It’s entirely possible that an early work by the next Atom Egoyan or David Cronenberg will screen on Wednesday night at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. With the 2013 Student Film Showcase featuring the best from post-secondary schools around the country and the Jump Cuts Young Filmmakers Showcase kicking off the evening with Toronto-area high-school students’ films, the night will be a coming-out party for a new crop of talent. Judging by the polished creativity of some of the entries, it’s safe to say that young people are more prepared than ever to start telling stories on film from an early age.

According to CBC’s Chris Boyce, the goal of this weekend’s CBCMusic.ca Festival is twofold. First and foremost, the CBC wants to celebrate Canadian music. Second, it wants to celebrate CBC Music, the broadcaster’s online music service, which launched a little over a year ago.

In 1996, Theatre Columbus premiered playwright Michael O’Brien’s “freely adapted” take on the famous Beaumarchais play The Barber of Seville, which was written in 1775. O’Brien’s version mixed in music from the 1816 opera of the same name by Gioachino Rossini, as well as original tunes by composer John Millard. The adaptation also propelled the story forward a couple centuries, with pop culture references galore. With Theatre Columbus co-founder Leah Cherniak at the helm, the musical ended the season with six Dora Award nominations (it won three) and plenty of critical acclaim.

Seventeen years later, Soulpepper Theatre is remounting this zany reimagination of The Barber of Seville, updated once again by O’Brien, Millard, and Cherniak. But, for some reason—the change in decade, or company, or sense of humour—whatever had made the original so magical, has faded, save for a few key performances.

Toronto’s extensive work on the silver screen reveals that, while we have the chameleonic ability to look like anywhere from New York City to Moscow, the disguise doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny. Reel Toronto revels in digging up and displaying the films that attempt to mask, hide, or—in rare cases—proudly display our city.

In 2000, as you surely recall, a little film called The Skulls came out, and our culture was never the same. Before the year was out, it would end up as the 72nd highest grossing film of the year and quickly rise to become the 1,901st biggest movie ever. With those kinds of numbers it’s no surprise that what once seemed a one-off movie became a franchise that, um, defined a generation. Yes, they made not one but two stunning sequels to The Skulls, and don’t let the fact that they went direct to video make you think they’re any worse than the original: they are precisely as sucky as the original, but without Joshua “Pacey” Jackson as the star.

The original movie, a tale of the dark, thrillery things that go on at places like Yale, was filmed on the cheap right here, so it’s no surprise that when the budgets got even tighter they came right back to Toronto.

The first flick used U of T to double as a quasi–Ivy League school. Toronto film lovers like you, dear reader, get much more of the same here. Why, the very opening shot of The Skulls II (suggested subtitle: “The Skullening?”) pans across the old Varsity Stadium…

…in all its glory…

…and, hey, you can even see the ol’ planetarium.

Before they’re done, the two Skulls sequels will hit all your favourite St. George Campus hotspots. Why, there’s Convocation Hall…

..the front campus…

…Unviersity College and the adjacent Croft Chapter House (wherein The Skulls do their dirty deeds)…

…the UC quad…

…seen from all sorts of photogenic angles…

…and then the quad…

…and main building of Victoria University…

…and the always pitureesque chapel at Knox College.

The exterior of the of the chapel scene was filmed rather nearby, up at Bloor Street United.

Our pouty, Pacey-like hero parks his car on Huron Street…

…but when they see some dude watching them from across the street, they seem to be a few blocks over, on Devonshire Place. (You can see OISE there in the background.)

Not-Pacey goes strolling with his gal pal down Bloor Street West…

…stopping at this shop, right across from New Generation Sushi. (The Pita Pit is now a Jamba Juice. And why not?) He spots a Ducati motorcycle in the window that he despearately wants to own, and if you don’t think it’s actually a shallow metaphor for the way he’ll sell his soul before learning that material things aren’t all they’re cracked up to be…well, then you need to bone up on your Skullology.

Naturally, his wealthy-but-possibly/likely-evil benefactors get him said Ducati and he drives it down Queen’s Park Crescent…

…and onto King’s College Circle.

Oooh, here’s a shadowy meeting in a dark alley. It’s been a while for us, but it’s our old pal, the Distillery District! If these guys shot anything at Casa Loma we might have to give them some kind of prize for hitting all our favourite and most obvious spots!

