorized, insufferably generic rise-fall-recover stories”—Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman) tells the story of British pop star Robbie Williams, who’s played by a CGI monkey—and two films that premiered in Cannes to little fanfare despite the unimpeachable status of their directors.

At the time, Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov posted sober assessments of both Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, weighing what he perceived as the strengths against the weaknesses within each of these “very Late Style” works. In the former, Richard Gere plays a dying documentarian coming to terms with the mistakes he’s made, and at Slant, Chuck Bowen finds that “the warmth of Oh, Canada renders it even trickier than many of Schrader’s more ‘on brand’ stories of vigilantes who write and speak in the clipped tones of the characters from the transcendentalist films that he treasures.” The Shrouds features Vincent Cassell as a tech magnate mourning the loss of his wife, and for Little White Lies’s David Jenkins, Cronenberg’s “play for the heartstrings” makes for “one of the most nakedly moving and revelatory films within his canon.”

The first trailers are out for two highly anticipated films that will see their world premieres as Special Presentations, Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths and Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch. Two other films in the program will arrive straight from Telluride. The End, a musical directed by Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing) and starring Michael Shannon, Tilda Swinton, and George MacKay, is “a fascinating and demanding intellectual exercise about what happens to a family who, after contributing to the world’s demise, shields themselves from the effects of disaster,” writes Lovia Gyarkye in the Hollywood Reporter. “Do they grieve or regret? Do they reflect on their actions? Or do they simply march forward, lulled into complacency by the avoidant and revisionist stories they tell themselves? In Oppenheimer’s striking feature narrative debut, it’s a combination of all the above.”

In the Los Angeles Times, Joshua Rothkopf calls The End “some kind of bleak masterpiece that most viewers will find too upsetting.” At Slant, Mark Hanson finds that the film “becomes somewhat tedious over the course of its two and a half hours, but in spite of—indeed, perhaps because of—it feeling like its moving toward a familiar climax, its bleakly funny and existentially haunting conclusion packs a wallop.”

Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front turned out to be more of an awards magnet than many might have guessed it would be when it premiered in Toronto in 2022. Berger’s follow-up is Conclave, an adaptation of Robert Harris’s 2016 novel written by Peter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow as high-ranking cardinals and Isabella Rossellini as a nun with secrets.  Joshua Rothkopf suggests that “for a movie about the Vatican’s solemn electing of a new pope,” Conclave “feels a lot closer to the trashy fun of an episode of The West Wing.”

Well over two hundred films will screen in more than a dozen programs in Toronto this year, and anyone looking for guidance might turn to recommendations from Ty Burr in the Washington Post, the Guardian’s Benjamin Lee, or the contributors to Filmmaker and Hammer to Nail. At the Film Stage, C. J. Prince has picked out eleven “must-see” short films. A late addition to the TIFF Docs program is The Bibi Files, an investigation into the charges of corruption leveled against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu incorporating never-before-seen leaked footage, directed by Alexis Bloom, and produced by Alex Gibney.

Preparations for the Platform competition were humming along smoothly until Mongolian herders Davaasuren Dagvasuren and Otgonzaya Dashzeveg, the cowriters and subjects of Gabrielle Brady’s documentary The Wolves Always Come at Night, were denied visas. Canada won’t grant them until the couple promises to leave after the festival, but as producer Rita Walsh tells the Hollywood Reporter’s Etan Vlessing, with their children remaining in Mongolia, they have no incentive to stay.

Wavelengths will offer the latest “last” films from Jean-Luc Godard, the final two features in Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy, and Dimitris Athiridis’s outstanding fourteen-episode state-of-the-art-world documentary, exergue - on documenta 14. And Midnight Madness will open tomorrow with Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley as incarnations of the same woman. The extreme body-horror satire divided critics in Cannes, where Fargeat won the award for Best Screenplay.