The Toronto film festival is traditionally held in early September, about a month before the festival here, and in the 20-odd years I’ve been attending I’ve never been so aware of the ideological gulf between Canada and the U.S. as I was this year. It was evident on-screen, in, for example, the pointed comparisons between the two countries in one of the best films there, Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, which takes up issues such as why people shoot one another, keep their doors locked or unlocked, and (more implicitly) do or don’t have national health care. It was also apparent offscreen, in the frequent anti-American slant of headlines and stories in Toronto newspapers. And it was visible in the feuding between a couple of high-profile American reviewers, Roger Ebert and Variety’s Todd McCarthy, who both expressed anger about not getting into certain press and industry screenings, and several members of the local press, who called the two spoiled and arrogant for making such a fuss.
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From this point of view, film festivals are important events, in that they can blow fresh air into an environment where only one limited reading of September 11, ecological policy, or foreign diplomacy is allowed to be called patriotic. Certainly this was true of the most popular of the press and industry screenings I attended in Toronto, held on the evening of September 10 (one had to stand in line at least 40 minutes). This was the most important single event I attended at the festival. It wasn’t the best film I saw, though in many ways it was the most moving: a French-financed collection of 11 shorts from around the world–a miniature film festival in itself–called 11’09″01. It was important not just as an indication of the opinions of an extremely varied batch of artists–Youssef Chahine, Amos Gitai, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, Shohei Imamura, Claude Lelouch, Ken Loach, Samira Makhmalbaf, Mira Nair, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Sean Penn, and Danis Tanovic–but as an emotionally cohesive experience.
By the time I saw 11’09″01, only a few days after its world premiere in Venice (where all the profits were to go to the welfare organization Handicap International), it had already been sold to 15 countries. Its coproducer Nicolas Mauvernay tactfully noted that it couldn’t be released here for a while because “Americans are in mourning”–presumably a reference to the bullies, not to those of us who prefer to mourn and think at the same time. As a consequence, many of us won’t be able to see this movie when we need to the most.
I don’t wish to imply that attending the Chicago Film Festival is the only way one can keep abreast of the best in contemporary cinema, much less the most important works from the past. The same weekend that this year’s festival starts you can also see at Facets Cinematheque the best film I’ve seen all year, Michael Snow’s *Corpus Callosum, a magnum opus by one of North America’s major experimental filmmakers. And around the time the festival closes, Facets will start a weeklong retrospective devoted to one of the greatest and most neglected French filmmakers, Jean Gremillon, whose films are virtually impossible to see here. Nevertheless, the festival is offering this town a treasure trove over the next couple of weeks, an opportunity to be celebrated.
