“The biggest movie-going town…”

If you were lucky enough to have been a Torontonian about a quarter of a century ago, back in the early 2000s, during the pre-streaming heyday of cinephilia, you might have convinced yourself you were living in the most vibrant capital of film culture in the anglophone world. 

For starters, the city was home to arguably the most influential English-language film magazine then in print, Cinema Scope. A belligerent and upstart film periodical launched at the turn of the millennium by a lanky local named Mark Peranson – who, in years to come, would go on to assume the coveted head programming role at Locarno and then the Berlinale – his homegrown magazine would quickly usurp the more established and august mastheads like Film Comment and Sight and Sound to become the required reading of any self-respecting cinephiles the world over.

Under Peranson’s maverick editorship, the magazine’s trendsetting, sharp-eyed coverage of the zeitgeist of world cinema – always a step or two ahead of the curve – set the template for the others to follow by unreservedly championing the forward-looking, if highly demanding and polarizing, sui generis auteurs then in ascendance, many of whom would go on to evolve into era-defining titans of art cinema (Jia Zhang-ke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Pedro Costa, Lisandro Alonso, Albert Serra, et al.). 

Secondly, back in the aughts, Canada’s biggest city was also home to Cinematheque Ontario (now TIFF Cinematheque), one of the most tirelessly industrious film archives then in operation. Under the aegis of its soft-spoken but indefatigable – and unapologetically francophile – programmer James Quandt (perhaps better known outside Canada as an Artforum critic responsible for coining the term “New French Extremity”1 to designate the sexually provocative films of Bruno Dumont, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux, Gaspar Noé, and others then in vogue), the cinematheque mounted a series of blockbuster retrospectives profiling masters both Old and Modern, who were then in need of rediscovery or reappraisal, including Bresson, Naruse, Oshima, Godard. (A magistral monograph on Bresson edited by Quandt and published on the occasion of its 1998 retrospective still ranks as the benchmark anthology on the great French master.2) Many of these retros the Toronto cinematheque organised would later tour major cities south of the border, in what was a reversal of American cultural hegemony.

Of course, occupying the centre stage in the annals of any committed Torontonian moviegoer, then or now, has always been the Toronto International Film Festival, North America’s de facto premier film fest, affectionately known to local and overseas attendees alike by its initials “TIFF”: an annual ten-odd-day bonanza held in September showcasing the best that international and arthouse titles have to offer. Initially known for its reputation as the “people’s festival”, over its half-century lifespan, TIFF has acquired, particularly in recent times, more of a star-studded sheen and Hollywoodian glitter as the flashy launchpad for the fall award season. 

In fact, longtime festivalgoers familiar with past editions, particularly TIFF’s high point during the early reign of Piers Handling, who served as CEO and executive director between 1994 and 2018, may find the current iteration of the festival somewhat lacking in character and much less personable as an event.

For one thing, despite its mammoth size, the TIFF of today is uninvitingly compartmentalised around the Lightbox. A sleek CAD$196 million TIFF headquarters erected in 2010 and equipped with a state-of-the-art multiplex, the edifice serves as the principal festival venue alongside the Scotiabank megaplex just a couple of blocks north, all hermetically located within the boundary of the city’s uber-upscale Entertainment District. Convenient and hassle-free as that may be for visiting industry types billeted at the Ritz-Carlton or nearby Hyatt Regency, the event is a far cry from the TIFF of yesteryears, which used to be a citywide celebration of cinema open to all and sundry. Before the Lightbox, screenings were held across the whole city: a festivalgoer would hopscotch from the palatial and historic Uptown cinema on Yonge Street in the bustling heart of downtown to more intimate settings such as the Isabel Bader Theatre tucked away on a leafy, quiet corner of the University of Toronto campus, or even an auditorium housed on the grounds of the Royal Ontario Museum, famously home to a hundreds-strong collection of dinosaur specimens.

Add to that, Peranson’s influential Cinema Scope magazine, whose indispensable online coverage of TIFF would always cut through the noise, has regrettably folded under financial strain in early 2024 following a quarter-century run. As a result, festgoers are now deprived of the magazine’s inexhaustible reviews of must-see titles that many had relied on as trusted signposts to navigate TIFF’s countless sections and notoriously bloated programming.

