TIFF NEXT WAVE FILM FEST from Friday (February 17) to Sunday (February 19). See listings for showtimes. Rating: NNNN
The themes of the movies screening in this year’s TIFF Next Wave film festival are much the same as they are every year, focusing on young people trying to figure out who they are in a world that doesn’t necessarily care.
But that’s not a bug, that’s a feature.
Young people will always struggle to define themselves against the culture in which they formed, and that struggle is fertile enough that it can be interpreted in any number of ways. It’s a story being told over and over again, in infinite combinations the art is in making a film that emerges from the crowded field and connects to an audience. That’s what the Next Wave celebrates – and this year, all film screenings (including the annual Saturday marathon) are free for anyone under 25 with valid ID.
The festival kicks off Friday with the day-long symposium of the Young Creators Co-Lab – which this year includes an afternoon panel with filmmaker Charles Officer and journalist Desmond Cole about systemic racism, hooked to their upcoming documentary The Skin We’re In.
And Friday evening, the traditional Battle Of The Scores challenges six high-school bands to soundtrack a film scene, and play that soundtrack in front a live audience.
Starting at noon and running to almost midnight in the Lightbox 4, Saturday’s Freaks & Geeks Movie Marathon lines up Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope, Hal Ashby’s Harold And Maude and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, with enough space in between each one for audience members to strike up a conversation and maybe make a new friend.
But if you’d rather explore new cinema, the Next Wave programmers have curated a fine weekend of features and documentaries from the festival circuit. This year’s Canadian selections feel particularly daring, both formally and narratively.
Chloé Leriche’s Before The Streets (screening Saturday, 6:30 pm, Rating: NNNN), which screened in town last fall in Cinéfranco’s showcase of new Quebec film, is set on the Manawan Reserve and performed entirely in the Cree dialect of Atikamekw.
Starting as a kitchen-sink drama and evolving into something else, it follows the odyssey of a young man (Rykko Bellemare) who surrenders himself to his people’s traditional healing ceremonies after a crime goes wrong.
Writer/director Yan England’s 1:54 (Sunday, 2:15 pm, Rating: NNN) is a grim drama starring Antoine Olivier Pilon as a bullied teenager sent spiraling by his best friend’s suicide. Pilon (star of Xavier Dolan’s Mommy, which also screening for free this weekend as part of TIFF’s year-long Canada On Screen celebration) is solid in the lead (with fine support from Mean Dreams’s Sophie Nélisse as a sympathetic classmate), and England establishes a suffocating tension, but the film’s final movement feels like a bit of an overreach.
The American entries seem a little less intense this year. Fresh from its premiere at Sundance last month, Ry Russo-Young’s Before I Fall (Sunday, 6 pm, Rating: NNN) features a textured Zoey Deutch performance as a high-school mean girl trapped in a time loop and reliving what seems to be the last day of her life, while Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s As You Are (Sunday, 8:45 pm, Rating: NNNN), from Sundance 2016, filters a subtle teenage story through the conflicting perspectives of Rashomon.
Spike Lee’s ESPN documentary 2 Fists Up (Saturday, 2 pm) wasn’t available for review, but I’m very curious to see how he tells the story of the 2015 student protests at the University Of Missouri over campus hate crimes, and how the coverage changed when the school’s football team took up the cause.
And if you missed Mahmoud Sabbagh’s Saudi Arabian romantic comedy Barakah Meets Barakah (Saturday, 2:30 pm) when it played TIFF last year, check it out my colleague Radheyan Simonpillai really liked it.
A number of screenings will feature filmmaker introductions and Q&As for the full program and showtimes, click here.
