Festival Daily






September 9, 2021
Opening Night! Canadian Joel Hynes talks frankly about his book-turned-film, Down to the Dirt
Posted By Festival Daily At 9:01 AM
File under: Directors
By Elizabeth Beddall When you call Joel Hynes’s home and catch the muffled squeak of a child’s voice – and hear a patient father suggest that his son go draw him a picture of a grizzly bear – you may, at first, wonder if you have the right person on the line. His body of written work may have you expecting something quite different. In fact, legend has it that the 37-year-old author-actor is partial to rage and mass destruction; that his persona could reach through the phone and sock you in the face. “Well, you know, it follows me around,”...

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A Round with... Terence Davies
Posted By Festival Daily At 9:01 AM
File under: Directors
By Nicholas Davies Who: Terence Davies, director, Of Time and the City and The Terence Davies TrilogyWhat: Vodka cranberry and vodka sevenWhere: 22 Lounge at the Windsor Arms Hotel, 18 St. Thomas StreetWhen: September 5, 7:30pm I arrive at 22 Lounge in the lovely Windsor Arms Hotel, where a very charming bartender clears out the back room to make way for my private chat with Terence Davies (no relation), the master British director of some of the most heart-rending works of contemporary cinema – including his latest, Of Time and the City, and his seminal Trilogy, which is screening in the Dialogues:...

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The TIFF Olympics!
Posted By Festival Daily At 9:01 AM
By SDR Still revelling in the sweet comfort of uninterrupted hours of Olympic viewing (where I discovered sport disciplines and exercises I never thought I would be interested in at 11:30 at night), and feeling the world come together in an incredibly fit form that can only give way to body issues and the like, I ask at the onset of this 33rd TIFF year… why let the magic end? Let it ride, I say. Make this TIFF athletic, Herculean, multi-disciplined and possibly spandexed. Set records, beating the clocks, the lineups, the heat; carry a torch of tickets and gift bags...

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Pontypool Breathes New Life into a “Dead” Genre
Posted By Festival Daily At 9:01 AM
By Tammy Stone   One of the magical qualities of cinema is that individual films can be many different things to different people. Films certainly unite, but they also divide, inspiring such heated debate and endless interpretation that it’s often hard to believe the same film lies at the source of it all. Then there are the films that deliberately set out to jar, stump and break the mould. Veteran director Bruce McDonald’s oeuvre has done just that, almost from the beginning. In 1996, Hard Core Logo, one of the early mock docs, rapidly achieved cult status, while last year’s The Tracey Fragments...

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Genre Down Under: An Email Roundtable
Posted By Festival Daily At 9:01 AM
File under: Directors
By Ghita Loebenstein The director of the “Ozploitation” flick Not Quite Hollywood, three Australian horror cohorts and Colin “Midnight Madness” Geddes join the Daily’s resident Aussie, Ghita Loebenstein, at a virtual round table to discuss the free-wheelin’ sex romps, blood-soaked terror tales and high-octane action extravaganzas that made up Australian genre cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. The Players: Mark Hartley, director, Not Quite Hollywood Jon Hewitt, director, Acolytes (also screening at the Festival) Michael and Peter Spierig, co-directors, UndeadColin Geddes, Programmer, Midnight Madness GL: Ozploitation has in many ways been Australia’s forgotten genre until now. When and how did you all come...

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