AFS Programmer Lars Nilsen’s 12 Must-See Films From Toronto International Film Festival 2018
From an outsider’s view, the Toronto International Film Festival may appear to be a glamorous, high-profile festival with back-to-back red carpet premieres of this year’s crop of Oscar contenders. For AFS Lead Film Programmer Lars Nilsen, the festival is a great opportunity to explore the pool of films that will someday make their way to the AFS Cinema. Fresh off his return from watching a personal record breaking 37(!) films, we spoke with Lars about his favorites from the festival. Be on the lookout for many of these film to make their way onto the AFS calendar in the coming months.
BIRDS OF PASSAGE
dir. Ciro Guerra & Cristina Gallego
“This is a film co-directed by Ciro Guerra, whose films EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT and THE WIND JOURNEYS we’ve played at our cinema. BIRDS OF PASSAGE is almost like a Godfather film in its scope. It’s a film about a crime organization formed among indigenous Columbian people who have an encounter with some Peace Corps volunteers who really want to buy some weed. So they go from being these people who live in a barter economy to becoming business tycoons in a way, over a 15-year period. It’s a wide, sweeping film about the ways of the first world coming to these people. It is an exciting, action-packed, incredibly violent, emotionally resonant film; but it’s also a sort of political tract about Capitalism. And I always think it’s really interesting when there’s that kind of a subtext to a film.”
“I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS”
dir. Radu Jude
“Radu Jude (whose films AFERIM! and SCARRED HEARTS we’ve shown) has a new, fascinating film which takes place in his native Romania. It’s about people putting on a historical pageant about World War II, and what happened during World War II in Romania, which was a very complicated time period. The film is about three hours long, and it’s mostly just people having conversations and quoting from books. It’s Godard-ian in the sense that it’s a film that’s made out of material that is non-traditional film material. It’s really good, and a really important film for our time. I was watching it with a friend and we walked out of it like ‘wow, is America the most illiterate country in the world?’ because these Romanians are talking about everything from like political theory to Laurel and Hardy in their conversations, and the breadth and scope of their discourse is so wide. It’s a really special film, I liked it a lot.”
OUR TIME
dir. Carlos Reygadas
“Carlos Reygadas, who made POST TENEBRAS LUX has a new film that’s amazing in scope. Three-hour long movies is one of the themes this year at TIFF I have to say. OUR TIME is a three-hour long movie about a married couple who are intellectuals. He is a poet, they’re ranchers on a huge spread outside of Mexico City and their sex life is very eventful, which sort of sows the seeds of their destruction, or at least the destruction of certain concepts that they hold dear. It’s a really interesting film and I can’t say much about it without spoiling it. But for me, it was one of the most emotionally wrenching movies I saw at the festival. I think it’s kind of a masterpiece, actually.”
MAYA
dir. Mia Hansen-Love
“There’s a very good new movie by Mia Hansen-Love, who has guest programmed for us before. It’s about a French journalist who was held hostage by terrorists and is trying to re-acclimate. He goes on a trip to India–which is the country where he grew up–and we see him trying to sort of rebuild his soul. It’s a sort of small film full of small observations and it’s just very good film with a lot of heart.”
HIGH LIFE
dir. Claire Denis
“The new Claire Denis film HIGH LIFE takes place in a space station/penal colony where prisoners are being dispatched to the outer reaches of the universe to see what happens when they go into a black hole. It stars Robert Pattinson and its an odd sort of prison movie (in space), and of course, it’s directed by Claire Denis so it’s weird and unusual and I liked it.”
HOTEL BY THE RIVER
dir. Hong Sang-soo
“Another filmmaker we love, South Korea’s Hong Sang-soo. We’ve shown several of his films. His new one, HOTEL BY THE RIVER, is part of his cycle of black and white chamber films with a small cast. It’s about a poet staying in a hotel, and his sons come to join him, and a couple of women recognize him as the poet he is, and there’s a lot of back and forth kind of like a drawing-room farce. I read a review immediately afterward saying that this was a “sad” new movie from Hong Sang-soo and it made me realize that everyone experiences movies so differently. I was laughing all the way through this film, and I didn’t think it was sad, I thought it was very drily funny, like so much of Hong’s work”
NON-FICTION (aka DOUBLE LIVES)
dir. Olivier Assayas
“There’s a good, talky (not in a bad way) new Olivier Assayas movie called NON-FICTION, it’s about a bunch of Parisian intellectuals who are authors and book publishers and people adjacent to the literary industry sort of dealing with the technological change and sort of what it means in terms of a shift in the French world of letters, if you will. It’s sort of a salon film. We experience the pleasure of good conversation with interesting people. There are some arch laughs, and a lot of very on-point cultural observations.”
