ImagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival from Wednesday (October 14) to October 18. imaginenative.org. See Indie & Rep film listings.
The imaginenative festival celebrates its 10th anniversary with a host of shorts, features and documentaries – a number of which have already made their Toronto debut in other festivals.[rssbreak]
That’s always going to be a problem when your mission statement is so specific. On the bright side, it does give local audiences a second chance to catch something they might have missed the first time around.
Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël’s eerie, vivid short film Tungijuq, screening before this year’s opening-night gala, Reel Injun, arrives fresh from TIFF’s Short Cuts program.
And both of the films playing on the night of October 15 – Jackpot (7 pm, at the Al Green rating: NNN) and Professor Norman Cornett: Since When Do We Divorce The Right Answer From An Honest Answer? (9 pm, at the Al Green rating: NN) – made their Toronto debuts at Hot Docs last spring.
Jackpot is the stronger of the two Alan Black’s gentle, poetic study of Etobicoke’s Delta Bingo hall offers a glimpse of the place where cheerful optimism and desperate compulsion collide. Director Alanis Obomsawin’s profile of Cornett, a beloved McGill religious studies professor whose contract was terminated without explanation in the summer of 2007, is less successful, mainly because she’s unable to distill her copious footage into a compelling narrative.
A couple of features from Down Under find new angles on aboriginal culture. Armagan Ballantyne’s The Strength Of Water (October 16, 9 pm, at the Al Green rating: NNNN) is a solid coming-of-age drama set in an isolated Maori village. Delicately mixing magic realism and piercing psychological insight, it’s like Whale Rider without the pandering.
Richard Frankland’s Stone Bros. (October 17, 7 pm, at the Al Green rating: NNN) tracks a pair of perpetually baked cousins (Luke Carroll and Leon Burchill) driving through the Australian outback on a vaguely defined heritage quest. The director doesn’t aim for anything more than ramshackle road-movie silliness, and the result is a pleasant, unpretentious little diversion.
normw@nowtoronto.com