Speaking of which, one of the familiar refrains of criticism thrown at TIFF over the years – some of it justified, some perhaps less so – has been the lack of overall coherence arising from the sprawling and scattershot nature of its selections. TIFF’s oversized and decentred nature, with no showpiece main competition to set the tone (“There was a philosophy from the very beginning of Toronto to be non-competitive,” Handling recounted to Screen Daily3 prior to this year’s 50th edition) can easily be traced back to its inception five decades ago as the “Festival of Festivals”, as TIFF was then known. The festival’s original aim – to quote directly from the late cofounder Bill Marshall’s preface to the booklet accompanying its inaugural 1976 edition – was to highlight “films from the major festivals and film-producing nations of the world”.4 Marshall hoped that his new festival’s eclectic, wide-ranging selection of world cinema (the first edition already boasted “127 feature films from 30 countries”) “fits into Toronto’s unique character” not only as the “multicultural” hub of the North, but perhaps more crucially as a city known, at least in the mid-1970s, for being “the biggest movie-going town, per capita, in North America.”

Toronto has since prospered into the biggest, and without doubt the most significant, event on North America’s film festival calendar, thanks in no small part to Marshall and his fellow cofounders’ firmly grounded founding ethos. But paradoxically, with the number of titles for the latest edition approaching close to 300, and a plethora of programmers put in charge of a myriad of sections any member of the public would be hard pressed to keep track of (Gala, Special Presentations, Centrepiece, Platform, Wavelengths, Discovery, Docs, and the list goes on), not to mention its much-hyped plans to introduce a new content market in 2026, TIFF may now be on the verge of being weighted down by the very enormity that served as recipe for its success.

Indeed, if some festivalgoers attending this year’s edition were left reeling and overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of choices offered by TIFF’s programming team, led by head programmer Anita Lee (who herself reports to chief executive Cameron Bailey), well, they were not alone. Take Special Presentations, the fest’s ostensible main slate, where, among others, Claire Denis’ hotly-anticipated latest title, The Fence, was unveiled. This gargantuan section alone accommodated a whopping 55-plus titles this year, which, depending on who you asked, was either an embarrassment of riches or Exhibit A in haphazard programming by committee.

Denis’ The Fence, for instance, shared the spotlight with a host of other world premieres in a crowded field that included Agnieszka Holland’s Kafka biopic (Franz), Steven Soderbergh’s London-set chamber piece (The Christophers), Pablo Trapero’s English language debut penned by Sarah Polley (& Sons), Alice Winocour’s Paris-set Angelina Jolie vehicle (Couture), as well as Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis concert doc (EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert). As if that was not enough, organisers topped it off with buzzy titles culled from Europe’s prestige film fests (Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, Oliver Laxe’s Sirât, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, to name but a few), all jostling for the attention of festgoers, buyers, and critics (which, as far as the latter group was concerned, came increasingly in short supply).

Perhaps more troubling, at least from the standpoint of curation, was the Platform strand. TIFF’s half-baked attempt at putting together a juried competitive sidebar, Platform was launched exactly ten years ago to much fanfare, admittedly with some genuine early promises. Yet save perhaps for its second iteration in 2016 – when, remarkably, it managed to assemble an exceptionally high-calibre lineup that boasted the likes of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama, Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Daguerrotype, Pablo Larraín’s Jackie, among others – Platform has since struggled to find a clear-cut identity or to fulfill its potential as a standalone section.

As it was in 2024, the 2025 ten-title lineup was, to put it bluntly, a confusing assortment of middling arthouse titles seemingly randomly picked without a discernible criterion. (To be fair to Platform’s lead programmer Robyn Citizen, one may say in her defence that she is almost set up for failure. Citizen certainly has her work cut out trying to attract top-tier talents to Toronto given her fest’s self-claimed “non-competitive” credo, which hardly helps her cause.)

Las Corrientes (The Currents}

Thankfully, the sidebar’s below-par standard was more or less single-handedly elevated by Swiss-Argentine filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler’s subversive stunner, Las Corrientes (The Currents, 2025) a post-Antonionian psychological drama centred around a well-to-do thirtysomething designer suffering from aquaphobia. In portraying her inscrutably unreadable and enigmatic heroine Lina (superbly performed by Isabel Aimé González Sola), Mumenthaler perversely draws from the objectified, mid-1960s archetype of the “women on the verge of a nervous breakdown” (i.e., Antonioni’s Red Desert or Hitchcock’s Marnie, to name two from 1964 alone), only to spit out a fluid narrative full of unpredictably off-kilter, Lynchian detours and digressions (a backroom shampoo wash under anaesthesia, anyone?). The film then culminates in a startlingly sensuous climax in the lantern room atop the heroine’s Buenos Aires high-rise tower block, an acrobatic denouement that wondrously ties together all disparate strands and loose ends.