What the what now? It’s Casa Loma! Outside…

…and in! Now we’re starting to feel bad for picking on the The Skulls franchise, what with all they’ve done for our fair city.

But, seriously folks, Casa Loma isn’t the only local mansion to get some facetime. Here’s Skulls III baddie Barry Bostwick (!) at his handsome retreat, which is a major location in the movie.

It’s actually Graydon Hall, up in North York, which we’re kind of surprised we don’t see more often. Casa Loma ain’t all that, after all.

And those aren’t the only places you can have shadowy meetings, either! You can have one at High Park…

…or the University Avenue courthouse.

And with the right lighting, even the adjacent Osgoode Hall library looks scary as all get out.

Oh, we’ve got some chases too! Here’s one that starts on Victoria Street (note the King Eddie in the back)…

…and goes down Leader Lane.

This police station, since torn down, is the old OPP headquarters on Harbour Street. (If you guessed it was replaced by condos, well, bully for you!)

They do all sorts of chasing behind it, where it’s rather hard to miss the Gardiner…

…and from this angle it’s even harder to miss the Rogers Centre.

As you can see by the window in the back, this hispter eatery is the dear, departed Gypsy Co-Op.

Perhaps because Skulls I starred erstwhile Dawson’s Creek resident Joshua Jackson, the producers felt they needed a Katie Holmeseque girl for Skulls III. In this one the twist is that she wants to be the first girl in the club. Will she get in? Will she, like Ducatiboy, learn some harsh lessons about the true cost of power and wealth? No spoilers here, suckers. Watch it yourselves! Anyway, she makes fearful phone calls from all sorts of photogenic places, like the middle of University Avenue…

…and, a little hard to be sure with how it’s framed, but we think also from the corner of Front and Church Streets.

She also competes as a swimmer, including at this meet…

…at North York’s Douglas Snow Aquatic Centre.

Look, we can’t tell you whether you should or shouldn’t watch one or all of the The Skulls movies. Certainly, if you’re young and wondering how to get into a secret club so you can be rich and powerful there are some moral lessons to be gleaned here. If you’re into U of T architecture porn, they’re pretty good for that too.

It’s not like we haven’t seen crappy sequels filmed here the odd time or six. But usually those franchises started with some sort of success before going off the rails. Here, as Wikipedia deftly puts it, “The [first] film was critically panned, but successful enough to spawn two direct-to-video sequels.” What does that say about the world we live in? That’s the real, existential question.

Toronto’s extensive work on the silver screen reveals that, while we have the chameleonic ability to look like anywhere from New York City to Moscow, the disguise doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny. Reel Toronto revels in digging up and displaying the films that attempt to mask, hide, or—in rare cases—proudly display our city.

We confess that when we profiled Driven we really had no idea Sylvester Stallone had made a second terrible movie here. That movie is the “mafia comedy” Avenging Angelo.

The director was Toronto-native Martyn Burke, meaning we at least know who to blame for dragging our city into this. Burke’s filmography doesn’t suggest the deft touch necessary for a successful “mafia comedy,” but then he did get a co-writing credit for Top Secret! so we won’t be too hard on him on the off-chance he wrote the “what phony dog poo?” joke.

In his commentary track for the movie, he suggests he was perhaps aiming for some sort of profundity but…yeah, no.

Whatever, we don’t have time to worry about quality. All we care about is locations, and here we are, playing Long Island. One of the film’s major set pieces (we use the words “film” and “major” loosely) is the assassination of real-life Hollywood legend Anthony Quinn, who’s playing a mob boss. Oh, and this isn’t a spoiler because his character’s name is Angelo and his bodyguard (Sly, natch) has to avenge him, or protect his daughter or something.

Anyway, it takes place in this restaurant…

…which is (despite the USA Today box) very clearly Oro, on Elm Street.

You can see a bit more of it here, with Mount Sinai Hospital at the end there.

Early on, they drive out to a handsome mob mansion up in the Bridle Path neighbourhood…

…at 40 Park Lane Circle. Amusingly, the neighbourhood being what it is, it looks like that humble manse has been replaced by something better.

