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TIFF 2008 To Open With Passchendaele

By Mathew Kumar

2008_06_17_pass.jpg
We’re a little under three months away from the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival, which means it’s about time to begin the constant buzz for the festival that many of you will find insufferable. The first announcement? That the festival is to open with the world premiere of Passchendaele, written, directed and produced by Paul Gross. Or “that guy out of Due South” if you’re in the mood for a lazy short-hand.
Only Gross’s second turn in the director’s chair (after, er, Men With Brooms, so quite a shift in style then), Passchendaele is named for the Third Battle of Ypres, a battle fought in World War I across three months until Canadian troops took the village of Passchendaele—a gain of five miles of territory at a cost of nearly 140,000 lives. Gross plays Sgt. Michael Dunne, a wounded soldier who returns to Calgary and falls in love with a nurse—her younger brother enlists, and so he follows him back to France to “protect” him, against the impossible odds.
You can view the trailer at the film’s official website right now, and although it starts absolutely terrible (“It was a time of innocence!” proclaims voice-over man, for no apparent reason) and pushes the “bit of love for the ladies, bit of war for the lads” angle of advertising for Atonement, it looks pretty interesting! Plus it’s apparently the highest-budgeted Canadian film ever (at a surprisingly small $20 million).
The 33rd Toronto International Film Festival runs September 4 to 13, 2008, and the website is to go (properly) live on June 27. As for ticket packages, once again Visa cardholders get a jump and will be able to order them from July 7, with everyone else able to order a week later.

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Comments

  • matty

    “Plus it’s apparently the highest budgeted Canadian film ever (at a surprisingly small $20 million).”
    Really?

  • David Topping

    Titanic doesn’t count, I assume.

  • AnarchX

    Iron Maiden (mock if you will, snooty & elitist bastards) had song called “Passchendaele” off their album “Dance of Death”. cool song and worth checking out even if Pitchfork don’t like Iron Maiden……(their bastards too).

  • lastplaceman

    I’m sorry, but that trailer is terrible. It looks like any other crap Hollywood blockbuster (not that I was expecting something radically different). Is that what $20 mil buys? The bigger the budget, the closer to Hollywood?
    On a side note, I love the fact that the poster for the film is a complete rip-off of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s ‘A Very Long Engagement’, right down to use of colour. Lazy design work.
    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0344510/posters

  • Apricot

    This is the most expensive Canadian film?? How much did ‘The Red Violin’ come in at?

  • Jonathan Goldsbie

    The IMDb estimates the budget of The Red Violin, a Canadian-British-Italian coproduction, at $10 million.

  • Blovertis

    Good to see someone is doing their part to uphold Canada’s image as the most boring nation on earth.
    Whatever its budget, Passch is sure to be yet another sepia-toned snoozefest, of interest to no-one under the age of 75.

  • Acadie

    Too bad, I think WW1 and our effort seems to be overlooked and the importance of the Canadian contribution seems under taught in our school system. I would expect better than this from a Canadian, if it is as bad as this trailer seems it is another crappy Canadian movie.

  • spacejack

    Actually I was thinking the poster looked more like The Notebook. But that’s probably just a standard layout that gets used all the time.
    “There’s only one rule: don’t die.” Isn’t that a Buffy line??

  • iamnotdynamite

    geek out for spacejack:
    “faith, first rule of slaying: don’t die.”