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Film Fests & Special Screenings Movies & TV

Can You Hack It? film festival puts spotlight on cybercrime and privacy rights

If Hot Docs and the Toronto Jewish Film Festival haven’t exhausted your appetite for cinema, well, I have good news for you: there’s another festival coming to town. Actually, there are two.

Well, one’s more of a screening series than a festival: tonight (Thursday May 12), the Goethe Institute brings Can You Hack It?, a showcase of three recent German films that deal with cybercrime and privacy rights, to the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

It kicks off tonight with Who Am I: No System Is Safe, a thriller about a technological prankster (Tom Schilling of Woman In Gold and Suite Francaise) who’s unwittingly recruited into a cyberterror cell. It’s an energetic, unapologetically commercial picture that’s slightly undermined by a final twist that’s been used a few times too often, but I can’t say I minded it this time around.

The series continues Tuesday (May 17) with the documentary Democracy, which tracks the development of data-protection legislation in the EU, and ends May 19 with Blueprint, a low-key 2003 drama starring Run Lola Run’s Franka Potente as an ailing pianist who has herself cloned to ensure the survival of her musical skills. This one’s a bit of a stretch thematically – though I guess Orphan Black has spent four seasons arguing that cloning is a form of identity theft – but given that it’s a Canadian-German co-production that was partially shot in B.C. but never released here, there’s some curiosity value.

All screenings start at 6:30 pm tickets are $10 available on the day from the TIFF box office.

And then there’s the ReelAbilities Film Festival, which starts tonight with an industry-only screening and officially opens tomorrow (Friday May 13) for a week of features, documentaries and shorts designed to highlight “award-winning films by and about people with disabilities.”

Most screenings will be held at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema, the TIFF Bell Lightbox and the Al Green Theatre in the Miles Nadal JCC, but the festival is also playing venues like OCAD University, Variety Village and the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital to ensure “geographical accessibility” for audiences that might not be able to make it to cinemas. (Check here for the full schedule.)

I particularly appreciated Cinemability (Sunday May 15, 5 pm at Lightbox), Jenni Gold’s documentary about the representation of disabled and differently abled characters in Hollywood. Gold gets commentary from Geri Jewell, Daryl “Chill” Mitchell, Ben Affleck, Geena Davis, Jamie Foxx, Peter Farrelly, Vince Gilligan, Robert David Hall, Helen Hunt, William H. Macy, Marlee Matlin, RJ Mitte, Jane Seymour, Danny Woodburn and dozens of other actors and filmmakers to construct a thorough and provocative examination of the issue that moves quickly and smoothly through the decades.

Other screenings include Kire Paputts’s The Rainbow Kid (Tuesday May 17, 7 pm, OCAD), which opened in Toronto last week (and which Glenn Sumi reviews here), and Lou Howe’s Gabriel (Wednesday May 18, 7 pm, OCAD), a drama starring Rory Culkin as a troubled young man trying to reconnect with his childhood girlfriend. I liked it a lot when it played Rendezvous With Madness in 2014 if you missed it then, you should absolutely catch up to it now.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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