Ah yes, here it is. For $14 million (give or take) you can have something not too shy to admit it’s inspired by the Chateau Versailles. But amidst its 22,000 square feet it has a ballroom, and if people aren’t impressed by you telling them Stallone once visited, maybe the 14 bathrooms will do the trick?

In the middle of the movie there’s a big shootout at this mall and we confess: we don’t recognize it. It’s got three levels with an HMV on the main level and a food court downstairs and other than that…we’re just not sure.

But then Sly escapes with Madeline Stowe and they’re in Hamilton. They drive past this Midas and along York Boulevard.

If Angelo is dead, he has to have a funeral. It takes place at Metropolitan United Church, never afraid to offer its services for the good of art.

This being a lame mobster movie, there also has to be some opera! Here it is, taking place at the Pantages (or the Canon, or the Ed Mirvish or whatever you want to call it on any given day).

You can also recognize its lovely lobby, where our thespians partake of victuals afterwards.

They also spent some time down by the lake. They shot something around Ashbridge’s Bay and there’s some water there, so it’s a fair guess, eh?

With greater certainty, we can safely say this flashbacky assassination scene is on the upper level of the driving range at Polson Pier.

And for all you port lands lovers, this is a pretty shot looking down Villiers Street.

They also venture out by the airport, driving into…

…and visiting the now-departed Valhalla Inn.

Mafia comedies are just not the most successful genre and, really, after making Oscar, Stallone should have known better. If you absolutely insist on seeing a mafia comedy shot in Toronto, just watch The Freshman.

Detail of Cléo‘s first cover image.

In 1962, French director Agnès Varda released Cléo de cinq à sept, a film that remains greatly respected for its sophisticated ways of approaching existentialism and mortality, all through a strong feminist lens. It’s from this film—and in response to its vivid and varied depiction of how women perceive and are perceived—that Cléo, a new journal of film, film culture and feminism, has drawn its name.

The editor and founder of Cléo, Kiva Reardon is the staff film writer at TheLoop.ca and has written for publications like Cinema Scope, Reverse Shot, and NOW Magazine (and also, incidentally, Torontoist). Cléo, however, has a different mandate than any of those outlets: first, to allow for a sophisticated and in-depth discussion of film, far beyond a review, through a feminist lens. And then, to provide opportunities for both emerging and established writers to publish their work. Other people involved in the project include managing editor Julia Cooper and contributing editor Mallory Andrews.

The journal will be published online on a quarterly basis, and so far there’s no charge for readers. The inaugural Spring 2013 issue is currently available. The theme of the issue, “flesh,” is explored in various ways. One essay examines body politics and biology in Zero Dark Thirty; another looks at the radical (and often extremely uncomfortable) ways that intimacy is portrayed in 1997′s Gummo and 2012′s Spring Breakers, both written and directed by Harmony Korine. Somewhere between an academic journal and mainstream film review, Cléo’s first issue artfully walks the line between accessibility and in-depth, well-researched inquiry.

The journal is currently accepting submissions for its second issue, the theme of which will be “home.” 200-word abstracts are due by May 1st 2013. As the editors explain: “for our second instalment we are interested in the ways space is rendered both onscreen and off. The topic of home is an opportunity to critically engage with gendered spaces.”

At rep cinemas this week: a legal drama from Quebec, a Hot Docs favourite, and an Chilean political fable about ousting Pinochet.

The Royal (608 College Street)
Tuesday, April 9, 6:00 p.m.

A multiple nominee at the inaugural Canadian Screen Awards, Daniel Grou’s L’affaire Dumont dramatizes the decade-long real-life legal struggle of Michel Dumont, a Quebec grocery store deliveryman and father of two who was convicted of sexually assaulting Danielle Lechasseur in 1990. As the film tells it, Dumont’s troubles began when he was picked from a police lineup. He later earned early parole after a series of appeals based on his accuser’s admission, in a televised interview, that she may not have identified the right man. The rest, as they say, is history, but it’s a tricky sort of history. L’affaire doesn’t have the clear narrative arc we expect of legal melodramas about wrongful imprisonment.  

