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TIFF 2009: Philip Hoffman

The artistic, experimental side of TIFF gets drowned out in the rush to the next sighting of a Clooney or a Cruz … but you know, that’s unfair. Some of the films consigned to obscurity by the massed media are just as powerful, and just as heartfelt, as anything with a studio logo on the poster.[briefbreak]

One of those films is All Fall Down, Philip Hoffman’s lovely collage of memories and archival footage, which premieres Saturday afternoon in the Canada First! series (and repeats again on Sunday check here for showtimes and ticket information). Hoffman, who teaches film at York University, created his debut feature as a memorial to his stepdaughter Jessie’s late father, George Lachlan Brown, a British expatriate who came to Canada, fathered a child and descended into poverty and mental illness.

Layered with narratives that comment on one another throughout the film, Hoffman’s work is neither a full-on experimental work nor a conventional documentary.

“It’s somewhere in between,” he says in an interview in the festival’s press lounge at the Sutton Place. “You know, it’s dealing with history and a lot of political and social content as well as it being a personal film. And there’s always a niche in large film festivals for these kind of films – films that are experimental, but not as, let’s say, conceptual.”

All Fall Down doesn’t back away from the darker aspects of Brown’s deterioration he narrates his own downward spiral in a series of increasingly paranoid voicemails, ostensibly left for Jessie but really directed at her mother, Hoffman’s partner Janine Marchessault. Played against grainy, indistinct footage of a man walking away from the camera, they’re emotional and unsettling, but also terribly, terribly honest.

“There’s a point near the end of the film,” Hoffman explains, “where he basically says he’s ‘getting out of this shithole’ and leaving Canada – he’s had enough, have a good life. But in the next section, he’s singing a song to Jessie, a very sweet song. I want the audience to juggle those two things and get a feeling from that: this person is these two things. He’s two things, and they’re totally extreme. We all are, aren’t we?”

I have to ask Hoffman how his stepdaughter feels about the project, given how close she is to so much of it.

“The death of a father at the age of 12 is huge,” he acknowledges. “Jessie watched parts of the film while it was being made – she also participated in the whole thing, you know? And now she’s 17, and I would hope that it sort of makes concrete some of the inner feelings that she can’t express. But that’s up to her, to engage with the film.”

And has she?

“She finally saw it in Berlin,” Hoffman says. “She said it was amazing. She looked at it like an artist would look at it.”

All Fall Down screens Saturday (Sept. 14) at 2:15 pm at the AMC 10, and repeats Sunday (Sept. 15) at 11:45 am at the AMC 2. [rssbreak]

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