TIFF 51: Latin American Gems, Part III – The Everlasting Return

by Cláudio Alves

Last but not least, in this miniseries of Latin American highlights from the 51st Toronto International Film Festival, we have a quartet of films that ponder return, whether to a place or a time, perchance a cultural root or the depths of literary history.

You have Lisandro Alonso’s Double Freedom, premiered at Cannes to rave reviews and which, effectively, marks a sequel, quasi-remake of the director’s quarter-century-old debut. The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs considers the work of Sara Flores, a Peruvian painter from the Amazon, while Life of Jorge Luis Borges is another madcap proposition from El Pampero Cine, focusing on director Mariano Llinás’ investigation into the titular writer. Also, it’s five and a half hours long and the funniest film at TIFF 51. Finally, Where the River Begins follows three youths in contemporary Bogotá as they leave behind their lives of urban misery and return to the Indigenous riverside village of their past, their shared legacy, their dreams…

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NYFF 64: “London” and “The Loneliest Man in Town” blur the line between fact, fiction and portraiture

by Cláudio Alves

When one’s engagement with cinema happens mostly through mainstream productions, it’s easy to fall into the false belief that narrative and documentary film are two strictly separated categories. However, almost since the medium's birth, the line between the two has been blurred, the barrier porous and permeable. One might go as far back as the Lumières’ artificial staging for their shorts, or perhaps relitigate the authenticity of Flaherty’s Nanook of the North for the millionth time since it hit theaters in 1922. Perchance we might reflect on the cinematic traditions of Portuguese post-revolution cinema, or the Iranian auteurs who kept pushing boundaries with their hybrid works in the 80s, 90s, and beyond. At the 64th New York Film Festival, many films fell between the binary of fact and fiction, with two doing so by appealing to the portrait as a cinematic model.

They’re both Austrian projects that vied for the Golden Berlin Bear earlier this year – Sebastian Brameshuber’s London and Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s The Loneliest Man in Town…

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TIFF 51: Latin American Gems, Part I – Actress-y Delights

by Cláudio Alves

Fair warning, the fall festival coverage isn’t over yet – it will never be over!

I kid, I kid. We’ll conclude the TIFF odyssey next Tuesday, exactly one month after the 51st Toronto International Film Festival screened its last picture with a very silly convo between myself and Brian Rector (aka Eurocheese). Until then, I still have more reviews to drop, mostly capsules that will hopefully spark your interest in smaller films likely to be released in limited form this year or the next. So take these as friendly recommendations, reminders to pay attention when you hear that these films might be playing near you. In that spirit of sharing cinematic joys and celebrating the Davids to Hollywood’s Goliaths, I decided to give some special space to Latin American cinema, which had an incredible showing at this year’s fest, spanning fiction to non-fiction, shorts to five-and-a-half-hour epics.

For this first batch of texts, I’m shining a light on films held together, in one way or another, by sublime lead actress turns. After all, there’s nothing that The Film Experience readership loves more than great actress-ing. They are Diego Luna’s Ashes, Fernando Eimbcke’s Flies, Neto Villalobos’ Love is the Monster, and Gabriel Martins’ On Behalf of My Son…

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NYFF 64: Currents Program #4 - "The Real World" Confronts Reality Head-On

by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor

We’re coming to you live from the 64th New York Film Festival with the hottest ticket of the whole event: The Currents short film programs! Program #4 is cheekily subtitled “The Real World”, bringing to you four films with unique narrative and stylistic understanding to one very fair question: How many realities does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Especially at a moment in time where “reality” has become so easy to manufacture, and memories created and destroyed at a moment’s notice for no reason other than capitalist convenience, that’s an important question to ask, whether the goal is to speculate on the future or reclaim a past. There’s no easy answer, but the human creativity and inventiveness these directors bring show how rewarding it can be to wrestle with such topics...

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TIFF 51: “Tender Loving Care” could be Mike Leigh’s perfect swan song

by Cláudio Alves

In 1971, Mike Leigh appeared on the scene with Bleak Moments, an exercise in social realism that wouldn’t immediately open the doors one might hope for in the British film industry. Instead, he became a TV writer-director, slowly building his reputation and drawing on the easy rapport with actors and improvisational methods he’d developed on stage. By 1988, he’d make his grand return to theatrical features with High Hopes. Eight years later, he won the Palme d’Or for Secrets & Lies. Eight years later still, he’d take the Golden Lion for Vera Drake. In the past decade or so, such accolades meant little, as he struggled to finance projects after a couple of period drama flops whose majesty proved unpersuasive to investors. By the time he returned in 2024 with Hard Truths, headlines were written about how Cannes and Venice had rejected his comeback before a more modest world premiere at TIFF. It’s been a storied, eventful, and difficult career. And it might be over. 

Tender Loving Care, which premiered at Telluride before screening at TIFF, the NYFF, and sweeping San Sebastián by taking the Golden Seashell, Best Leading Performance for Kate O’Flynn and Best Screenplay for Leigh himself, is likely his last work. At 83, health issues have turned filmmaking into a painful endeavor, and financing remains an issue. Well, if this is to be Mike Leigh’s swan song, it’s a pretty perfect one at that…

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