Though the dominant thread here is the courtroom drama, Grou is more attracted to the personal dynamics of his subject’s life. The film focuses on Dumont’s turbulent relationship with his ex-wife and children, and his burgeoning romance with his second wife Solange (Marilyn Castonguay), who becomes his legal champion. As played by international star Marc-André Grondin (C.R.A.Z.Y.), who turns in a nuanced performance, Dumont is the sort of shy, taciturn man who needs a defender in order to fight for his rights. 

With such a passive presence at the centre of the story, Grou is left to supply his own pyrotechnics. He keeps the camera in constant motion as it tracks along courtrooms and dinner tables. He also shakes up the chronology so that we don’t see Dumont’s alibi for the night of the attack until midway through the film, keeping us in the dark along with Solange.

That ostentation tends to wear after a while (the jumbled timeline makes it hard to track the ebb and flow of both Dumont’s legal battles and his relationships), but Grou has a good eye, nicely evoking his subject’s subsistence lifestyle through details like reused Pepsi bottles and his beat-up pair of tinted glasses. His Quebecois spin on the Dardennes brothers’ realist portraits of the French underclass feels on-point. The film is at its best when subtly implying that Dumont’s trial was determined by gender and class dynamics beyond his control: the masculine smugness of his lawyer damning his client in the eyes of the judge, who can barely contain her distaste at the accused’s witnesses, many of them friends with criminal records for all manner of petty thefts and parole violations.

What definitely doesn’t work is the film’s way of ignoring Lechasseur’s victimhood in order to establish Dumont’s. A late scene shows a polygraph specialist dismantling the credibility of her testimony because of its rhetorical polish, which is ghastly. It’s bad enough that this moment is situated in a montage about Dumont’s rising legal fortunes. But the suggestion that a rape victim’s account can’t be too well-crafted lest it feel contrived is just a hair’s breadth away from victim-blaming. The next scene goes some way toward restoring the victim’s dignity, with a powerful performance by Kathleen Fortin. But, as with the accusation’s effect on Dumont’s life, the damage is already done.

65_RedRoses
Directed by Philip Lyall and Nimisha Mukerji

Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)
Tuesday, April 9, 6:30 p.m.

When 65_RedRoses premiered at Hot Docs in 2009, it marked a happy ending of sorts for its subject, Eva Markvoort, a Victoria theatre student with cystic fibrosis who, after years of being bound to an oxygen tank, was on the verge of starting a new life as a youth counsellor in Toronto. Sadly, while the film wrapped with her successful double-lung transplant in 2007, Markvoort was diagnosed with chronic rejection soon after and passed away the following March. That makes it a very different sort of documentary in retrospect: it’s an earnest case for organ donation as well as a one-woman show that’s now shot through with a haunting reminder of how fragile our bodies are.

Co-directed by Markvoort’s friends Philip Lyall and Nimisha Mukerji, 65_RedRoses is as much about Eva’s titular online identity—a monicker inspired by her childhood mispronunciation of the name of her condition—as her grueling months on the transplant waiting list, a pager by her side. Though Eva is surrounded by a circle of loving family members and well-wishers, she’s most at home in the cystic fibrosis community she reaches through LiveJournal, where her friends include Kina, who’s going through chronic rejection when we meet her, and Meg, a teenager who exacerbates her breathing pains with a cocktail of recreational pharmaceuticals.

Lyall and Mukerji lean too heavily at times on the sitcom potential of the conceit that if the three friends were to meet in real life they’d exchange deadly “superbugs” and harm one another’s health. But the directors lucked out with their subject, a vibrant young woman who’s also a natural performer. Eva’s blog, peppered with her confessional poetry as well as video dispatches from her bed, was a fascinating thing, at once deeply personal and highly constructed, just as her operatic pen name would suggest. 65_RedRoses is enormously moving as an account of the rough days before Eva’s transplant, especially in light of her death so soon after, but it’s most compelling as an accidental star vehicle for an actress whose illness kept her from performing, then paradoxically gave her the lead in her own biography.

No
Directed by Pablo Larraín

TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Showtimes

It’s a strange honour, but No surely qualifies as one of the funniest films about the Pinochet regime. The third entry in Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s trilogy about the dictatorship—shot entirely with analog technology that visually flattens the difference between archival footage from the ’80s and scripted material, making everything seem like a news dispatch from that era—the film tells the story of the 1988 plebiscite on whether to grant the Chilean general another eight-year term as president. It’s told from the perspective of René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal), a young ad man who finds himself in charge of the television campaign for the “No” side of the vote.

