One of the big thrills about covering a film festival is discovering a gem on your own.
Last
year, while on my way to the celebrity ball - that being the premiere of Brad
Pitt's film about baseball general manager Billy Beane -- I got tangled up in line for Rush tickets. Not
the band Rush, but the rush line for extra tickets. Normally, you'll see 10 or 20
people, but this time there were hundreds standing in a line that went around
the corner and down the street. Turns out an Iranian filmmaker, under house
arrest for making a film, made a film about being under house arrest. It
arrived at TIFF by way of a USB thumb drive smuggled into Canada
in a loaf of bread. Like everyone else, I had to see it for
myself -- if for no other reason than to pay tribute to the artist's efforts. 
So, I bowed out
of the Pitt press conference and went to the screening of "This is not a
film."
It made me laugh and cry. Most of all, it
made me appreciate how lucky we are as writers or filmmakers and audiences to
choose what we want to create and see.
This year's gem, "Far Out
Isn't Enough," was discovered by accident thanks
to an usher who had no idea what film was showing and nodded to yes to all
questions asked. I went to the screening thinking it was something else, and
boy was it something.
Not only is
Ungerer's story interesting -- he was the first children's author to make a
kids book about creepy things like a snake, was blacklisted in America and his
books were banned by libraries for publishing erotica artwork - but fun to
watch. Its director Brad Bernstein combines traditional documentary
storytelling with original animation including that of Ungerer himself.
Additional interviews with illustrators such as Maurice Sendak, who says in the documentary there would be no
"Where the Wild Things Are" without Ungerer, also make it a gem.
No comments:
Post a Comment