SPROCKETS TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL FOR CHILDREN AND YOUTH at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King East), to April 17. tiff.net/sprockets Rating: NNNN
It’s been holding student screenings all week, but the 2011 Sprockets festival of international children’s and young adult cinema formally launches Friday evening (April 8).
The event sounds like a blast – a party at Sprockets new home at TIFF Bell Lightbox Friday at 5:30 pm, followed by a special screening of Pixar’s Hawaiian Vacation, the new short featuring the Toy Story characters, and a sneak peek at this summer’s Cars 2.
This year’s festival finds TIFF partnering with Disney on several occasions. In addition to giving Sprockets the Toronto premiere of Disneynature’s documentary African Cats, the House of Mouse is supplying six films from the Disney vault for the Lightbox’s Family Classics Saturday matinee series, which kicks off April 16 with Mary Poppins.
And speaking of Disney, Franziska Buch’s Here Comes Lola (rating: NNN) should please younger fans of the Hannah Montana franchise with its nine-year-old heroine (Meira Durand) who imagines a vivid career as a bubblegum pop icon to cope with her loneliness.
But it’s the young-adult programming that really shines, reminding us once again how much more willing the Europeans are to confront complex issues of teen identity and sexuality than are their North American cousins.
Oh, we produce the odd outlier on this side of the Atlantic – David Lee Miller’s My Suicide was a highlight of last year’s festival, and this year Sprockets features Ingrid Veninger’s delicate coming-of-age drama, Modra (rating: NNNN), fresh from its Toronto theatrical run – but for the most part, the Europeans are light-years ahead of us.
This year’s more mature offerings include Baldvin Zophoníasson’s Jitters (rating: NNNN), a rough-and-tumble drama about a group of carefree Icelandic teens blindsided by trauma, and Big (rating: NNN), Maartje Bakers’s documentary about two Dutch teenagers – a girl and a boy – trying to overcome their obesity.
Sarah McCarthy’s The Sound Of Mumbai: A Musical (rating: NNN) arrives fresh from last year’s TIFF with its insistently cheery look at a group of Indian children offered the chance to perform selections from The Sound Of Music. People who like this sort of thing will like this sort of thing – and they’ll really like the fact that the one-hour feature is preceded by a live performance by La Jeunesse Youth Orchestra at Saturday afternoon’s (April 9) show.
Other documentary offerings include Marshall Curry’s excellent 2009 go-kart documentary, Racing Dreams (rating: NNNN), and Louder Than A Bomb (rating: NNNN), Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel’s doc about a slam poetry competition for Chicago teens. The former has the director of the amazing political documentary Street Fight finding emotional hooks in an entirely new milieu. The latter plays like Spellbound with more charismatic and self-aware subjects. And the poetry’s pretty good.
Most titles screen multiple times over the course of the festival.
normw@nowtoronto.com
