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A Writer's Words
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Pierre Rissient: Influential Cinephile
Painting a Family Portrait

Celebrities
Michael Moore on the road again
Demme & Moore docs in Special Presentations!
Yes, it's THAT Phil Donahue
Wyclef Plays at TIFF Party
Celebrities Exposed at Final Doc Talk

Cinematography
Night is not so dark
Reflections on "A Jihad for Love"
Lawrence Johnston heads deep into "Night"
Blindsight Opens Eyes and Hearts
ON CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ghosts of Cite Soleil

Directors
Herzog takes us to the South Pole
SHOWING DOC THE DOC
Reflections
Madina on Farmer's Requiem
Bill Maher on RELIGULOUS

Distribution
Doc Corner: Exchange of Ideas
Industry survey: W. Wilder Knight II
Industry survey: Cara Mertes, Sundance Doc Film Program
Industry survey: Jan Rofekamp & Diana Holtzberg, Films Transit
Industry survey: Peter Broderick, Paradigm Consulting

Editing
Last Minute Finishes
Another Fragment from Iraq

Free Speech
Read more on "Obscene"
TIFF picks from Renew Media's Brian Newman

Human Rights
Young Girls Speak Out
One trip to Iraq, three Real to Reel films
Pakistani Women’s Activist speaks at TIFF
Unorthodox Shooting on SHAME
Desi Docs: South Asian Sensations at TIFF

Humour
Play on Playa'
Sick Humor Makes Us Well

Memories
Back to Reality
Growing up on the Kibbutz
TIFF memory: US vs John Lennon
Memories of Summercamp! at TIFF 06
From TIFF to Congress race

Music
TIFF memory: US vs John Lennon
Getting Close to Philip in "Glass"
Wyclef Plays at TIFF Party
Kurt Cobain Speaks Out at TIFF
Yoko Sits in at Lennon Peace Film Premiere

Panels
Covering War
Complicated Lives
Living to the Fullest
Let's Talk about Darfur
Sunday School with Bill Maher and Larry Charles

Parties
Time to Relax and Mingle
TIFF picks from True/False's David Wilson
Memories of Summercamp! at TIFF 06
Celebrating Office Tigers
Docs Discussed Over Breakfast

Picks
The race begins!
TIFF picks from Michaelle McLean, Hot Docs Forum
Meet the Press
TIFF picks from Sean Farnel of Hot Docs
TIFF picks from Jonathan Rosenbaum

Politics
Read more on "Body of War"
Collaborating with Ariel Dorfman on "A Promise to the Dead"
From TIFF to Congress race
Yes, it's THAT Phil Donahue
Iranian Cinema Part of the Revolution

War & Conflict
Read more on "Body of War"
Collaborating with Ariel Dorfman on "A Promise to the Dead"
From TIFF to Congress race
Yes, it's THAT Phil Donahue
Former US Soldier Speaks at Premiere of Iraq films

Wavelengths
Wavelengths, part III
I'm writing to you from Kuala Lumpur...
Docs in Wavelengths, Part II
Exploring the world of Schindler's Houses
Docs push boundaries in Wavelengths

Feeds
Filtered by Topic: Directors
September 11, 2021
Herzog takes us to the South Pole
Posted By Heidy Morales At 1:54 PM
File under: Directors

Last night was the premiere of Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World; his latest project.  It seems there is no territory that Herzog (shown right) will leave unexplored.

In this film, Herzog does all the narration as well as some camera and sound work.  He starts out by taking us on board the plane that brings him to Antarctica, then introduces us to many of the people who live and work on this continent.  There is an art to Herzog's work; he is able to have intimate moments with...

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SHOWING DOC THE DOC
Posted By Doug Pray At 11:02 AM
File under: Directors
The main character of my movie has never seen it. He’s the legendary Doc Paskowitz and he’s been refusing all along. But last night he flew into Toronto and, if he can bear it, he’s going to see the movie tonight at the world premiere. It might be hard for him to get up and walk out of the theater before it’s over, because he’ll be flanked by his nine grown kids (many of them are big and strong), his wife Juliette (she’s...

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September 9, 2021
Reflections
Posted By David Schisgall At 11:15 AM
File under: Directors
Last night, at the premier screening of the outstanding doc "Heavy 
Metal in Baghdad," I sat next to Waleed Rabia, who was the first
singer in the Iraqi metal band the film profiles.  (I met him in Baghdad in 2004, and some of the footage I shot there is in the  film.)Waleed was luckier than his bandmates -- he now attends film school in British Colombia. But last night he was emotionally shaken watching the heart-breaking story of his old friends who are still suffering in the middle east.Sitting next to Waleed...

