Christmas Eve
I just received an email from TIFF, confirming that my Out-of-Town Package is on the way will be shipped tomorrow. Only a few more hours a little more than a day until Christmas morning, when FedEx will show up at my office, program book in hand. Let the obsessive package-tracking begin.
Over lunch today I finished working through the film list and have done just about all of the research I can do before the full descriptions go live. Here are a few smaller films that have caught my eye.
- Teza - Haile Gerima, Germany/Ethiopia/France
- Shakespeare and Victor Hugo's Intimacies - Yulene Olaizola, Mexico
- Hooked - Adrian Sitaru, Romania/France
- Winds of September - Tom Shu-Yu Lin, Taiwan
- Sea Point Days - François Verster, South Africa
With a lineup like TIFF's you have to take some chances. Any other suggestions for potential hidden gems?
12 comments:
if you look at the email more closely, you'll see it says the package will be sent tomorrow and received by you on Wednesday.
Oh, you're right. Damn.
Well hopefully you've be able to see the schedule online and such tomorrow! Although nothing is the same as having the book in your hands.
I've been behind on my website work and lots of other things. But since people will be scheduling soon, I figured I should provide a quick alert from the Wavelengths side of things. If at all possible, don't miss "When It Was Blue." It's stellar.
I may not have mentioned that I quite liked Hashiguchi's Hush! at TIFF 2001, and am hoping that All Around Us makes its way to a place near me.
I would be excited about Mundruczo and Hadjithomas/Joriege if I were going. And I thought the one Mika Kaurismaki film I've seen was very worthy.
Who are all these filmmakers and why do they keep making all these films?
Thanks for the recommendations, Dan. Mundruczo and Hadjithomas/Joriege are both sitting pretty high on my list, but I hadn't paid much attention to either Hashiguchi or Kaurismaki.
Michael S, I've held off watching my screener of "When It Was Blue" because that's the one that will have live accompaniment, right?
Right, Darren, although the screener (reliable word has it) provides a fairly accurate representation of what the piece will look like. The screener-version blew me away, so the live version is a can't-miss.
Just wanted to say that I picked up my Programme guide this morning (along with my 30 ticket package)...Ah, that fresh newly inked smell. I had to go to work shortly after picking it up, but I managed to leaf through a few sections. They gave me three separate order books, so I'm not sure if I do all 30 films in one book or 10 in each. Likely the former.
Sigh, I already miss my TIFF book...I'm glad I gave it a small hug before I left.
Unless I'm mistaken, Reeves' When it Was Blue is one of her multi-projection projects. When she was in San Francisco a few months ago for a retrospective, she talked about why she is still working in 16mm and why she enjoys making films that require multiple projectors. There's an element of chance introduced by the need to start the second projector manually. The two don't sync up the same every time. (And in some of her multi-projector works, the pictures are side-by-side, not overlapping. I'm sure that would be swell when smooshed down to a TV aspect ratio.)
She was even reluctant to show a video clip of When it Was Blue alongside all of the great 16mm work that she was showcasing at the retro, but we did get a glimpse. It does look neat, but I'd hate to see that kind of thing on a screener when there's a chance to see the real thing in a few days.
Understood, guys. But I've been hired to write an extensive preview on Wavelengths for GCD, so I was sort of obligated to watch the thing. And I reckon, if Reeves didn't feel the screener provided at least a vague sense of what she as up to, she wouldn't have provided it.
But at any rate, let not my sacrifice be in vain. The piece, even in degraded pseudo-form, is brilliant, so the performance will no doubt be mindblowing. I have been a skeptic about Reeves' work in the past, but I'm sold now.
Yeah, your previews are helpful and I'm glad you do them. We're all tainted by the dollar at one point or another. Festival programmers, film critics, the like. ;-)
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