Field Reports: Toronto Film Festival #6 (Filipi)

Unmistaken Child

One of the great pleasures of any film festival is when you miss a film you intended to see and luck into a nice discovery. Israeli director Nati Baratz's documentary Unmistaken Child pulls back the curtain on the highly secretive process by which Tibetan Lamas are selected. The film follows the young disciple of a recently deceased Master as he travels by foot, mule, and helicopter in search of the reincarnation in the form of an infant boy. The film is visually stunning and is one of those rare films (not unlike Into Great Silence which we screened a couple of years ago) that truly exposes you to a culture or tradition you've never seen before. Hopefully a distributor will pick it up.

I'm still not sure what to make of Takeshi Kitano's Achilles and the Tortise. The latest from the director of Brother, Fireworks, and Zatoichi follows a young boy of marginal talent who is obsessed with painting due to his father's love of art. The film follows the boy to young adulthood as an art student and finally to adulthood as an ever-struggling artist. He never displays an original bone in his body, copying famous artists like Miro or Warhol and chasing trends like “action paintings” or politically inspired art. At times the film is frustratingly simplistic but others wildly hilarious. The film is filled with suicides, death, and ultimate failure so it is hard to call the film “entertaining” but the film is at its best when Kitano embraces comedy (not unlike some of his past films). His idea of what art school is like is either the very warped view of a person too old to remember school or a very broad satire. That it is hard to tell the difference is a problem throughout the film.

Finally, I ended my festival with the most recent film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish director of Distant and Climates, two films that screened at the Wexner in recent years. In Three Monkeys, a politician facing reelections is involved in a hit-and-run accident. He asks his driver to take the blame, promising a large sum of money after the man's six-month prison stay. The driver accepts but the promise of the lump sum starts to eat at the man's wife and adult son. I won't give away more and hopefully we'll be showing the film soon at the Wexner. It's much more accessible than Ceylan's past films, never reaching the sublime heights of Distant but still very much in keeping with his past work.

That's it for me this year. Chris is staying a couple of days longer than me so I'm sure he will be posting more soon.

- Dave Filipi, Curator, Film/Video