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Over The Top Film Festival

OVER THE TOP FILM FESTIVAL tonight (Thursday, May 21) through Saturday (May 23), various times. See listings. overthetopfest.com.


The film component of this year’s Over The Top festival isn’t big – just five features over three nights at the Royal and the NFB’s John Spotton Theatre – but it’s an opportunity to catch some intriguing works in what’s likely to be their only theatrical engagements. Most are just too odd to rate a commercial run.

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The fest kicks off May 21 with White Lightnin’ (Rating: NNN), a biopic about Jesco White, an Appalachian step dancer and ticking time bomb of rage previously profiled in Jacob Young’s Dancing Outlaw documentaries.

If you’re not familiar with those, Dominic Murphy‘s amped-up cross between an exploitation film and a neo-realist psychodrama will happily rub White’s life in your face for an hour and a half.

Also playing tonight is Tokyo! (Rating: NNN), a trio of short works by Michel Gondry, Léos Carax and Bong Joon-Ho set in that Japanese city. As you’d expect from these directors, the films are idiosyncratic and eccentric in equal measure – only Gondry would tell a story in which a young woman realizes her destiny by becoming a chair – but they’re enjoyable enough as a lark.

Friday’s offerings are stranger still. Jared Drake‘s dystopic comedy Visioneers (Rating: NNN) casts deadpan comic Zach Galifianakis as an unassuming office drone trying to keep a level head while people around him literally explode with emotion. As low-budget sci-fi, it’s clever enough, though the corporate satire yields diminishing returns at feature length.

Severed Ways, about Vikings rockin' in the New World, is the fest's best.

Tony Stone‘s Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery Of America (Rating: NNNN) is exactly the reason we need Over The Top. No other fest would ever consider screening this spare, impressionistic tone poem about two Vikings marooned in the New World circa 1007, and its chances for local theatrical engagements are – well, let’s say slim. But it’s a unique and engrossing experience, playing out an unlikely spiritual quest against a meditative backdrop scored with heavy metal.

The festival closes with Spiros Stathoulopoulos‘s PVC-1 (Rating: NN), a single-take thriller about a Colombian woman (Merida Urquia) who’s had a collar bomb locked around her neck by extortionists and would really like to get it off. The premise is compelling, particularly for the first half-hour, but writer/director/cinematographer Stathoulopoulos is so consumed with the practical and logistical challenges of shooting in real time that he neglects to come up with any reason for us to care about his story or characters.

normw@nowtoronto.com

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