Happy Friday! What are you doing tonight? Want to spend a few hours wallowing in sex, drugs, violence and squalor?
Well, you’re in luck. To mark the Toronto opening of Filth, the latest adaptation of Scots novelist Irvine Welsh’s work to hit the screen, the Carlton Cinema is pairing it with the first and greatest Welsh picture, Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, for a special double bill – and I’m hosting it, so that’s extra great, right?
Trainspotting screens at 7 pm, with Filth following at 9 pm. Admission is $15.50 for both pictures ($13 for students), and there will be prizes. Really, though, it’s worth it just to see Trainspotting on a big screen again. Trust me on this.
But that’s not the Later in the week, once you’ve come down, you can think about celebrating Aboriginal History Month. The ImagineNative Film Festival is marking the occasion – and making note of its own 15th anniversary – with a series of cinematic events around town all month, including the launch of an Online Youth Video-making Contest (June 6), a free screening of award-winning indigiFLIX shorts at the Bloor and Gladstone branch of the Toronto Public Library (June 13) and a screening of Star Wars: Episode IV dubbed into Navajo at TIFF Bell Lightbox on National Aboriginal Day (June 21). Full details and screening times can be found at ImagineNative’s Facebook page, and on the festival’s website. Keep an eye on those.
And then there’s the second annual Scarborough Film Festival, which takes over the Fox Cinema Tuesday (June 3) through next Sunday (June 7) – and spills over into the Woodside and one of the theatres in the U of T Scarborough campus – to screen 16 features and 20-odd shorts in the east end of the city.
This being a festival that’s still in its infancy, the program is a catchall of smaller pictures from the festival circuit, but there’s a genuine Canadian premiere: I’ll Follow You Down, from Toronto director Richie Mehta (Amal, Siddarth). An intriguing, intimate spin on the time-travel genre starring Haley Joel Osment, Victor Garber and Being Human’s Susanna Fournier, it’s set to open theatrically June 20, but this will be your chance to see it at a proper film festival. So that’s cool.
The festival is also holding a free screening of George Tsioutsioulas’s documentary The Story Of Furious Pete June 7 at 7:30 pm at Cedar Ridge Creative Centre. That’ll be cool too, though I suggest you eat first.
