A Decade+ in Review: The 2019 Toronto International Film Festival Darren Hughes October 2019 Festival Reports On 31 December 2018, the fundraising arm of the Toronto International Film Festival sent a year-end email solicitation, urging recipients to support cinema by helping the organisation hit its annual target of 3...
Leadership Transitions, Critical Voices and Experimental Cinema at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival Darren Hughes December 2018 Festival Reports In 2018, the Toronto International Film Festival joined Sundance, Berlin, Locarno and Vienna in announcing major changes in leadership. After 36 years at TIFF, the final 24 of them as chief executive officer, P...
Wavelengths at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival Darren Hughes December 2017 Festival Reports My conversations during the first two days of the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival were dominated by two subjects: Twin Peaks: The Return, which had aired its final episodes earlier in the week (and ult...
Wavelengths at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival Darren Hughes December 2016 Festival Reports The 2016 Wavelengths shorts program opened auspiciously with Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Sangrienta (Bloody Silhouette). Made in 1975 in Iowa City, the two-minute, Super-8 film begins with a high-angle shot of Mendi...
No Home Movies: Wavelengths at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival Darren Hughes December 2015 Festival Reports The 2011 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths program included Mark Lewis’s short film, Black Mirror at the National Gallery, in which two bulky, fully articulated machines – one man...
Image Problems: The 2014 Toronto International Film Festival Darren Hughes December 2014 Festival Reports Feature Image: I am Here “WTF is this movie?!” I scribbled this note midway through I Am Here, Fan Lixin’s trainwreck of a documentary about Super Boy, an American Idol-style talent show that is a ratings s...
Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness: On Watching Avant-Garde Shorts at the 43rd International Film Festival Rotterdam Darren Hughes March 2014 Festival Reports “Most of the filmmakers I cover don’t get paid to make their films, so why should I expect to get paid to write about them?” – Michael Sicinski To get straight to the point: if the 2014 International Film Fest...
Reasoned Arguments: A Conversation with Frederick Wiseman about At Berkeley Darren Hughes December 2013 Feature Articles Frederick Wiseman’s second documentary, High School (1968), was at the time of its release an unprecedented glimpse into America’s public education system. Throughout his career, Wiseman has bristled at the ter...
Cinema is Dead. Long Live Cinema. The 38th Annual Toronto International Film Festival Darren Hughes December 2013 Festival Reports By coincidence, the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival began and ended for me with strikingly similar images. The first film I saw, Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain, opens with a minutes-long shot through a ...
A Conversation with Nicolas Rey Darren Hughes December 2012 Feature Articles Nicolas Rey’s third feature film, differently, Molussia (2012), is an adaptation of a novel he’s never read. Written between 1932 and 1936, Günther Anders’s The Molussian Catacomb analyzes the rise of fascism...
Where More Meets MORE: The 37th Toronto International Film Festival Darren Hughes November 2012 Festival Reports “Where OMG Meets WTF”. This was the first tagline I spotted at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. Others included “Where Fantasy Meets Reality”, “Where Indie Meets Epic”, “Where Wow Meets Huh?” an...
Nostalgia, Chaos, and Moments of Ecstasy: The 36th Toronto International Film Festival Darren Hughes December 2011 Festival Reports Festival Business The opening weekend of the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival also signalled the beginning of TIFF’s second year in the $200 million dollar TIFF Bell Lightbox. The public side of the ...