Still, for all its shortcomings, this year’s TIFF, the festival’s 50th edition, was nonetheless a jubilant occasion to celebrate this important milestone. An occasion, furthermore, to acknowledge and salute Torontonians’ genuine passion for the seventh art, without whose contributions, it goes without saying, TIFF would never have been accorded its current stature as a cultural behemoth. 

Blue Heron

In addition to being TIFF’s golden jubilee year, the 2025 edition was also the year of the triumphant homecoming of Blue Heron, the debutant hometown filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s resounding Locarno hit, which was stirring up plenty of hype in local media and was practically on everyone’s lips in the lead-up to its North American premiere. (As predicted, Romvari picked up TIFF’s Best Canadian Discovery Award.)

An interrogative semiautobiographical coming-of-age diptych set against the menacingly picturesque backdrop of Vancouver Island of the late 1990s, Blue Heron is Romvari’s partial attempt at reimagining her hazy but troubling childhood memories of growing up side by side with her emotionally disturbed older step-brother on the westernmost fringe of the Pacific Northwest. Inevitably, her film will be spoken of and analysed in relation to its out of the blue, attention grabbing bravura shift in perspective and tone that occurs at the pivotal midway juncture of the narrative. But at the core of Romvari’s fraught, fictionalised portrayal of her big Hungarian immigrant household of six is the distinctively Canadian story of migration and the need for roots (which she shares with Atom Egoyan’s early, fractured intercultural family portraiture). This is most palpably symbolised in the film (albeit perhaps too neatly) by the eldest brother’s compulsive behaviour of drawing up elaborately detailed maps of his local Vancouver Island community, down to the names of each alleyway and household. 

At any rate, Romvari’s delicately rendered and structurally adventurous first-time effort confirmed yet again the continued relevance of Canada’s thriving independent filmmaking scene – especially once viewed in conjunction with Levers, Rhayne Vermette’s even more impressive, if less heralded, sophomore experimental feature (shot on what the Winnipeg-based Métis filmmaker describes as “some broken Bolex cameras”). A bewilderingly nonsequential and rhizomatic magical realist small-town allegory set in Manitoba’s French-speaking rustic community (which also served as the setting for her memorably handwrought 2021 debut, Ste. Anne), Vermette’s UFO of a film revolves around an exaggeratingly pompous unveiling ceremony of a publicly commissioned sculpture by a mystery Indigenous artist, and mostly takes place on a chaotic day the Sun improbably takes a sabbatical and refuses to rise up.

“Film as trip”

In the end, it was left to Wavelengths, an emphatically curated slate where Levers was aptly slotted, to pick up the pieces. A semiautonomous sidebar devoted to challenging but surprisingly appealing experimental works handpicked by curator and longtime Cinema Scope collaborator Andréa Picard, this fest-within-a-fest has acquired an outsized reputation, at least among experimental film circles, as one of the most expertly curated programmes of its kind on the international festival circuit. An ideal place, therefore, to sample the newest cutting-edge trends in avant-garde filmmaking practice, and, by extension, to take the pulse of where the future of cinema might be headed. Indeed, for some, the sheer joy of sitting through Wavelengths’ adventurous, left-field programming alone constitutes a sufficient reason to pack up a suitcase and trek all the way to Toronto – even if it may cost you an arm and a leg.

If there was a common thread to Picard’s curatorial vision for this year’s Wavelengths, assembled in conjunction with her able co-programmer Jesse Cumming, it was the preponderance of films that interrogated the cinematic medium through the framework of what could be broadly defined as “road movie”. Indeed, across Wavelengths’ enthralling lineup of eight features and a trio of shorts programmes (all essential viewing), the definition of “road movies” took on many elastic forms and surprising turns, not least in the shape of the festival’s indisputable standout title, Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, a giant leap from the Georgian visionary’s breakthrough previous effort, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021). 

