More on the TIFF decision and reversal with broader implications. But presumably, for Cooper, there would be some cases where art and art organizations may wish to draw the line:
…Art, like education, is not a TikTok algorithm. It’s not there to cheerlead your pre-existing biases. If you don’t like something, nobody’s forcing you to watch it. If you find yourself groping for an excuse to silence opposing voices, you should probably find some other line of work.
A partially publicly funded arts organization ought to apply principles of institutional neutrality, and its staff ought to prioritize ideological diversity at least as much as visual diversity. The film festival offers a platform. It should not pick a side. Just as academic institutions have been forced to reinvent themselves along these lines or else descend into endless shouting matches, so too will artistic ones.
It’s hard to know whether TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey, or the festival’s board, donors, and government funders, are willing to deliver that kind of blunt message. To do so would require the kind of restraint that seems to be in short supply in our polarized culture.
If they can’t do that, they should give up their public funding altogether. Canadian taxpayers should not have to pay for anybody’s political soapbox.
…The other disturbing commonality is that officials are failing to reflexively protect the invaluable right to freedom of artistic and political expression in Canada.
We have no doubt that if noisy protesters demanded the withdrawal of a TIFF movie because of its glorification of violence, TIFF officials would be the first to stand up for the filmmaker’s right to artistic expression.
But when it comes to telling stories or singing songs that some deem offensive, that reflex has been replaced by a knee-jerk run for cover.
This is an alarming development in Canada. In difficult times, we need people in positions of authority to stand up for freedom of expression – not look for excuses to abandon it. That never ends well for anyone.
…All of this has created not just chasms in the arts community and a chill on artistic expression, but a disincentive for organizations considering ponying up to support the arts. You want your brand associated with something positive and meaningful: a literary prize, a film festival, maybe a theatre festival that claims to push the boundaries. (Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival also caved to dissenters, cancelling the Canadian play The Runner last year.) But shell out money to get embroiled in this? In this economy?
The arts are in trouble and need corporate support. The world is in trouble and needs art to guide and inform, and artists who help us understand the issues and inspire us to be brave and fight for what’s right.
Of note, joins the genre of movies such as Das Boot, Los Chicos de la Guerra, and All Quiet on the Western Front, albeit all of these were made after the wars ended, not during hostilities. Interesting question, will this film be shown in Russia or not?:
…The feature film All Quiet on the Western Front, which also humanized the “wrong” side of the First World War with its devastating portrayal of a young German soldier’s experiences, won four Academy Awards last year, including best international feature film.
Russians at War, which dispels the myth that there is any glory involved in war whatsoever, deserves similar recognition. It certainly deserves a chance to be seen.
Of course, Russians is much more sensitive. It is a documentary to begin with, but also because this catastrophe is happening right now. It is bringing agony to Ukrainians at this very moment. Nobody should have to experience what Ukrainians are suffering through at the hands of Russia.
This film in no way discounts that. If anything, it emphasizes it.
It does not disregard the inhumanity of war to humanize the low-level members of the aggressor’s army: Russian soldiers and medics as young as 20 who are sent to the front lines along with their hopes and dreams – and their not-quite-yet-fully-developed prefrontal cortexes. The opposite, in fact.
Russian fighters – some drafted, some indoctrinated, some there to keep their families fed back home or a friend company at the front, some there because they don’t know why – are also victims of this war. As one notes in the film, they are at war with themselves. “Slavs against Slavs.”
Thousands and thousands of people, Ukrainian and Russian, have been ripped from their lives to further a madman’s dream.
And a talented filmmaker, without an official posting or even a press pass, followed them almost all the way to the front so that we could know about it. And be outraged. Not at the film; at the war.
Censoring art is never a good idea. But keeping this film under wraps is denying the public of more than the experience of seeing an excellent movie. It is restricting access to a vital message: an unforgiving indictment of war.
This year’s Toronto International Film Festival is filthy with films boasting socially progressive bona fides. Battle of the Sexes, starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell, tackles chauvinism in the sports arena. Kings, with Halle Berry and Daniel Craig, looks at racism through the prism of the Rodney King riots. The same-sex romance Call Me by Your Name aims to be this year’s Brokeback Mountain. Hollywood, don’t you know, is all about speaking truth to power.
TIFF itself is even positioning itself as more socially “woke” than usual, with its Share Her Journey campaign aimed at remedying the unbelievable gender imbalance in the industry (last year, only 7 per cent of the top 250 films were directed by women).
Yet year after year, it’s the less-glitzy documentary program that exhibits true social awareness. It makes sense; with smaller budgets, lowered aesthetic expectations, and a cinematic form built on real-time urgency, documentaries are better positioned to act as a mirror to the current culture.
It was a notion I kept returning to this past weekend, as TIFF lurched from one glitzy, questionable star vehicle to the next – where were the incendiary films that could unite audiences to stand up and cheer? Where were the movies that might actually make a difference in this heightened political climate? As ever, the doc lineup provided the answer, with one of the most culturally conscious selection of films in recent TIFF memory.
