July 3, 2002

ARARAT AND A SPIDER WALK INTO A FILM FESTIVAL:
TIFF 2002's Opening Press Conference - July 2, 2002

Another round of musical chairs placed this year's opening press conference for the Toronto International Film Festival (henceforth TIFF) at the Design Exchange, an area inside the streets-spanning Toronto Dominion Centre. I arrived just before the doors opened, waiting in line behind various tripod-slingers--TV media are always the earliest to arrive.

The first face I saw upon entering belonged to Gabrielle Free, recently and deservedly promoted to Director of Media & Public Relations. Random chaos and I'm signing in after she told me she would do so by proxy, and she sees me with the clipboard after she has forged my John Hancock... I have wasted no time in making my first faux pas of the Festival season, but it's all good.

Cosy and sterile duke it out in the atmosphere of the Design Exchange, which suggests the Pottery Barn stocked with Sharper Image bric-a-brac. Familiar faces everywhere, but nobody's really looking at one another; the last time a lot of us saw each other was when 9/11 happened, so maybe it's a social hangover. Maybe it's the humidity: 38 degrees Celsius outside.

Maybe it's the absence of carpeting. Mingling on hardwood is never intimate.

The giant clock above the makeshift stage puts pressure on the Festival committee. Five dollars per half-hour it costs to park here; I am relieved when the conference draws to a quick close after commencing well past its scheduled 2:00pm start. Gabrielle goes to the front, Michèle Maheux is next. Greetings. Salutations. And then the sponsors.

Piers Handling takes his place at the podium and gets down to the nitty-gritty. He announces several pictures that will play Toronto in September. The big-screen adaptation of Janet Fitch's best-selling White Oleander, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Renee Zellweger, and Robin Wright Penn, screens as a Gala Presentation; ditto Brad Silberling's Moonlight Time (with Jake Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, and Susan Sarandon), and Im Kwon-taek's Chihwaseon, about real-life enigmatic artist Jang Seung-up.

Other announcements included the eight titles thus far confirmed for the special program Harvest: South Korean Renaissance. They are: Park Ki-Yong's Camels; Kim Ki-duk's Bad Guy; Hong Sang-soo's Turning Gate; Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance; Jeong Jae-eun's Take Care of My Cat; Jang Sun-woo's Resurrection of the Little Match Girl; Lee Jeong-hyang's The Way Home; and Park Jin-pyo's Too Young to Die. (Not a prequel to the John Stamos vehicle Never Too Young to Die.) The aforementioned Chihwaseon is at the forefront of this year's National Cinema Spotlight on South Korea.

French filmmaker Robert Guédiguian is TIFF 2002's featured director. The North American premiere of his latest, Marie-Jo et ses 2 amours, joins Guédiguian's La ville est tranquille from 2000, A l'attaque! (also from 2000), 1998's A la place du cœur, Marius et Jeannette (1996), A la vie, a la mort! (1995), Dieux vomit les tièdes, and his directorial debut, Dernier été.

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra provides live accompaniment for the Chaplin Mutual Shorts (featuring Easy Street, The Cure, and The Adventurer) on Friday, September 13^th at 6:30pm in the Visa Screening Room of the Elgin Theatre.

Let's see, what else... Oh yeah, director Allan King receives the Canadian Retrospective. Handling called him one of his homeland's most important filmmakers, and much of King's oeuvre will be shown during the 10-day TIFF: the shorts Dreams, Epilogue, The Field Day, Maria, Orson Welles Interview, Running Away Backwards, and A Talk with Irene; the documentaries Skidrow, Warrendale, A Married Couple, and Who's in Charge?; the fictional Who Has Seen the Wind? (adapted from the W.O. Mitchell novel); and the recently confirmed Joshua, A Matter of Pride, Red Emma, Come on, Children, and The Dragon's Egg. Canadian Open Vault, meanwhile, hosts Gilles Carle's 1972 ode to failure La vraie nature de Bernadette, starring Micheline Lanetôt and Donald Pilon.

The late Festival programmer Ramiro Puerta, in memory of whom Handling delivered a caring eulogy at yesterday's do, receives a partial tribute to his own work with Two Feet, One Angel. His shorts Crucero/Crossroads, Two Feet, One Angel, Contradanza No. 2, and The Topic of Cancer are slated alongside Spanish-language offerings The Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Strawberry and Chocolate, and the new Jaime Humberto Hermosillo film Exxxorcismos.

One final pair of official selections from Canada to mention. As expected, Atom Egoyan's Ararat opens the 27^th annual TIFF. Egoyan sent in his absence the film's star David Alpay to read a speech that won over most of the room with its praise of Toronto's ethnic diversity. David Cronenberg's Spider also made Gala status, and a spry, Gap'd Cronenberg was on hand to thank the Festival personally. Mr. Cronenberg lingered after Handling wrapped things up (or had things wrapped up for him: his call for "Questions?" was barely audible in the hum of exiting media--we're a rude sort) to provide quick soundbites. Because I haven't brought a tape recorder to these pre-TIFF events since the nineties, I opted to remove my reporter hat and notify Mr. Cronenberg of this site's advance rave for Spider. He seemed disappointed that we didn't wait to critique a theatrical presentation--faux pas number two, but it's all good.-Bill Chambers

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