TIFF '24: "All We Imagine As Light" is one of the year's best films

by Cláudio Alves

France went with Emilia Pérez and Luxembourg chose not to submit a film at all. India was the last hope, but, as expected, went a different route, choosing a Hindi title, Laapataa Ladies, and ignoring the work of a director who's been outspoken against injustices in her country. Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light is officially out of the Best International Film Oscar race – a pity, for it's one of the year's best films, a miracle of grace that's as close to cinematic perfection as one can get. So much so that talk of awards feels improper, an anodyne aspiration in the face of what Kapadia unleashes on screen. Awards are too small to do this narrative feature debut justice. Even the Cannes Grand Prize feels insufficient, for All We Imagine As Light is one for the ages…

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TIFF '24: A Mohammad Rasoulof Double Feature

by Cláudio Alves

THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes.

Much of the period leading up to this year's Cannes Film Festival was consumed with news of Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof. Always outspoken against an oppressive regime, his career has been dedicated to political art commenting on present injustices through the prism of fiction. For this, he has been arrested multiple times, and his latest feature, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, proved too much for the Iranian authorities. Police hounded many people involved with the production, Cannes organizers were pressured to drop the official competition title, and Rasoulof himself was put behind bars, convicted to eight years in prison and an additional filmmaking ban. Thankfully, before celebrations started at the Croisette, the cineaste managed an escape to a safe house in Germany, the same country that now takes Sacred Fig to the Oscars as its official submission.

At TIFF, two works with screenplays signed by the Iranian political dissident were screened. There was the eponymous Cannes prize-winner and Seven Days, directed by Ali Samadi Ahadi…

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TIFF '24: "By the Stream" could be a good introduction to the cinema of Hong Sang-soo

by Cláudio Alves

There's an odd comfort in seeking the new Hong Sang-soo film at any given festival. Thanks to the speed at which the Korean auteur runs through production, you'll usually find one. He regularly premieres multiple features every year. Earlier in 2024, he won the Silver Bear at Berlin with A Traveler's Needs. A few months later, he was at Locarno, ready to present his overall 32nd feature-length project, By the Stream, which took the Best Performance award for Kim Min-hee's work. This second project also made it to TIFF, delighting loyal fans with a new Hong that's much like all the other Hongs that came before. That's not a dig, merely a recognition of the director's remarkable consistency…

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The Hunt for the Tenth: Women in Best Director of 2024

By Juan Carlos Ojano

After last Oscars’ historic record of three female-directed films in Best Picture, we are again headed towards another round of awards season, albeit with no clear frontrunners yet as of the time of writing. Since 2017’s #MeToo, mainstream media outlets have been more cognizant of the routine exclusion of women in the Best Director conversation. Many cinephiles have also been vocal in addressing this issue, more than ever.

The issues female directors face is deeper and more systemic than just the awards season. However, this process of instant canonization is symptomatic of which kinds of art and artists are given more value by the critics and the industry. The fact we only had our ninth female nominee for Best Director at the last Oscars - in the Academy’s 96 years of existence - speaks loudly to this problem...

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TIFF '24: Wang Bing completes the "Youth" Trilogy

by Cláudio Alves

YOUTH (HARD TIMES) won a special mention at Locarno, the Junior Jury and FIPRESCI prizes.

Last year, Wang Bing presented Youth (Spring) at TIFF after the film's world premiere in competition at Cannes. It was to be the first part of an epic trilogy, one of a magnitude that's impressive even for such a grand muralist as the director is known to be. His filmography is full of works documenting the Chinese dispossessed, often curious about the labor forces whose strenuous efforts make the national economy work its exploitative, feverishly expansionist dream. For Youth, he focused his camera on the greener workers, a new generation consigned to a life of unfair garment labor, struggling to survive within the putative economic boom of modern China. Wang shot it between 2014 and 2019, dividing his findings between three films that collectively amount to a nearly ten-hour-runtime. 

At The Film Experience, we've already gone over Spring, so it's time to tackle Hard Times – competition in Locarno – and Homecoming – an erstwhile Golden Lion contender from Venice. The cumulative effect of these three monuments of cinema cannot be overstated…

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