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September 8, 2021
Madina on Farmer's Requiem
Posted By Thom Powers At 6:23 PM
File under: Directors
Director Ramses Madina discusses his film Farmer's Requiem: With a contemplative pace, Farmer's Requiem studies the effects of time on the icons of agriculture. The hauntingly beautiful decay of farms and barren fields are echoed in the fading considerations of Victor McGregor, a farmer at the end of his days. Farmer's Requiem was filmed over a period of three summers beginning in the summer of 2002. The entire filmmaking experience was a unique one that involved labour intensive shots filmed using a specially modified Bell...

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Bill Maher on RELIGULOUS
Posted By Thom Powers At 8:00 AM
File under: Directors
Bill Maher and director Larry Charles (Borat) will take the stage on Sunday for a special Mavericks discussion. Here are Maher's thoughts on his new work-in-progress RELIGULOUS:

Since starting on Politically Incorrect in 1993, it has been my pleasure over the last decade and a half to make organized religion one of my favorite targets.  I often explained to people, “I don’t need to make fun of religion, it makes fun of itself.”  And, then I go ahead and make fun of it too, just for laughs.

With religious fanatics like George Bush...

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September 7, 2021
Larry Charles on RELIGULOUS
Posted By Thom Powers At 12:30 PM
File under: Directors
Director Larry Charles (Borat) will take the stage on Sunday for a special Mavericks discussion with Bill Maher. Here are his thoughts on his new work-in-progress RELIGULOUS:
Ok.  An old God, a very buff old God that lives in space decides to create the first man from earth dust, then makes a woman from that man’s rib.  They get to live forever if they don’t eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, but the woman is tricked into eating a piece by a talking snake and all...

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Glass, Part 6
Posted By Scott Hicks At 11:45 AM
File under: Directors
On the making of GLASS: a portrait of Philip in twelve parts: All in all, making this film has been a return to my roots as a filmmaker - pursuing an idea of personal passion, living it by the skin of your teeth, figuring out the financing and maintaining the persistence of vision you need to realise the dream.  I've enjoyed returning to the documentary form of story telling after more than a decade away from it - with all its unexpected developments, frustrations and delights.
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Looking Back on Trumbo
Posted By Peter Askin At 10:08 AM
File under: Directors
Looking back on the making of TRUMBO, two things stand out for me. One is Trumbo's charisma on screen.  Irrespective of the subject matter, his age, or health, and he was quite frail near the end of his life, he was mesmerizing.

Despite the repetitious grind that editing can be, I always looked forward to Trumbo's interviews.  He was eloquent, he was funny, and he had the best deadpan delivery this side of Jack Benny.

For those who don't know it, I also recommend checking out Trumbo's brief but memorable film appearances...

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September 6, 2021
Glass, Part 5
Posted By Scott Hicks At 2:33 PM
File under: Directors
On the making of GLASS: a portrait of Philip in twelve parts: Finance remained a pressing issue but ultimately, the full budget was raised from a small group of private investors in my hometown of Adelaide, South Australia. And there were others who became enthused with my vision for this film, enabling it to happen.  Oasis Post has hosted the editing of three of my movies. They devised a post-production path that allowed the film to be pulled together efficiently with the best technology, despite being shot on multiple...

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September 5, 2021
Bringing the Jihad of the Camera to Toronto
Posted By Parvez Sharma At 4:00 PM
File under: Directors

Islam has the fundamental concept of the greater "Jihad", an "inner struggle" - one often ignored in the narrow interpretation of the word as "holy war", beamed into your home daily-courtesy the friendly folk at Fox and friends.

As the gay and Muslim director/producer of a A Jihad for Love I am faced with the choice that all Muslims must make today. Are we going to allow our own communities' volatile bigots (definitely a minority) define our religion for us? Or are we...

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Glass, Part 4
Posted By Scott Hicks At 2:24 PM
File under: Directors
On the making of GLASS: a portrait of Philip in twelve parts: As the material accumulated - more than 120 hours of it - the pressing question for me became "How on earth am I going to edit this thing?" Enter Steve Jess - a fine editor I had worked with in New York on various commercials. Steve offered to give up his day-job at post-production company Whitehouse for seven months (and they generously agreed) and applied his extraordinary energy to this project.  Using cineSync software created in Adelaide by Rising...

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September 4, 2021
On Glass, Part 3
Posted By Scott Hicks At 7:08 PM
File under: Directors
In 1997, while I was editing “Snow Falling On Cedars” I used a track of Philip’s music as “temp” (what filmmaker hasn’t?) for a powerful sequence we were working on.  I made contact with his publishing company Dunvagen to enquire about licensing the track, and formed a connection with his manager Jim Keller.  It was Jim who encouraged the start of a relationship between Philip and myself, and over the next few years I enjoyed a number of his performances from Los Angeles to Sydney, taking both my sons to see Philip and...

