A scene from "Uncle Boomee Who Wan Recall His Past Lives" by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Independent, art-house cinema may be experiencing an unprecedented financial lull, but you'd never know it from the vibrant list of master filmmakers coming to the Toronto International Film Festival next month.
Festival organizers announced the final additions to their lineup Tuesday, including new films from French director Jean-Luc Godard, Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-ke, British filmmaker Ken Loach and the globally acclaimed Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Other highly anticipated films coming to the festival include French filmmaker Catherine Breillat's The Sleeping Beauty, about a young girl coming of age in a story of epic proportions; French director Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men, about a group of monks killed in Algeria; and Romanian director Andrei Ujica's The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, a documentary montage about the Romanian ruler culled from 1,000 hours of archival footage.
Other documentaries sure to grab attention include The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, a film about the recording of Bruce Springsteen's pivotal 1978 album, and basketball star Steve Nash's directorial debut with his hour-long doc Into the Wind, about Terry Fox. The director of An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim, also returns to TIFF with Waiting for "Superman, " examining the decline of public education in the United States and featuring Bill Gates, among others.
TIFF programmers aren't backing away from controversy - among the films at this year's festival are Torontonian Bruce La Bruce's sexually graphic gay film L.A. Zombie, which was recently banned in Australia.
Tuesday's announcement brings the tally of films at this year's TIFF to about 250 features, a treasure trove of world cinema, despite the aftershocks of the recession on independent filmmaking.
That's not to say that the recession hasn't had an impact. As Piers Handling, the festival's director and chief executive officer, says, "It takes a little while for the recession to be seen in terms of film production. There's a lag time of a year or two. I think what we're seeing is a hollowing out of the mid-budget productions of $10-million to $30-million."
This could have a particular impact on major Canadian directors. "David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Daniel Arcand: They want to work above the $10-million range for their productions," says Handling. "But I think it's becoming increasingly difficult to find financing for those films. There is going to be a real shakedown there."
Still, Handling is quick to add, "What may happen is that those films that get made in that category - mid-level-budget productions - may be better films as a result."
Given the over-supply of films in a weak market, what may be happening now is a winnowing out of some lesser film projects. Yet what further industry change lies ahead, and what will happen to the gulf between small, independent films and massive blockbusters, are questions that remain, and may have an effect on TIFF in future years.
"I don't think anyone coming to the festival who has been here over the last 10 to 15 years will notice a major shift. There's still the relatively large-budget productions, still huge star power coming to the festival, still a lot of independent work being produced, still [a]very international [group of films]in terms of composition. But it may slightly be at a tipping point in terms of how much longer this can continue," Handling says.