Dry Leaf

Koberidze’s third feature begins on the flimsiest of premises, rehashing the well-trodden troupes of the “search for the missing girl”. Lisa, the 28-year-old photojournalist daughter of Irakli, a middle-aged gymnastic instructor living in Tbilisi, mysteriously disappears, leaving behind a letter in which she informs her parents that she is going away but that they must not pursue her. Despite his obvious paternal concern, Irakli (played by Koberidze’s own father, David) ultimately decides against filing a missing persons report, what with Lisa being an adult of “a legal age”. But once he gets wind of Lisa’s plans to document football fields dotted around Georgia’s sleepy backwaters for her personal photo project, Irakli leaves the city to embark on a road trip on the trail of his missing daughter, with his “invisible” travelling partner, Levan, a former colleague of Lisa’s. 

As in the aimless hunt for a vanished girl across Sicily’s alienating landscape in Antonioni’s modernist classic L’avventura (1960), Irakli’s initial goal of locating his elusive daughter gradually recedes in the course of his drawn-out car odyssey across Georgia’s rustic and autumnal Caucasian steppe (which takes up most of the film’s hypnotic, epic running time of three hours). And it is around this point in the narrative that Koberidze’s pastoral road movie finally picks up momentum and truly gets interesting. 

“It’s not the destination, it’s the journey”, the old adage goes. Slowly but surely, Irakli’s long-winded, discursive road trip becomes a journey for its own sake and a movement unto itself: a circular voyage of sublime repetition through unbroken serpentine roads, only interrupted by periodic stops at abandoned and disused football pitches – where, invariably, he finds no trace of his daughter, except for a smattering of blissfully bored country children, rusty netless goalposts, grazing cattle, and stray withered leaves in the desolately empty fields.

As a genre, the road movie has long served as a testing ground for much of the significant innovations in modern cinema, no doubt stemming from its freeform and freewheeling attributes, from Godard’s revolutionary mid-60s landmarks like Pierrot le fou (1965) to Wenders’ pathbreaking, post-New Wave variants that fused Americana with his distinctive Germanic sensitivities, to Kiarostami’s great “dashcam” experiments like Ten (2002), which heralded the arrival of the cinema of the new millennium. 

For Dry Leaf, Koberidze follows the examples of the genre’s illustrious forerunners by making no less a bold aesthetic gesture. The Georgian auteur shoots the entirety of his three-hour-plus film-fleuve on an archaic Sony Ericsson W595 – a mobile phone which, from the vantage point of our mid-2020s, might well be the crappiest image-recording device one can get one’s hands on.

Koberidze’s audacious choice of format – a cameraphone manufactured some 15 years ago – is a highly risky but inspired one. Its retrograde, low-resolution image quality renders all objects fuzzy, blurry, and ill-defined, transposing Georgia’s picturesque rural peripheries into a pixelated dreamscape of illusory fictiveness, as if the whole film is some vague afterimage of a dream half-remembered by Irakli. (Which is not quite unlike the otherworldly and fairytale-like setting of What Do We See, in which a pair of love-struck protagonists find themselves in a city transformed by the magical spell cast by the World Cup fever.)

As much as the choice of filming on a crude cameraphone is a stylistic one (reminiscent of Michael Almereyda’s ingenious use of a PixelVision toy camera for his 1994 cult vampire flick, Nadja, which incidentally screened as part of TIFF’s Classics strand), it is also a statement of intent on the part of Koberidze.

By wholeheartedly embracing the technical limitations imposed by the Ericsson, Koberidze daringly resists contemporary cinema’s unhealthy fixation with colour-graded slick imagery in favour of a bare-bones simplicity. This back-to-basics approach bears fruit most effectually in the film’s unadorned but spellbinding visual leitmotifs (the moving car in the open landscape, the deserted football fields, the titular dry leaves rustling in the wind, etc.), which attain all the more poetical vigour for their directness and incision. That is to say that it is not the polished photogenic look, but pictorial forces that ultimately impart strength to each and every shot.

In addition to Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, Ben Rivers’ lo-fi dystopian fable, Mare’s Nest, was another spin on the road narrative programmed in Wavelengths. The British experimentalist – who is something of a specialist in speculative travelogues, as seen in works like I Know Where I’m Going (2009) and Slow Action (2010) – this time follows the strange Carrollian adventures of Moon (Moon Guo Barker), a little girl in tattered clothes navigating a detrital distant future. Another indispensable entry into the genre was provided by Palestinian documentarian Kamal Aljafari’s With Hasan in Gaza, a haunting and mournful road trip down memory lane. 

