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Film Fests & Special Screenings Movies & TV

>>> Film Festival Spotlight: European Union Film Festival

European Union Film Festival from Saturday (November 14) to November 28 at the Royal (608 College). eutorontofilmfest.ca. Rating: NNNN


Every year, the European Union Film Festival returns to the Royal with two weeks of free nightly screenings, giving Torontonians the chance to reap the bounty of Europe’s commercial cinema. Tickets are available at the box office on a first-come, first-served basis if you don’t want to risk arriving to a sold-out show, you can buy a reserved ticket for $10 through the festival’s website.

You are unlikely to see another movie this year that’s as antic and odd as the Hungarian entry, Károly Ujj Mészáros’s Liza, The Fox-Fairy (Sunday, 6 pm). A jaunty period comedy about a young nurse (bright-eyed Mónika Balsai) who may or may not be cursed with perpetual unhappiness by the ghost of a Japanese pop star, it zips from one calamity to the next, propelled by a maddeningly catchy song and a pop aesthetic that feels like the mutant child of Wes Anderson and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. I can’t imagine this ever getting a Canadian theatrical run, so catch it if you can.

It’s followed by Italy’s Sworn Virgin (Sunday, 8:30 pm), a drama about a woman (Alba Rohrwacher, of Hungry Hearts and The Wonders) in a small Albanian village who adopts a celibate male identity to escape the cultural restrictions placed on her gender – but finds this even harder to live with than it sounds. Director Laura Bispuri has made a study of a person trapped between two modes of existence, but Sworn Virgin doesn’t really fit into cinema’s current trans movement. It’s its own thing.

If you missed it at TIFF, Louise Osmond’s documentary Dark Horse (Monday, 6 pm) – winner of this year’s World Cinema Audience Award at Sundance – recounts the rise of Dream Alliance, the racehorse whose triumph at the 2009 Welsh National became a media-friendly Cinderella story. It’s both a rousing sports movie and a celebration of Welshness, which is kind of nice.  

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