Even putting aside its achievement in near-gender parity – 41 per cent of 2017’s doc programming is directed by women, versus the festival’s total programming of 33 per cent – this year’s offerings are impressive, even intimidating, in their progressiveness.
There are films on iconic figures in the black community (Boom for Real, about Jean-Michel Basquiat; Grace Jones: Bloodlight & Bami; TheGospel According to Andre, focusing on fashion icon Andre Leon Talley; Sammy Davis Jr.: I Gotta Be Me; and Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart, which chronicles the life of playwright Lorraine Hansberry); movies examining LGBT issues (Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood); and the expected, though no less appreciated, docs pivoting on here-and-now politics, including The China Hustle, Cocaine Prison, Silas and The Final Year.
On paper, that list might read like a compacted semester on the most liberal campus imaginable. Yet the films are more dynamic than didactic. It is a testament to the programming prowess of TIFF’s longtime documentary expert, Thom Powers – especially when the rest of the festival is crowded with temptations of glossier, more escapist fare.
“Sometimes these things come together as a coincidence,” says Powers, who has been programming docs for TIFF for the past twelve years, and has also worked with the IFC Center in New York, the DOC NYC festival and the Miami International Film Festival. “The Grace Jones film, I’ve been following that for ten years. And then there happened to be a cluster of films, like the Jean-Michel film and the Andre film.”
Although he prefers not to trumpet certain connective themes in his doc selection, Powers admits that this year offers a notable cluster of films that cannot escape the current political climate. “The films come in waves, and outsiders may not see the connections like I do, but there is a notable cluster of films in the program about figures of resistance,” he says. “They come from very different countries and very different filmmakers, but each of the central characters in something like Silas, they impressed me for their courage and eloquence in standing up to larger forces.”
“Right now, in North America, we see people hold up signs of ‘resist’ and rally around this idea of resistance,” he continues. “I think these figures, and these films, have a lot to teach us.”
On the issue of gender parity, Powers admits the doc medium simply makes it easier for female filmmakers to make headway in a notoriously hostile and sexist industry.
“There’s no question there, with budget being a very big factor,” he says. “It takes a lot less money and fewer gatekeepers for women to get started on a documentary project. Or any director, because you don’t have to wait for someone to give yourself permission. You can just get it going with less resources to begin with.”
Good read on the industry’s ongoing diversity challenge and how this year’s films are strong award contenders (I saw Moonlight at TIFF and well worth seeing):
You know Moonlight even if you haven’t stepped inside a movie theatre in months. Ever since Barry Jenkins’s intimate drama about one black man’s coming of age premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September, it has dominated the cultural conversation. Walk a block in any major city and you’ll encounter giant bus ads touting its brilliance. Read any film critic’s year-end Top 10 list and you’ll find it near the top (Metacritic has the film topping 52 lists). Ask any industry insider and they will tell you Moonlight is the film to beat at this year’s Academy Awards.
Which is all quite a radical shift from this time last year, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominations for the 2016 Oscars, and exactly zero non-white performers were nominated in the acting categories. For the second year in a row. In an instant, the social-media hashtag #OscarsSoWhite became easy shorthand for the industry, with the Oscars themselves cast as, in Chris Rock’s words, “the White People’s Choice Awards.”
But Moonlight, and a handful of other films, might represent a long-overdue turnaround. In the last quarter of 2016 – what is traditionally known as awards season, when studios release their prestige pictures – there has been a notable surge of heavily marketed, critically acclaimed, diversity-forward films dominating the marketplace: Moonlight, certainly, but also the historical drama Hidden Figures; the interracial drama Loving; the Barack Obama biopic Barry; two monumental documentaries from Ava DuVernay (13th) and Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro); the tearjerker Lion starring Dev Patel; and the powerful Fences, directed by and starring Denzel Washington.
All promise to be strong presences at this year’s Academy Awards – and all offer the hope of a sea change in the industry, an acknowledgment that Hollywood is finally waking up to the need for diverse voices, both in front of and behind the camera.
Or is it the mere illusion of a sea change?
The industry has been down this road before, after all. In 2002, Denzel Washington and Halle Berry became the first black performers to win both top acting Oscars in the same year (for, respectively, Training Day and Monster’s Ball). Five years later, seven performers of colour dominated the 2006 Academy Awards’ acting categories: Will Smith, Djimon Hounsou, Eddie Murphy, Rinko Kikuchi, Adriana Barraza and eventual winners Forest Whitaker and Jennifer Hudson. But instead of those moments leading to permanent change, the industry fell back on whatever promises those recognitions may have implied.
“When Denzel and Berry won, the industry said, ‘Well, that’ll do for the next 20 years! Good job, everyone, pack it up!’” jokes Darnell Hunt, director of UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and an expert on diversity in the film business. It’s a good line, but there are real tears mixed with the humour. While Hollywood considers itself a bastion of liberal values and progressive politics, it has consistently proven loath to highlight diverse performers and filmmakers, and in recent years has even lost what little progress had been made. (Last February, Hunt released a study that found that film jobs still go to “overwhelmingly white male performers and filmmakers,” with minorities losing ground in acting, writing, directing and producing jobs since his previous study came out in 2015.)