If Rivers’ vision of dystopia was a postapocalyptic world pockmarked by the ruins of former civilisations and inhabited exclusively by communes of prepubescent children, With Hasan in Gaza proposes a dystopia of an altogether different sort: the occupied but still intact and buoyant Gaza Strip circa the Second Intifada (2000 – 2005). A densely populated narrow sliver of land otherwise known as the world’s largest “open-air prison”. 

With Hasan in Gaza

An expert in archival intervention, Aljafari has been stalwartly seeking to redress the historical wrong perpetuated to Palestinians in his eerily evocative and profoundly lyrical found footage works. Perhaps the most illustrative and compelling example of his archive-based project to date is Recollection, his 2015 feature entirely comprised of images appropriated from Israeli and American films shot on location in his hometown of Jaffa. Aljafari radically recontextualises these existing images by surgically exorcising all the actors from the foreground of the shots, in such a way that the city’s marginalised Palestinian residents glimpsed only as extras come into fuller view, in what is a defiant act of reclaiming a place of cultural erasure.

For his latest, With Hasan in Gaza, a highlight of the Wavelengths sidebar and the festival as a whole, Aljafari taps into his own personal archive in order to engage with a past that is inextricably intertwined with that of his nation’s traumatic history. With his all-too-topical new documentary, the Berlin-based Palestinian film essayist repurposes a recently rediscovered trove of MiniDV footage he had filmed in 2001 during a two-day car trip he undertook with the titular local guide to the Israeli-occupied coastal enclave. From this long-dormant material, Aljafari crafts a searingly elegiac and rigorously conceptual Gaza travelogue: a time capsule that vividly resuscitates the reality of life in Gaza a year into the volatile period of the Second Intifada, a popular uprising against brutal Israeli occupation.

Like the father’s search for his vanished daughter in Dry Leaf, the ostensible locomotive of Aljafari’s cross-territory Gaza traversal – from its nondescript northern checkpoint to the southern portion of the enclave – is the filmmaker’s search for a former cellmate he had befriended as a teen while being incarcerated in an Israeli juvenile prison. (A traumatic chapter from Aljafari’s formative period also recounted at some length in his arresting 2006 nonfiction debut feature, The Roof.)

Whether Aljafari – a Palestinian raised in Israel who at the time of his Gaza sojourn was a fresh-faced twentysomething studying filmmaking in Cologne – actually succeeds in locating his long-lost friend is less materially important here. Instead, as evident from his first-person MiniDV footage, it is the fleeting encounters with Gazans of all walks of life and the scenery zooming past the car window that increasingly capture the young Aljafari’s gaze, who remains largely faceless behind his viewfinder, not unlike Vertov’s “man with a movie camera”. 

And what ultimately emerges as the drive progresses southward is the bleakly ominous picture of a Gaza under Israel’s occupation regime: encroaching Jewish settlements, Israeli military installations and watchtowers, high security walls slicing through dusty terrain, residential blocks reduced to rubble by indiscriminate Israeli shelling, and so on. Given the viewers’ foreknowledge of the territory’s utter and systemic destruction since October 7, 2023, Aljafari’s backward-looking, rear-view mirror vision of the Gaza of the Second Intifada seems to presage the grim roadmap to the catastrophe engulfing present-day Gaza.

Elsewhere in the programme, the subject of being “on the road” was again the recurring through line across Wavelengths’ scrupulously compiled shorts programmes.

In fact, from Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s stream of consciousness Super 8 visual diary chronicling his frantic transcontinental tour on the film festival circuit (I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash) to Toronto-based Texan Blake Williams’ sensory 3D road trip through the stereoscopic desertscape of the American West (FELT), not to mention Moroccan polymath Abdellah Taïa’s leisurely languid camcorder recollections of his escapade to the Mubarack-era Egyptian capital in search of his former flame (Cairo Streets), the idea of “film as trip” proliferated in Picard and Cumming’s programming. 

Slightest Pretense

Among shorter length works, arguably the one that stole the show was another title meditating on the figure of the traveller: Japanese artist and filmmaker Saito Eri’s poetic and disquieting dialogue-free narrative-adjunct film, Slightest Pretense. Here the traveller in question is a sensitively faced but neurotic looking young man (Kurozumi Hisao) on a temporary visit to Kugenuma, a coastal resort town just south of Tokyo, apparently for the purpose of recuperating from an unspecified episode of “psychological torment”.