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Pint-Sized Pollock
Posted By Amir Bar-Lev At 1:02 PM
File under: Directors
On the making of My Kid Could Paint That:
Next week I'll be in Toronto to present, My Kid Could Paint That, a documentary about Marla Olmstead, an internationally acclaimed four-year-old painter. Marla's abstract paintings sold for as much as $25,000 a piece, but when her father was accused of secretly authoring the paintings, their value plummeted overnight.
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Paskowitz Invasion!
Posted By Doug Pray At 12:00 PM
File under: Directors
On the making of Surfwise: Damn! It’s too late to change the title of my film, isn’t it? The masters are done, the graphics are in, the Festival catalog is printed. The date for my first-ever world premiere at Toronto is set and locked. 9/11… But looking over the list of profound and political doc titles that are premiering at TIFF—they all look so incredibly powerful— I kind of feel like a little bag of Cheetos sitting in the organic produce aisle at Whole...

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August 30, 2021
Gianvito's "Profit motive and the whispering wind"
Posted By John Gianvito At 12:00 PM
File under: Directors
Director of Profit motive and the whispering wind: I am writing this from my office at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts where I teach film production and history and where, in a few hours time, all power to the building is to be shut off for some major maintenance operation. This only means that I can't further procrastinate or belabor work on this blog entry,(and, that I better not leave anything in the refrigerator over the weekend). As I try to reflect on what I might tell...

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August 29, 2021
Notes on GLASS, Part 2
Posted By Scott Hicks At 12:00 PM
File under: Directors
On the making of GLASS: Philip being Philip, there was never a dull moment. Every day there was something new: a fresh collaboration, renewal of an old friendship, rehearsals for a world premiere of a new work, recordings of film scores (including my own “No Reservations”), sessions with other film directors, time out with his infant sons. Gradually pieces of his rich and varied life revealed themselves as Philip generously opened the doors into his family and friendships, as well as the extraordinary tapestry of his evolution from early days in...

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August 28, 2021
From Blindsight to Brazil
Posted By Lucy Walker At 12:00 PM
File under: Directors
Oi, Toronto! That nice dream between Everest, where we shot
BLINDSIGHT, and the largest garbage dump in the world, where I am currently working. Just when you get used to the smell they find a human body, or mention a leprosy epidemic, and the sound man passes out. But at least it's at sea level - after the hell of 23,000' for BLINDSIGHT I'm relieved to look across at the ocean at all times.
Across the bay you can see Christ The Redeemer reaching his arms out to...

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August 27, 2021
TIFF memory: US vs John Lennon
Posted By John Scheinfeld At 11:03 AM
File under: Directors, Memories, Music
Nothing could beat the first screening of THE U.S. vs. JOHN LENNON at TIFF 06. Starting with the line outside The Ryerson Theatre snaking around three city blocks...to crossing the red carpet bordered by dozens of TV cameras, lights, reporters and microphones...to the SRO crowd responding in all the right places (hearing laughter ripple through that large an audience was an indescribable feeling)...from sitting next to Yoko and experiencing her powerful response to what she saw on screen...to the standing ovations at film's end and as the credits rolled...the Toronto experience is something...

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Meeting Luise Rainer: The Moment
Posted By Arthur Dong At 9:43 AM
File under: Directors
San Francisco Chinatown movie houses were my early childhood film schools. They offered up a steady stream of Chinese language films from overseas and seeing Chinese on the big screen was no big deal. But then I started venturing outside the neighborhood and haunted now-defunct repertory theaters, and I remember seeing Luise Rainer in the 1937 MGM Epic, The Good Earth. It was something else to watch this German actress portray a self-sacrificing Chinese peasant in yellow-face, leading a cast of thousands of real-life Chinese extras and bit players, not...

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August 24, 2021
REBELLION explores Litvinenko case
Posted By Andrei Nekrasov At 12:42 PM
File under: Directors
On the making of REBELLION: THE LITVINENKO CASE -
In Russia some people call me a traitor because of my “positive” portrayal of the ex-spy Litvinenko who was subjected to an incredible three week long execution in London last November. I made a point of not replying to such accusations. Others, among them friends and colleagues, are wondering why my producer Olga Konskaya and I took the risk and trouble of infuriating our government if we used to make films about artists, composers and poets,about love and other beautiful things,and could have...

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August 23, 2021
I'm writing to you from Kuala Lumpur...
Posted By Chris Chong Chan Fui At 2:38 PM
File under: Directors, Wavelengths
On the making of  POOL - I'm writing to you from Kuala Lumpur, within the autocratic state of Malaysia, currently celebrating it's 50 years of on-again off-again independence.  While in my time in the big city, I was fortunate enough to have been able to join a researcher on her trip to the province of Aceh, one of the hardest hit areas during the 2004 tsunami that devasted parts of South and South-East Asia. Eighteen months after tragedy, we took a plane from Kuala Lumpur to Medan, Indonesia, and was taken...