René’s portfolio of hyperactive soda ads—which always make time for a mime’s smiling reaction shot—makes him an odd choice for the job, and a seemingly poor fit for the “No” campaign’s brain trust: a broad coalition of leftist politicians, community organizers, and broadcasters, endangered and driven underground by Pinochet’s oppressive rule. The schism between the campaign’s social democratic messaging and René’s tendency to boil things down to buzzwords and jingles—the shades of David Axelrod’s management of the Obama ’08 campaign and its promise of “Hope” and “Change” are surely not accidental—is gripping stuff. It’s also unexpectedly moving, as when the campaign’s banal sloganeering (“Joy Is Coming!”) becomes a populist anthem during a non-violent rally crashed by the police.

Most of all, though, it’s funny, thanks in no small part to Bernal’s buoyant performance as a gentler sort of Don Draper. The actual ad campaign likewise brings some levity to the film. It’s too bizarre to be be untrue.

No is the rare political movie that’s dead serious about its subject without being unduly enamored with itself. Lighthearted but sincere, it strikes roughly the same balance that makes René’s campaign a success.

Still from Mariposa Ancestral Memory.

At rep cinemas this week: Canada’s longest-running Latin film festival, a resurrected cult favourite from the ’80s, and Leos Carax’s endlessly inventive star vehicle.

Jackman Hall AGO (317 Dundas Street West)
Showtimes

Founded in 1995, aluCine (otherwise known as the Toronto Latin Film + Media Arts Festival) has since become one of Canada’s largest and longest-running Latin film festivals. It gives a platform to new and established filmmakers who are based either in Latin America or in Canada.

The festival kicks off its screening series on Wednesday with the Canadian premiere of Juan Andrés Arango’s La Playa DC, which screened in the prestigious Un Certain Regard programme at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. Arango’s feature debut is a coming-of-age story about a pair of Afro-Columbian brothers navigating the streets of Bogota. Scored to hip-hop and pitched somewhere between the observational cinema of the Dardennes brothers and the youthful verve of Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, it’s an auspicious first film, even if its subject matter and tone are a bit familiar.

In addition to celebrating new talents like Arango, the festival’s organizers are also spotlighting the work of more established filmmakers. They will, among other things, be mounting a retrospective of the experimental shorts of Raul Ferrera-Balanquet, which span both video art and dramatic monologue, slipping with ease from Spanish to English. The films, made over the course of more than two decades (up to and including 2013′s Mariposa Ancestral Memory), interrogate the filmmaker’s complex history as a queer Cuban exile and political radical. They’re performance pieces, set to a mixture of archival footage and interviews.

Those seeking more variety than this auteurist sidebar can offer might wish to take in one of the festival’s many anthologies of short films. Saturday afternoon’s programme of Afro-Brazillian documentaries, which examine racial identity in contemporary Brazil, are a nice compliment to both the opening-night film and the Ferrera-Balanquet retrospective, while “Contemporary Visions Canada,” screening on Thursday, offers a range of new work from Latin-Canadian filmmakers.

Miami Connection
Directed by Woo-sang Park and Y.K. Kim

TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Showtimes

You could argue that Miami Connection owes its status as a cult phenomenon mostly to the efforts of Alamo Drafthouse programmer Zack Carlson, who in 2009 first brought the 1987-made martial arts curio to the genre-hungry audience it always deserved. It would be a crime, though, to downplay the efforts of directors Woo-sang Park and Y.K. Kim in bringing this moony-eyed baby to life. Tempting as it is to celebrate the strange fruit of their labour as transcendentally bad storytelling, only the worst cynic could deny their good spirit and their savant-like genius for comic set pieces.

A martial-arts musical about a showdown between Orlando-based Taekwondo-fighting musical artists and some motorcycle-riding ninjas with a grip on the city’s cocaine trade, Miami Connection feels like a bizarre mirror image of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Kim, credited as a grandmaster, stars as the nigh-incomprehensible leader of the good-guy pack, a multiracial synth-rock troupe known as Dragon Sound, whose members devote their off-nights to cleaning up the streets in the name of of nonviolence.

