Festivals

As usual, the Toronto International Film Festival’s first Saturday culminated with what has become a tradition. The annual HFPA/InStyle bash took over the Windsor Arms off Bloor street, as a veritable who’s who of filmdom descended on the hotel to celebrate film, the beginning of the Fall awards season, and generally catch up with one another at North America’s largest festival.

The Italians did not just run the festival, they also ruled the red carpet. This year there were more local designers than ever before, and jury president Annette Bening, as well as Rebecca Hall, set the tone by wearing Italian designers exclusively.

Guillermo del Toro’s Cold War fantasy drama The Shape of Water took home the top award at the 74th Venice Film Festival. “ I believe in life, I believe in love and I believe in cinema,” del Toro said as he accepted the Golden Lion to a massive standing ovation at the Palazzo del Cinema’s Sala Grande.

What begins as an old-fashioned family melodrama turns into a more complex existential meditation on the way we live now in Robert Guédiguian’s La Villa  (The House by the Sea). Unlike most Hollywood family sagas, the story doesn’t center on the inevitable conflicts between parents and children – the classic generation rift – but on three late middle-aged siblings, when they reunite at the place where they grew up.

Documentaries can be a joy to watch if they are well made, and the Michael Caine-produced and narrated My Generation is a delight. The 84-year-old actor was welcomed to huge applause at the premiere of the Swinging Sixties doc at the Palazzo del Cinema.

During the making of Milos Forman’s Man on the Moon in 1998, rumors abounded about his lead actor’s downright weird behavior. Jim Carrey had lobbied hard for the part of comedian Andy Kaufman despite Forman’s misgivings and was now creating what is commonly known in Hollywood as a “difficult set”.