Gabrielle Marceau

TIFF 2023 | A Happy Day (Hisham Zaman, Norway/Denmark) — Centrepiece

By Gabrielle Marceau In Hisham Zaman’s A Happy Day, three teenagers in Northern Norway attempt to run away from a centre for asylum seekers. But they haven’t gotten far when they’re discouraged by the insurmountable, snowy mountain between them and freedom. Sitting by the side of the road, they worry about freezing to death. “They’ll…
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TIFF 2023 | How to Have Sex (Molly Manning Walker, UK) — Discovery

By Gabrielle Marceau  Three British teens—Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) and her two besties—touch down in Greece for a holiday. After swimming in the ocean, they decide they want fries, and the resort town, designed to cater to British tourists, provides. Fries are the only sustenance they’ll get on the trip, aside from drugs and buckets of…
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TIFF 2023 | I Told You So (Ginevra Elkann, Italy) — Platform

By Gabrielle Marceau An absurdly yellow fog hangs thick over the churches, cemeteries, and stylish apartments in Ginevra Elkann’s I Told You So—an inescapable sign of incoming planetary collapse. But the quirky characters in this apocalyptic vision—a priest battling addiction, a house-bound grande dame, the lonely compulsive eater who cares for her, and an alcoholic…
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TIFF 2023 | Robot Dreams (Pablo Berger, Spain / France) — Centrepiece 

By Gabrielle Marceau At a time of renewed anxiety over A.I. encroaching on our lives (usurping artists, stealing screenwriting jobs, replacing lovers) and making them increasingly atomized, Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams weaves a tale about the way humans (or here, a menagerie of anthropomorphized animals) will callously exploit and discard robots, even the very friendly…
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TIFF 2023 | Seagrass (Meredith Hama-Brown, Canada) — Discovery

By Gabrielle Marceau  If you’re one of those people who’s gotten hooked on Showtime’s Couples Therapy or podcasts like Esther Perrel’s Where Should We Begin, you’re accustomed to the arduous but rewarding process of working through a relationship’s Gordian knots and the incredible breakthroughs when patterns are broken, defences are shed, and connections restored (at…
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TIFF 2023 | Snow Leopard (Pema Tseden, China) — Centrepiece

By Gabrielle Marceau In Pema Tseden’s latest film (and perhaps his last: he passed away this May during post-production), a snow leopard in the Tibetan countryside is held captive in a sheep’s pen after killing nine rams. We see its story from a number of angles: inflexible bureaucrats imposing a nationalist agenda; an incensed herder…
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TIFF 2023 | Swan Song (Chelsea McMullan, Canada) — Special Presentation

By Gabrielle Marceau It seems every ballet documentary has to have an image of feet. Usually bloody and bandaged, pulled gingerly out of a pointe shoe, the dancer’s mangled foot betrays the agony required of the art, but also reveals our desire for confirmation that ethereal beauty has a price in pain. Chelsea McMullan’s Swan…
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TIFF 2023 | Woman of the Hour (Anna Kendrick, US) — Special Presentations

By Gabrielle Marceau  In 1978, serial killer Rodney Alcala was in the middle of a five-year killing spree when he appeared as a contestant on The Dating Game and won. The stranger-than-fiction cautionary tale is deeply unsettling and symbolically rich—the bachelorette is introduced as a tantalizing prize in front of painted childlike flowers, the bachelors…
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TIFF 2023 | Working Class Goes to Hell (Mladen Đorđević, Serbia/Greece/Bulgaria/Montenegro/Croatia/ Romania) — Midnight Madness

By Gabrielle Marceau  Mladen Đorđević’s Working Class Goes to Hell wears its title more literally than the 1971 Italian satire, The Working Class Goes to Heaven, it references. While his protagonists don’t get led into the nether world à la The House that Jack Built (2018), Đorđević’s  slow-burn quasi-horror about a group of concerned citizens…
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TIFF 2021 | Farha (Darin J. Sallam, Jordan/Sweden/Saudi Arabia)

By Gabrielle Marceau Farha opens with a familiar story: a young Palestinian girl, nearing womanhood, who is trying to determine the course of her life beyond the confines of tradition. Farha (Karam Taher) wants to go to school, but her father wants her to marry and stay in their village. This family conflict is interrupted…
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TIFF 2021 | Maria Chapdelaine (Sébastien Pilote, Canada)

By Gabrielle Marceau Maria (Sara Montpetit) is the eldest daughter of a settler family living in rural Québec after the turn of the century, and like many literary heroines, she is trying to determine what kind of life she wants to lead— which, in the strictures of the era, means which suitor to marry. She…
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TIFF 2021 | Kicking Blood (Blaine Thurier, Canada)

By Gabrielle Marceau Early in Blaine Thurier’s existential vampire drama, the beautiful, bloodsucking Anna (Alanna Bale) takes home the hapless drunk Robbie. He asks for a drink, and Anna replies: “I don’t drink alcohol.” It’s a clear reference to Bela Lugosi’s iconic line in Dracula (1931), where he lingers deliciously over the pause between, “I…
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Can’t Get You Out of My Head: Dasha Nekrasova on The Scary of Sixty-First

Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) was, ostensibly, a film that couched a meditation on the mundane topic of marriage and mistrust in mysterious extravagances (operatic orgies, hints of the occult, dream logic). Watching it now, it’s abundantly clear that the film is actually most trenchant in its treatment of class, corruption, and the sexual penchants of an invincible, monied elite (embodied by Sydney Pollack).
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A Glitch in the Matrix (Rodney Ascher, US)

In 1977, Philip K. Dick gave a speech titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others,” in which he revealed that many of his dystopian novels weren’t the products of his imagination or dreams, but came from recovered memories of actual alternate worlds. Dick was entirely sincere, and this realization plagued him. Footage of this speech (and of Dick’s skeptical French audience) punctuate Rodney Ascher’s A Glitch in the Matrix, which explores the psychological and cultural impacts of that moment when science fiction seeps into our reality.
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