Is Moonlight, then, and its fellow crop of Oscar favourites – each worthy in their own way, each carrying unfair burdens and expectations – part of a deliberate reaction to the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, or a simple matter of good timing bereft of any meaningful industry change?
“In the case of Loving, it certainly isn’t a reaction – the movie’s been in the works for four years, and that’s just the kind of gestation period it takes for features,” says Peter Saraf, one of the drama’s producers. “But we are seeing more films that are starting to engage on issues that have been ignored for a while.”
Cameron Bailey, artistic director for the Toronto International Film Festival, agrees, though adds that there’s another factor to consider. “What we’re seeing is a reaction to the establishment that elevates movies to the public consciousness. The companies that sell and buy movies, the exhibitors, the critics – all those areas are probably paying more attention and are more conscious of trying to address diversity than a year or two ago,” says Bailey, whose festival this past fall hosted premieres of Moonlight, Loving, I Am Not Your Negro and Lion, as well as a sneak peek of Hidden Figures. “It all makes it impossible to ignore the great work coming from African-American or Asian American or Latin American artists.”
This cultural elevation, Bailey says, can be framed as an evolving democratization of just how movies get valued. “It used to be critics telling audiences what was great and what they had to see. And it still is, but it’s also Twitter and Facebook now, and Black Twitter has also been incredibly vocal and increasingly influential,” he says, referring to the loosely defined network of social-media users focused on interests to the black community, from politics to the arts. “Look at the reaction on Black Twitter to, say, the new Black Panther movie being developed by Disney. Every time there’s a casting announcement, Twitter freaks out! That’s great, but what it tells you is that people who make movies and green-light them are finally paying attention to social media – and if they want to make money, they follow that interest.”
“We talk about the industry as if it’s a monolith, and of course, at the end of the day, it isn’t – all those people sitting in those rooms making decisions are ultimately paying lip service to the notion that they want to get their product to an audience,” says Nina Shaw, a lawyer and industry power player who represents some of the top black artists working in Hollywood today, including DuVernay and musician John Legend. “So when you see something you like, you tweet about it, and use all your social-media outlets to encourage other people to do the same. And I’m telling you, the folks on this side of town are looking at those things and using them as indicators as to what audiences want to see.”
TIFF does have an amazing diversity of films, with this but one example:
This year we’ve seen endless loops of online commentary and Hollywood hand-wringing about the enduring whiteness of American cinema and how structural challenges continue to restrict filmmakers of color. So it was not surprising that there was so much anticipation around the October release of first-time director Nate Parker’s film The Birth of a Nation. The story of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion and self-empowerment, as seen through the artistic vision of a young, black filmmaker, caused a bidding war at the Sundance Film Festival at the height of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign.
But by the time the Toronto International Film Festival opened last week, Parker was embroiled in a much louder conversation about sexual assault and toxic masculinity after debate about his acquittal on rape charges during his college days resurfaced. A month before the film that would prove Hollywood’s diverse bona fides was to open, it was already in full-blown public relations free fall.
Fortunately, The Birth of a Nation was neither the only nor the most anticipated film about black life to screen in Toronto, which hosts the largest film festival in North America; one that sets the tone for the Oscars and tests the viability of serious American cinema. Festival artistic director Cameron Baily told me that this year’s festival may have been its blackest edition ever. It pushes back against the idea that Hollywood can only absorb one black story at a time, and challenges the limited parameters of a “black film”.
This year’s festival shifted the conversation about diversity from a focus on the absence of black faces in movies to a feast of cinematic styles and stories as wide-ranging as the black experience itself.
Most importantly, the films opening at Toronto explored stories about justice, family, and selfhood without didactic or conventional Hollywood bluster about race. From the struggle for interracial marriage rights in the restrained drama Loving to a young boy’s battle to reconcile his masculinity and sexuality in Barry Jenkins’ lyrical second film Moonlight, this year’s program introduced a new set of faces and performances for critics to savor and nominate.
Indian-born filmmaker Mira Nair premiered Queen of Katwe, a story about a young Ugandan woman’s journey to become an international chess champion. The movie was filmed in Uganda and South Africa and opens in wide release as a Disney production. It stars Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo (Selma), and features no white saviors.
Perhaps the best-received film of the festival to directly confront the limited portrayal of blackness on screen was I Am Not Your Negro, filmmaker Raoul Peck’s searing new documentary about writer James Baldwin. The film won the festival’s prestigious top documentary prize and was purchased for wide release by Magnolia pictures. Made in collaboration with the Baldwin estate, Peck’s documentary tells the story of American racism through the words of Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, archive interviews, and his essays on race relations. It features no talking heads, hazy footage or conventional biographical framing devices. Instead, it blends Baldwin’s writing with arresting footage of contemporary police brutality to underscore the writer’s powerful insight and voice.
At this year’s Toronto festival, neither the filmmakers nor the curators wished to have these films categorized as ‘diverse’ and, therefore, seen as niche. There’s such range in the films, Bailey told me, that to just “call them all ‘black films’ really reduces their context, their variety, their differences and their power.”
Multicultural Meanderings 