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One trip to Iraq, three Real to Reel films
Posted By David Schisgall At 11:59 AM
File under: Human Rights, Directors
By my count there are three films in this year's Real to Reel that have their roots in my trip to Iraq after the invasion in 2003. At the time, I had basically given up trying to make feature docs and   was focussing on making socially positive doc episodes for television. I went to Iraq to make two shows for MTV:  True Life: I'm in Iraq, a verite and interview hour about American and Iraqi young people in the post-war period, and Gideon's Diary in Iraq, a half...

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Getting Close to Philip in "Glass"
Posted By Scott Hicks At 11:16 AM
File under: Music, Directors
I wanted to create a story where the participants were the narrators with
the sense that the audience was invited into the room to share in these
lives of Philip, his friends and family. I always felt the film would be a
kind of “mosaic portrait”, like a Chuck Close portrait, where an arrangement
of fragments form an overall picture.

Picture: Director Scott Hicks (center) films artist Chuck Close (left) in
conversation with Philip Glass (right) in New York, as part of "GLASS : a
portrait of Philip in twelve parts" (photo by L. Skutch)
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August 21, 2021
Exploring the world of Schindler's Houses
Posted By Heinz Emigholz At 3:59 PM
File under: Directors, Wavelengths
A Conversation about "Schindlers Houses" as featured in Wavelengths

Marc Ries: What was your first encounter with Schindler like?

Heinz Emigholz: In 1975, I happened to pass the Lovell  House in Newport Beach. At first sight, the building struck me as simultaneously  strange and well-conceived.  But at that time, as a filmmaker I was working on extremely  time-analytical compositions with no ideas on architecture outside the medium of time. Only later did my film work expand to issues and depictions of space. And I had  forgotten my encounter...

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August 20, 2021
Reflections on "A Jihad for Love"
Posted By Parvez Sharma At 2:33 PM
File under: Cinematography, Directors
It has been almost seven years since I landed on the shores of "the free world" in my rickety boat and now we all find that the torch the lady on the Hudson holds has never burnt more feebly. As a Muslim filmmaker from India I have been honored to have the current US regime re-classify me “an alien with extraordinary abilities.” This is a real Department of Homeland Security category also known as the O-1 visa.

Interestingly, I was entering fairest Halifax in Canada on the day that Toronto...

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August 17, 2021
Read more on "Body of War"
Posted By Thom Powers At 4:16 PM
File under: , War & Conflict, Politics, Directors
Continuing our links to Real to Reel docs, Body of War has an impressive web site that includes a trailer and lots of background information. Here's an excerpt from the director's statemet by co-director Ellen Spiro (pictured here filming on location). Spiro writes:

It's June 2005. George Bush is on the radio. He's saying "My greatest responsibility as President is to protect the American people." I think, "Why do I feel more unsafe than ever?" The phone rings. It's Phil Donahue.

"Phil WHO?" I say. "Phil Donahue, I'm calling about...

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August 15, 2021
Collaborating with Ariel Dorfman on "A Promise to the Dead"
Posted By Peter Raymont At 4:00 PM
File under: , War & Conflict, Politics, Directors


In October of last year, I brought my dear wife and filmmaking partner, Lindalee Tracey to hospital. She was suffering through the last, painful stages of cancer. During each of Lindalee’s final days in palliative care, Ariel Dorfman sent me a poem which I read to her. Poems by the Persian poet, Rumi and by Ariel himself. So Lindalee slipped away with Ariel’s and Rumi’s lovely words swimming in her mind.

Ariel was traveling to Chile just a few weeks after Lindalee’s passing....

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August 13, 2021
Memories of Summercamp! at TIFF 06
Posted By Sarah Price At 3:46 PM
File under: , Memories, Parties, Directors
Last year's TIFF was a blast for us--we literally tried to bring summercamp to the festival. As if dressing up like camp dorks and whipping the audiences into a frenzied round of Baby Shark (a camp song favorite) wasn't enough, we had a party where they served camp food, had an illegal bonfire in the parking lot of the bar, and the Flaming Lips did an acoustic sing-a-long.  All with blinking disco visors and whistles (pictured). Summercamp! is currently being released theatrically through Argot Pictures (we opened in NYC...

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August 9, 2021
From TIFF to Congress race
Posted By Michael Tucker At 2:56 PM
File under: , Memories, War & Conflict, Politics, Directors
When GUNNER PALACE premiered at TIFF in 2004 we asked two soldiers from the unit featured in the film to come up to Toronto for a casual Q&A. One of them, Captain Jon Powers, later became involved with the publicity for the release of the film and spent six weeks on the road doing press, meeting audiences and attending events. Through that exposure, Jon decided to start an NGO to help Iraqi children and actually returned to Baghdad in 2005.

