Okay, everyone, it’s time once again to explore your inner and outer selves as the Toronto International Body Image Film & Arts Festival – known colloquially as the Bite Me! festival – returns to the National Film Board Mediatheque today through Sunday with a program of documentaries, features and shorts intended to address issues of body image, identity and sexuality.
It won’t always be pretty – partly because many of these films will seem uncomfortably confrontational to people who would prefer not to explore the issues they raise in quite so much depth, and partly because a couple of this year’s the programming choices are not so great.
I’m thinking specifically of this year’s opening night feature, Amazon Falls, a feeble docudrama loosely based on the story of Lana Clarkson, the former Deathstalker starlet who never quite landed her big break and came to an ugly end at Phil Spector’s house in 2003. (Here, she’s called “Jana” and played by April Telek in a performance that’s much stronger than the movie around it.)
It screens at 8 pm, to be followed by a post-film discussion with director Katrin Bowen and others about “women, image and the industry” – issues the film raises but doesn’t engage with.
Things get much better on Saturday, with ten hours of documentaries grouped into three programs. Knives (12 pm) looks at the appeal (and stigma) of cosmetic surgery (De)Constructing Beauty (4 pm) considers societal standards of beauty from the perspective of outsiders – the “foreign”, the transgendered, the obese. Consuming Bodies (6 pm) pairs the short doc Arresting Ana, about France’s bizarre pro-anorexia movement, with Matthew Ogens’s Confessions Of A Superhero, a look at the people who make their living walking up and down Hollywood Boulevard dressed as Batman and Spider-Man. The evening concludes with Orgasm Inc. (8:30 pm), Liz Canner’s uneven but intriguing look at the pharmaceutical industry’s search for a female equivalent of Viagra.
Sunday’s programming is far more varied, but the highlight is Gen Silent, screening at 3:30 pm. Stu Maddux’s hour-long doc shines a light on the horrific trend of LGBT seniors forced back into the closet in nursing homes, the better to avoid the scorn, neglect or outright abuse of bigoted staff members. It’s a distressing subject, and an awful reminder that for all the progress we’ve made towards true equality, there are still some dark, ugly places in the human heart that need to be addressed.
At the NFB Mediatheque, 150 John St. Tickets available at the door, or through the festival’s website, where you’ll also find the full screening schedule.