BURNING
dir. Chang-dong Lee
“Chang-dong Lee’s new film BURNING (which is going to be playing at Fantastic Fest) is a pretty riveting film based on a Murakami short story called “Barn Burning”. I don’t want to spoil what the movie’s about, but it’s a really interesting story about a guy who falls in love with a woman, a romantic triangle with an older rich guy develops, and then the rivalry between the two men reaches extreme proportions.”
SHOPLIFTERS
dir. Hirokazu Koreeda
“The new film from Koreeda, whose film THE THIRD MURDER we just played, is called SHOPLIFTERS. This was the Palme D’Or winner at Cannes this year. It’s a pretty amazing neo-neo-realist film about a family of very poor people in a city in Japan who make a living hand-to-mouth: stealing, hustling, begging, living however they can. Things happen over the course of the family’s life of course, which I won’t spoil here. A really nice, really wonderful, well acted film.
AMERICAN DHARMA
dir. Errol Morris
“AMERICAN DHARMA is a full-length interview with the fascist, Steve Bannon. And a lot of people I talked to had real mixed feelings about this because they felt like, ‘why give the microphone and camera to this fascist to tell his fascist, racist stories?’ But (as always for me with Errol Morris films) I think it’s fascinating to hear from Steve Bannon. Because Bannon trips over himself, he trips over his logical fallacies at every turn, and it becomes more of a pathological document about what creates a Steve Bannon, which I think is valuable. And it’s creepy to spend time with Steve Bannon, there’s no doubt about that–but I also feel like I have insight into the sort of mental processes that create a Steve Bannon and I think it’s valuable for that reason alone.”
THE WILD PEAR TREE
dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan
“I saw a movie called THE WILD PEAR TREE which is by the director of WINTER SLEEP, which won the Palme D’Or a few years ago (and which just played at the AFS Cinema) . This new film takes place partly in the Anatolian region of Turkey, partly in the cities, but it’s about a young man whose father is a poet. Over the course of his life his father has become a school teacher and a gambling addict and is generally kind of a fuck-up, and we see him through the son’s eyes. The son–so full of promise and ideals–judges the father. Over the course of the three-hour long film we see as he begins to forgive his father and draws insight over his own life from looking at his father’s ruined, wasted life: which may or may not have been so ruined and wasted, as it turns out. It’s like a big discursive novel that bulges out in some places and is understated in others, but is so full of detail that it gives you a vivid sense of time and place.”
MONROVIA, INDIANA
dir. Frederick Wiseman
“Frederick Wiseman is a filmmaker who we’ve played every film that he’s come out with since the AFS Cinema has been open, and I can’t imagine us not playing a new Frederick Wiseman film (or an older film as it’s restored). I think Wiseman is really in the top tier of our greatest living filmmakers. He has a new film called MONROVIA, INDIANA, and it’s in the manner of some of his recent films like IN JACKSON HEIGHTS where he goes and explores a neighborhood and sees how the neighborhood works. Here he goes to a small town in Indiana and he examines the process by which the town runs, by which the culture happens in the town, and how the school system works, and all of that. We see the mechanisms of small-town America circa 2018, or 2016, or whenever the film was made. And it has a whole new gloss now that Trump has been elected based on voters from towns like Monrovia, Indiana. I’m not sure the political tone was intended at the time the cameras were rolling, but it’s fascinating to watch people in church, to watch people having a wedding, to watch a Masonic ceremony, to watch a town council meeting, and to just see the way that small towns work. It’s not ‘urbane-New-York-guy-is-looking-at-small-town-Americans-and-judging-them’ I don’t think that’s the case. It’s not a film where we’re laughing at people. There are some times where we’re laughing with them, but it’s a film that really makes us think about what it’s like to be, for instance, a guy who runs a gun shop in Monrovia, Indiana.”
