Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits, starring Royalty Hightower as a Cincinnati kid who joins her school’s dance squad at exactly the wrong time, is the sort of debut feature that leaves everything on the table. It’s nervy and immediate and urgent, as though Holmer knows she may never get another shot at grabbing an audience.
And at least for Toronto, that’s true: the movie is screening here just once, at the Open Roof Festival this coming Wednesday (August 3). And that’s really unfair.
The Fits was hailed at Venice and Sundance, and it just had a decent art-house run in the United States. But as happens so often with smaller pictures, Canadian distributor Mongrel Media has opted to bypass the big screen and go for VOD and DVD somewhere down the line.
I don’t mean to single out Mongrel, mind you this is a problem facing the entire industry these days. Entertainment One regularly lets great movies slide right past the megaplex the most egregious example this year is Anne Émond’s Our Loved Ones: the film opened in Quebec and screened at TIFF, made Canada’s Top Ten and won Émond the Toronto Film Critics Association’s Jay Scott Prize, and which went straight to DVD and iTunes in English Canada. And honestly, I’m still pissed about that it’s a terrific film and should have been given the chance to find its audience.
But if distributors aren’t willing to risk a week’s run on a single Toronto screen, the Open Roof Festival programming The Fits represents an interesting opportunity for a new type of engagement. That festival has built a lineup that’s quite daring for a summer festival, mixing in crowd-pleasers like Everybody Wants Some!! and Sing Street with more complex fare like The Lobster and Sleeping Giant. And The Fits isn’t the only premiere the festival also has Sophie Goodhart’s My Blind Brother, a SXSW comedy starring Adam Scott, Jenny Slate, Nick Kroll and Zoe Kazan, playing August 17.
If distributors won’t spring for a theatrical run, it makes a lot of sense to launch a movie this way if nothing else, it creates awareness for the eventual VOD and DVD availability. And a really positive audience response might even make a further big-screen engagement seem like a worthy gamble.
So if you’re downtown next Wednesday night, head over to 99 Sudbury and check out The Fits under the stars. Tickets are available right here, and the evening includes a performance by Grand Analog. And if you like it, let me know I’d be more than happy to pass the word along.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