Last week I was in Chicago for the second annual Yearly Kos...

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September 15, 2021
Iranian Cinema Part of the Revolution
Posted By doc blog reporter At 12:57 AM
File under: Politics, Directors

Everyone has heard of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, but few Westerners have seen much of the Iranian cinema and its impact on the country over the past sixty years. Director Nader Takmil Homayoun (right) decided to breathe life into the rich history of his native land's film industry with Iran: Une Révolution cinématographique, which made its premiere tonight to a sold out crowd at the Al Green theatre.

Iranian cinema has largely been off the North American radar, perpetuating an image in the West that Iranians are people of prayer and...

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September 14, 2021
Celebrating Office Tigers
Posted By Thom Powers At 4:06 PM
File under: Parties, Directors
Producer Lawrence Elman and director Liz Mermin celebrate the world premiere of their film Office Tigers at a party for the film on Saturday night, held at the Tribute Lounge at the Century Room. For the film's second screening on Monday, the audience sang "Happy Birthday" to Mermin.

Yesterday, Lorrie Goldstein of the Toronto Sun praised Office Tigers in a warm review, excerpted here:

Employees working for big corporations everywhere will identify with Office Tigers harried staff as they cope with long hours, demanding bosses, early deadlines, constant retraining, jargon-filled...

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September 13, 2021
TIFF Gets to Know a Terrorist on Film
Posted By doc blog reporter At 7:22 PM
File under: Politics, Directors

A full house gathered at the ROM today for the premiere screening of My Life as a Terrorist: The Story of Hans-Joachim Klein. The film follows the life of Klein, a German man who went from being a left-wing radical to being linked to the murders of OPEC officials in 1975. Klein describes this transition and reveals how he feels the terrorist organization used and manipulated him.

Stock footage and photographs are used along with recent footage of Klein on a trip back to his...

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September 12, 2021
Celebrities Exposed at Final Doc Talk
Posted By doc blog reporter At 6:32 PM
File under: Celebrities, Directors
If you are planning to make a doc on a celebrity, the top floor of the Sutton Place hotel would have been the perfect place to be today, as the final Doc Talk featured an diverse panel discussing their use of celebrity in film. The panel featured Sophie Fiennes (The Pervert's Guide to Cinema), AJ Schnack (Kurt Cobain About a Son), Sara Berstein (HBO Documentaries), and John Scheinfeld (The US vs. John Lennon). Moderator Thom Powers began by asking the panel about challenges making their films. “Our biggest obstacle was called ‘Yoko’”, said...

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Doc Collaborators Discuss Mixture of Artistic Mediums
Posted By doc blog reporter At 3:42 PM
File under: Panels, Directors

The second of three Doc Talks today focused on collaboration, featuring the creators of Manufactured Landscapes discussing how a project comes toghether with such difficult creative bridges to build. The film's director Jennifer Baichwal said it was very different to look at an image through the eyes of a photographer, which she needed to do in creating this film focused on the work of famed Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky.


When Burtynsky found out a film was in the works about him, he was hesitant to be part of a project full...

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September 11, 2021
Blindsight Opens Eyes and Hearts
Posted By doc blog reporter At 7:44 PM
File under: Cinematography, Directors

Blindsight has its world premiere today at TIFF, garnering possibly the loudest and longest applause of any Real to Reel film so far at the festival. The film's director, Lucy Walker (background), documented the amazing story of six blind Tibetan children attempting to climb a 22,000 foot peak near mount Everest in 2004. The children were led by their teacher, Sabriye Tenberken, who is also visually impaired, and Erik Weihenmayer, a blind man who climbed to the top of Mount Everest.

Filled with emotion, struggle, triumph and a rousing rendintion of...

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September 10, 2021
Imagine a Perfect Evening
Posted By David Leaf At 1:27 PM
File under: Memories, Directors
We had the privilege of screening The U.S. vs. John Lennon last night at the Ryerson Theatre. We couldn't have asked for a more receptive audience, or a more exciting evening.

After spending nearly a year making a film, it's only human to wonder if anyone other than you and your team cares about it. In the car en route to the theatre, John Scheinfeld (we wrote, directed and produced together) and I had that opening night feeling of "this is it."

We had heard that there was considerable interest in the film, but we really didn't know what to expect....

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September 8, 2021
ON CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ghosts of Cite Soleil
Posted By Asger Leth At 10:42 AM
File under: Cinematography, Directors

Ghosts of Cite Soleil (right) didn´t have months or years of pre-production behind it when we started shooting. There was no production company. There was no extensive preparing for the great mission an undertaking like this film could be. There was the prepared desire to do a certain kind of film in the right setting and there was the sudden unraveling of historic events in Haiti that invited filming and immediate action. There was a clear dramatic line of events waiting to happen.  And then there was the...

