A still from Double Freedom.TIFF/Supplied
Biographical works are a crowd-pleasing staple at the Toronto International Film Festival, and this year they even pervade the festival’s most experimental section, Wavelengths. This edition, audiences are treated to the surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance reminiscing and quibbling in Once Upon a Time in Harlem, while a radical Japanese filmmaker, banned from leaving his country for decades due to his support of the Red Army, persists in Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo.
In the film that holds the section together, the genial Argentine gadfly Mariano Llinás goes way deep on the Life of Jorge Luis Borges. This is not your typical biography, and Wavelengths, each year, proves far from a typical collection of films.
Thanks to some grousing in outlets such as this one, the program has been slightly expanded this year, consisting of 15 shorts, two mid-lengths and 11 features (up from nine), most of which bowed elsewhere, including Llinas’s three-part, 330-minute digressional epic on the influential Argentine writer, which just launched in Venice.
Life of Jorge Luis Borges proves to be Wavelengths’ linchpin as Llinás’s hunt through the relics of Borges’s past focuses on how, in Borges’s writing, fiction pervades reality or vice versa. Llinás’s quest becomes as much about himself as his subject, a film about a brilliant eccentric made by a brilliant eccentric. It’s not the only film so deeply personal that its autobiographical leanings will be the focus of postscreening discussions. Others, as Llinas teaches us, require some investigation to reveal hidden clues.
A still from Life of Jorge Luis Borges.TIFF/Supplied
Take Llinas’s countrymate, Lisandro Alonso, who returns with one of the most unlikely sequels of all time, Cannes standout Double Freedom. Back is woodcutter Misael Saavedra, whose daily work on Alonso’s father’s estate is again patiently depicted. The original La libertad intermingled fiction and reality so seamlessly that many confused it for documentary. In the intervening decades Alonso embraced artifice, and Double Freedom introduces Saavedra’s sister Misaela, played by Catalina Saavedra – in a Borgesian twist, they aren’t at all related (she’s the Chilean actor from The Maid).
In a more dizzying confluence of realities, Sebastian Brameshuber’s London can be a considered a sequel to a film made by another director entirely. Bobby (Bobby Sommer), a rideshare driver going back and forth from Vienna to Salzburg on the A1 West Autobahn, plays the same character he did in Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours. A compelling representation of today’s Europe, London is almost entirely shot in studio in a car with rear projection, with improvised dialogues, some more real than others – to add a further layer, in real life Sommer is a driver himself, in charge of the transportation for the Vienna film festival.
Denis Côté has spoken about how Nobody’s Violence, his unsettling story of a euthanizing angel of death in the Quebec countryside, was influenced by his own confrontation with mortality, leading up to and after his kidney transplant. Côté dedicated it to his recently deceased mother, and grieving is also central to John Torres’s transfixing yet mystifying The Remotes, a world premiere that plays like a labyrinthian Filipino remix of David Cronenberg’s Crash. As Borges wrote about Keats, “I do not think I understood the words, but I felt that something was happening to me. It was happening not to my mere intelligence, but to my whole being.”
A still from Nobody's Violence.TIFF/Supplied
Likewise, while watching Nicolás Pereda’s amusing, self-reflexive chamber piece Everything Else Is Noise, one doesn’t grasp a fully personal connection. There is the reappearance of Pereda’s stock cast of actors including Teresita Sánchez, who plays a classical musician and composer, and Lázaro G. Rodriguez, as a TV documentarian bumbling through an interview with Sánchez, her friend and her daughter, all musicians. But the genesis of the film was Pereda spending time with his mother, who was the first to establish a group of female composers in Mexico.
Also focusing on womanhood, the British artist Beatrice Gibson plunges into auto-fiction in her atmospheric, 16mm-shot debut At Night: She appears on camera as a director trying to figure out the film she’s making. Dream, reality and fiction intertwine as over the course of one Parisian night she meets heterogenous women also playing versions of themselves. They engage in a handful of frank on-camera discussions about topics such as sexuality, motherhood and race, guided by their own literary figures, including the late American poet Alice Notley.
Llinás doesn’t shy away from Borges’s Peronist and fascist tendencies in his twilight years, and political autobiography invades every frame in two experimental works that see filmmakers confronting problematic elements of their national identities. Both are standouts of a program that reinforces Wavelengths’ tendency to refuse to separate the personal and the political.
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In the world premiere of The Black Box Is Orange, Toronto’s Yuula Benivolski complies a biography of her Israeli hometown in an intelligent way that would impress even Llinás. Her shape-shifting essay in 10 chapters makes trenchant use of photographic archives to uncover the history of Shlomi and its environs, built atop the rubble of the Palestinian village of al-Bassa on the Lebanese border. Patient, complex and absorbing, Benivolski’s debut is a genuine discovery.
An equally unflinching short provides the title for the Wavelengths 2 program, This Suffocating Now. Taking off from a broken wrist playing basketball, Vika Kirchenbauer carefully builds up an analysis of hypocrisy and state oppression she and others continue to experience. Kirchenbauer shows and tells us what it means to speak your truth as an artist in contemporary Germany, a country she describes as failing to learn the correct lessons from its own past, driven home this week by Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) seismic electoral breakthrough. The implicit conclusion, as a Roomba rumbles over the floors of her recently renovated flat, is that her homeland is in dire need of a good house cleaning.