One of the most exciting emerging voices in Japan’s experimental scene, alongside such figures like Oda Kaori and Kawazoe Aya, Saito might be best remembered for her indelibly haunting and visceral monochrome miniature, Ebony Dream (2019), a fevered daydream of a film in which a somnolent young woman clad in a funerary black dress is seized by a parasomniac fit that starts to progressively resemble a trace-like dance of someone possessed.

With her latest project, Saito draws inspiration from a classic literary source, “Cogwheels”, a grippingly self-interrogating account from Japan’s pioneering short story writer, Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927). Published posthumously, the story examines, with almost unbearable intensity, the author’s own seishinteki fukeiga, or “a mental landscape.” 

Nowadays, Akutagawa’s name is most closely associated, at least in the West, with Kurosawa Akira’s seminal period whodunit, Rashomon (1950), which was famously adapted from a pair of Akutagawa’s celebrated macabre historical tales. But much less widely known, perhaps, is Akutagawa’s tragic early demise at the age of 35 from an overdose of barbiturates following his prolonged bouts with mental illness and drug addiction.

Where Ebony Dream investigated involuntary physical movements divorced from the rationality that governs the waking state, Slightest Pretense sets out to map out the disintegrating mental landscape of the young traveller modelled after the Rashomon author. Namely, the terrifying rupture that occurs in how he perceives the topography upon which he traverses, through a handful of ecliptic narrative fragments that oscillate between mundanity and madness. 

In the first of these near-narrative sketches, Saito situates her forlorn hero on a sandy beach packed with tourists. The nameless traveller is seen alternately covering and uncovering each of his bespectacled eyes while gazing out at the shimmering wintry seascape, as if he were administering himself an optical exam, perhaps in order to assess his own ailing perception of reality. In the course of his subsequent meandering through the seaside town before retiring to his gloomy hotel room, his tenuous grip on his surroundings finally seems to crumble away like a sandcastle under a swelling tide, as semaphored by some deliriously hallucinatory shots that borrow heavily from the surrealist idiom (a stalking apparition in a hooded poncho trailing him in broad daylight; beach sands slipping through the hero’s fingers and that of an imaginary woman; a mirage-like vista with a Buddha statue and Mount Fuji, etc.).

Shot tactilely on Super 8 in the real-life seaside locale where Akutagawa spent some of his last days recovering from nervous exhaustion and chronic insomnia, Slightest Pretense is a startling depiction of a man losing his grasp of reality, unsettling yet not without disarming humour; nor does Saito’s touch ever succumb to heavy-handedness. Though the Japanese artist’s film may not be, strictly speaking, a road movie, it remains a portrait of a man at the end of the road, on a temporary leave from reality, his mental faculties and his “cogwheels” rapidly unspooling and unwinding. It is a study of a nameless man without a map, whose descent into madness is acutely inscribed in the film’s metamorphosing coastal landscape. In speaking of Saito’s Akutagawa adaptation, one is tempted to quote Deleuze’s maxim describing Resnais’ psychodramas of the mind: “Landscapes are mental states, just as mental states are cartographies”.5

Toronto International Film Festival
4 – 14 September 2025
https://tiff.net

Endnotes

  1. James Quandt, “Flesh & Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema”, Artforum, February 2004. https://www.artforum.com/features/flesh-blood-sex-and-violence-in-recent-french-cinema-168041/
  2. James Quandt (ed.), Robert Bresson (Toronto: Toronto International Film Festival Group, 1998).
  3. Jeremy Kay, “TIFF at 50: Former CEO Piers Handling on Growing the Festival, Rivalry with Montreal and Godard’s Demands”, Screen Daily, 4 September 2025. https://www.screendaily.com/features/tiff-at-50-former-ceo-piers-handling-on-growing-the-festival-rivalry-with-montreal-and-godards-demands/5208548.article
  4. Bill Marshall, “An Introduction to the Festival of Festivals”, the first Festival of Festivals programming book, 1976, p. 13.
  5. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 206-7.

About The Author

Kohei Usuda is a Tokyo-based critic who has contributed to publications including Artforum, Frieze, Cinema Scope, Screen Daily and Midnight Eye.

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