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September 6, 2021
Looking Back on at Bush vs. Kerry
Posted By Adam Del Deo At 10:53 AM
File under: Politics, War & Conflict, Directors
We just received word that one of the "stars" of our political documentary, a tireless grass roots campaigner for the Democrats by the name of Miles Gerety, will be attending the world premiere of our film, ".So Goes the Nation."  Miles actually drove all night from Connecticut to Ohio for those final crazy days of the campaign to try and tip the scales for the Democrats. We couldn't be happier to hear that Miles, as well his Republican counterpart Leslie Ghiz, will both be present at the World Premiere on Sept....

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September 5, 2021
Unorthodox Shooting on SHAME
Posted By Mohammed Naqvi At 11:10 PM
File under: Human Rights, Directors
[TIFF will be showing Shame (left), a documentary about Pakistani activist Mukhtaran Mai, in Real to Reel as a work-in-progress. Here the director takes us behind the scenes - Ed.]

We needed a few crucial pick up shots done and I was in the middle of editing in New York. To get these pick ups, I would have had to go back to Pakistan for a few days. At that point, however, we were nine days away from the Toronto International Film Festival deadline and it wasn’t possible for...

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Last Minute Finishes
Posted By Thom Powers At 10:19 AM
File under: Editing, Directors
The Globe and Mail reporter Jennie Punter writes today about the final bits of post-production happening in the 11th hour for TIFF films. She focuses on three titles including the documentaries EMPz 4 Life and Manufactured Landscapes (left).

Here's an excerpt:

For her documentary Manufactured Landscapes, which follows acclaimed Canadian artist Ed Burtynsky as he captures large-scale photographs of China's industrial revolution, Baichwal says the sound mix is a crucial step in creating the shape of vast spaces, like the Three Gorges Dam, for viewers. "We're experimenting to the last...

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September 2, 2021
Notes on Perverts
Posted By Sophie Fiennes At 1:43 AM
File under: Memories, Directors

This is not a statement, just a quick reflection, late at night from Stockwell, South London. The guy in the flat below me is playing a very insistent trance music track and the soft but predictable bass is seeping through the floorboards like the smell of cooking. Perhaps this is his revenge for all the late nights he had to suffer at my hands, hearing the recorded voice of Slavoj Zizek (left), like a Balkan Zeus, booming away from above about "Libido!" - and unintelligible vibrations through the walls with...

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September 1, 2021
ON CINEMATOGRAPHY: Blindsight
Posted By Lucy Walker At 4:33 PM
File under: Cinematography, Directors
I love cinema verite, and Blindsight called for combining verite with interview, a rich mix. For verite scenes it's a sine qua non that the cinematographer needs to have as much patience as I do to let things unfurl in front of the camera.

[Right: Sabriye Tenberken in Blindsight]

Some DPs think it's a set-it-up- and-shoot-it-quick-and- go-for-a-beer deal, and how much do I wish it were that easy, but alas anything I've ever directed that was worth watching has required a more painstaking approach. Real life is...

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ON ARCHIVAL: My Life as a Terrorist
Posted By Alexander Oey At 10:55 AM
File under: Memories, Directors
When we were doing research for my film My Life as a Terrorist: The Story of Hans-Joachim Klein (right), one of the first things I did was looking for archive footage of the riots in Frankfurt in the 70's. Hans-Joachim Klein had been in numerous of these riots. He had been throwing stones at the police and he had been fighting with them.

The most famous scene, that of Klein beating up a policeman together with former German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Joschka Fischer, was easy to get. But the "ordinary riots" were hard...

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August 31, 2021
ON ARCHIVAL: The US vs John Lennon
Posted By John Scheinfeld At 2:03 PM
File under: Memories, Music, Directors

[Today begins a series of postings by TIFF directors discussing different crafts that go into documentary making: archival research, shooting, editing, music - Ed.]

Dick. Shamus. Slewfoot. The slang varies, but the job is the same throughout decades of crime films -- navigating a noir-ish jungle of torpedoes, fakeloos, shysters, tomatoes and roscoes to obtain information.  

Although hardly as treacherous, making The U.S. vs. John Lennon did involve quite a bit of hard-boiled detection. Lennon was one of the...

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ON CINEMATOGRAPHY: Kurt Cobain About a Son
Posted By AJ Schnack At 1:55 PM
File under: Cinematography, Memories, Directors

I first met Wyatt Troll,  my director of photography on Kurt Cobain  About A Son, more than a decade ago when we were both starting out in production.  We were both making music videos - I was an Executive Producer at a company that made low budget clips for indie rock bands and Wyatt was a DP and photographer just starting to make a name for himself.

Flash forward to last spring as I was thinking about who should shoot this film and I got in touch...

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August 29, 2021
Experimental documentaries, qu’est-ce que c’est?
Posted By Andrea Picard At 4:25 PM
File under: Cinematography, Directors

The slippery fields that are documentary and experimental film have been flooded–dare I say littered– with theoretical posturings, both having been debated ad infinitum.

Bypassing those tired arguments altogether, I will simply list the remarkable (amount of) documentaries in this year’s Wavelengths programme. In the traditional sense, the avant-garde has always formed to rebel against mainstream structure, inertia (societal or stylistic), and conservative and extremist politics. And sometimes the politics of the image alone were (and are in face of preposterous “film is dead” current...

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Blindsight Training Day
Posted By Lucy Walker At 10:51 AM
File under: Directors, Memories

Tashi Delek, as the Tibetans say! I just came across this journal entry from a tough day on the shoot, and I thought it might be a good warm-up for the premiere of Blindsight. This was just the training climb, the real climb was even gnarlier, but you’re going to have to wait for the movie for that…

June 1st
Woke to rabid-sounding dogs barking all around the tent – at least something is managing to stay alive out there, not just rock and weather. And at least not lightning...

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Reflections on Office Tigers
Posted By Liz Mermin At 7:55 AM
File under: Directors, Memories
[The director of Beauty Academy of Kabul  explains how she approached her new film Office Tigers (right), having its world premiere at TIFF  - Ed.]

I’ve always hated offices.  The bad lighting, forced camaraderie, strict hierarchies, water-cooler banter… deadening.   I find it particularly depressing that this sterile anti-aesthetic should be the greatest contribution the West (particularly the US) has to offer the rest before we slip away into economic irrelevance. So when I first heard about OfficeTiger – a story rich...

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August 28, 2021
Writing from Manipur
Posted By Haobam Paban Kumar At 2:16 PM
File under: Directors, Memories

Hi, all. I am, Haobam Paban Kumar from Manipur – the eastern most state of India bordering Myanmar. My documentary film A Cry in the Dark (left) is going to have its world premiere at TIFF. 

When Manipur became a part of India in 1949, a large portion of the Manipuri population was resistant, believing the merger to be an illegal and illegitimate annexation. To...

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Desi Docs: South Asian Sensations at TIFF
Posted By doc blog reporter At 11:36 AM
File under: Directors, Human Rights

This year, TIFF is pleased to present an especially strong line-up of  documentaries from South Asia. A Cry in the Dark (left) captures the violent repression of locals in Manipur, India protesting the rape and killing of a young woman under police custody. The film’s director, Haobam Paban Kumar, a native of the Eastern Indian province, captured escalating protests of shocking intensity - including shots of police beating unarmed activists and journalists in open sight. This protest, barely covered by the international press, demonstrates the power of independent documentary...

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Festopia
Posted By Amy Berg At 12:18 AM
File under: Directors, Memories
Just a year and a half ago, after spending over four years on the same story for CNN and CBS before that, a pedophile priest named Oliver O'Grady decided he would participate in the film I wanted to make. It became Deliver Us From Evil (right) -- the story from inside the sickest mind possible, the secrets that were meant to stay in the private files and crypts of the Roman Catholic Church, and the blind trust in those they perceived as God's messengers that left families with no faith...

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August 27, 2021
Herzog, Apted, & Others in the Realms of Fiction
Posted By Thom Powers At 11:49 AM
File under: Directors
Werner Herzog is coming back to Toronto, following the major retrospective of his documentaries this spring at Hot Docs. His new film Rescue Dawn (left), showing in TIFF's Masters section, stars Christian Bale and is adapted from the directors’s 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. But do distinctions between documentary and fiction even matter to Herzog? In 1999 he delivered his barbed and witty “Minnesota Declaration,” challenging the term “cinema verite.” Among the points of this manifesto, he stated, “There are deeper...

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August 26, 2021
Can't Wait To Get There
Posted By David Leaf At 1:38 PM
File under: Celebrities, Directors, Memories, Music

My very first trip to Canada as a kid was to Expo '67 in Montreal, and among my favorite memories of the fair are the terrific movies about Canada that played in the various exhibits.  Most memorable was the Czechoslovakian pavilion, where a mind-blowing "interactive" (did that word even exist back then?) film allowed the audience to participate in the storytelling. I can still feel the fun of endlessly riding the monorails and in my mind's eye,...

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Another Fragment from Iraq
Posted By James Longley At 10:27 AM
File under: Directors, Editing
When I came back to Iraq shortly after the US invasion in 2003, I was looking for personal stories to document that would also show parts of the bigger picture of what was happening in Iraq under US occupation. I filmed six different stories, of which three wound up in my feature documentary, Iraq in Fragments. The short film Sari's Mother (right) is one of the stories that was left out of the larger documentary, but I always felt it was one of the most compelling things...

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S&MAN; site live
Posted By JT Petty At 8:56 AM
File under: , Directors
I feel like a bit of an interloper here, since my movie's officially part of the Midnight Madness program, but a doc's a doc, so--

Today we launched the website for S&MAN (left), (www.sandman-movie.com) which has all the usual goodies: a trailer, music, etc., along with its own blog.  I've invited a few of the subjects I focused on in S&MAN to contribute, so hopefully we'll be hearing from Bill Zebub, Toe Tag, and Debbie D.  My hope is for the site...

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Are you in American Hardcore?
Posted By Paul Rachman At 2:06 AM
File under: Directors, Music
OK, a free sticker to anyone who can identify themselves in the crowd of this American Hardcore screen grab! We have lots of old vintage early 1980's footage. Much of what we found was stored in old shoeboxes in closets and was shot on VHS in ELP mode back in the day so as to maxmize the amount of shows per tape. A perfect example of some of the rarest is this capture from an early Negative Approach show in Philadelphia shot by Steven Eye. A Detroit band, Negative Approach was...

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August 25, 2021
About A Son, Featuring Michael Tucker
Posted By AJ Schnack At 3:46 PM
File under: Directors, Memories
Not long after the festival announced the first crop of titles in the Real to Reel programme, I got an email from fellow filmmaker Michael Tucker, who (with partner Petra Epperlein) made the excellent film Gunner Palace and this year's Toronto premiere The Prisoner Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair. Michael wrote me to say that he used to live in Seattle and is friends with Charles Peterson, whose photographs we are using in our film about Kurt Cobain (and who will be with us for the...

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Ross McElwee Obeys
Posted By Thom Powers At 12:12 PM
File under: Directors, Memories

Director Ross McElwee brought this documentary Bright Leaves (right) to TIFF in 2003. Here he recalls his experiences as a filmgoer at that festival...

ROSS MCELWEE:
I was invited to the 2003 Toronto Film Festival with my documentary, Bright Leaves.  Two moments stand out for me. When I attend the Toronto International Film Festival,  I try to see films that I assume will have little chance of theatrical distribution in the US. Having read an interesting description of the Belgian filmmaker  Thomas...

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August 24, 2021
Doc Talks on Sept 12
Posted By doc blog reporter At 11:29 PM
File under: Directors, Panels

Manufactured Landscapes (right) represents a tremendous collaboration
between director Jennifer Baichwal and cinematographer Peter Mettler as they follow photographer Edward Burtynsky taking his large-scale pictures on modern industrialization. The opening shot tracking through a Chinese factory will take your breath away. These three artists will come together for one of three Doc Talk panels on Sept 12, sponsored by HBO. This new initiative is open to TIFF Industry pass holders .

Another Doc Talk panel will focus on "War and Conflict" featuring filmmakers
Michael Tucker (The Prisoner)...

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Reflections of a Terrorist
Posted By Thom Powers At 3:32 PM
File under: Directors, War & Conflict

My Life As a Terrorist: The Story of Hans-Joachim Klein (left) will have its North American premiere at TIFF this year. In 1975, Klein joined the notorious terrorist Carlos the Jackal in a kidnapping of OPEC officials in Vienna. Klein came to regret his involvement, went into hiding for two decades and was eventually arrested. After getting out of prison, he told his life story to Dutch filmmaker Alexander Oey for this remarkable documentary.

The film was brought to my attention by...

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August 23, 2021
Michael Moore back at TIFF!
Posted By Thom Powers At 12:20 PM
File under: Directors, Politics
Today the press was buzzing with reports that Michael Moore (left) will be coming to TIFF for a special event in our Mavericks section. Moore will be showing glimpses from not just one, but two works-in-progress. He'll be showing a teaser from his eagerly awaited doc Sicko about the US health care system, due as a major release from The Weinstein Company in 2007.

But kept more secret until yesterday's announcement, Moore has been editing another piece titled The Great 04 Slacker Uprising. It's a scrappy road trip movie...

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August 22, 2021
Spellbound Bursts on the Scene
Posted By Thom Powers At 9:40 AM
File under: Directors, Memories
When I'm asked about the new boom in theatrical documentaries, I point to TIFF 2002 as the starting point. That was the year that Spellbound, Winged Migration and Bowling for Columbine played the festival before becoming surprise box office hits in the next year.

Spellbound's director Jeffrey Blitz recalls that turning point...

JEFFREY BLITZ:
Toronto was the first film festival where theatrical distributors took note of Spellbound and it was enormously exciting because of that. The night it all came to a head, I remember sitting in the lobby...

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