Of course, one might wonder how that message squares with Dragon Sound’s preferred method of peacekeeping: systematically maiming their enemies. But it’s a testament to the directors’ and stars’ guilelessness and lightness of tone that you never really ask the question. More than anything, this is a sweet movie with a sublime soundtrack, including the standout cut, a mind-numbingly repetitive but infectious anthem about the protagonists’ abiding friendship, which sticks “through thick and thin”—and presumably also through ninja offensives. It’s a song about loyalty, which is all too fitting given the kind of sincere devotion the film inspires among its followers.

Holy Motors
Directed by Leos Carax

Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex Avenue)
Friday, March 29, 7:00 p.m., FREE

The key to Leos Carax’s wickedly smart and genial Holy Motors might be a throwaway moment at the start of its most sobering scene. Frequent Carax collaborator Denis Lavant plays a depressed single father collecting his sullen daughter from a party. As he pulls up to the apartment, he’s greeted by the sounds of Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” pulsing from the window, an odd choice for a Parisian teen dance party, but an appropriate one for the film, which costars Minogue as a seasoned performer nostalgic for the old parts she’s played.

Though it scans as a joke, that sly callback to Minogue’s career (despite the fact that she isn’t, ostensibly, playing herself) is central to Carax’s project—a warm tribute to actors and to the real moments of tenderness couched in every unreal performance they pull off. Lavant, it should be explained, isn’t playing the father so much as a man (identified only as Monsieur Oscar) who’s tasked with playing him. Oscar is something like a hybrid between a professional actor and a secret agent: based in a limo that roams the streets of Paris at night, he gets his assignments in a manilla envelope, then drives off to play whatever small-time crook, banker, or uncouth imp the situation demands. As the Minogue reference suggests, though, on some level Lavant is also playing himself, an actor of great range in a particular body that’s carried along with him to every performance, rather like the titular car.

Holy Motors will be most enjoyable to viewers who have a passing familiarity with Lavant’s prior work, particularly his lithe, full-bodied performances in Carax’s Mauvais sang and Claire Denis’s Beau travail. But the manic energy of the lighter segments and the deep melancholy of Oscar’s last few assignments, which bring him ever closer to his natural persona (or so we think), can be appreciated by anyone who’s ever marvelled at the sheer amount of roles they’ve inhabited over the years—which is to say, anyone.

Hot Docs 2013
Multiple venues
April 25 to May 5
Individual tickets $14.60 ($6.20 for late-night screenings)

“Hot Docs is no longer a teenager.” That’s how Hot Docs Director of Programming Charlotte Cook characterizes this year’s edition of the festival, which begins on April 25. It’s an apt analogy, both because Hot Docs is now in its 20th season and because of the documentary fest’s rapid expansion and maturation into a Toronto cultural juggernaut.

This year’s Hot Docs lineup, announced at a press conference earlier today, features over 200 films (culled from a record number of submissions, including over 300 from Canada alone), ranging from shorts to medium- and full-length features. The proceedings will kick off on opening night with The Manor, a portrait of director Shawney Cohen’s family business: a strip club in Guelph, purchased by his father 30 years ago. Cohen told reporters this morning, without a trace of irony, that “there’s a beautiful message in this story.”

The rest of the Hot Docs program isn’t wanting for engaging subject matter, either. Not interested in extreme geographers and biologists in the Arctic (Expedition to the Edge of the World)? Perhaps stunt bikers in Baltimore might be more your speed (12 O’Clock Boys). If you require celebrity content in your provocation, there’s James Franco and Travis Mathews’ imagining of the deleted material from William Friedkin’s Cruising (Interior. Leather Bar.).

For the intellectual set, the trio of films making up this year’s Big Ideas series should provide more than adequate conversation fodder. Films focused on women’s-rights scholar Anita Hill (Anita), humanitarian/retired general Roméo Dallaire (Fight Like Soldiers, Die Like Children) and controversial scientists Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss (The Unbelievers) will, in all three cases, be accompanied by appearances from their subjects.

For full details on the Hot Docs lineup and schedule, head over to the official website. This year’s edition runs to May 5. For anyone looking to get their fest on early, the Hot Docs 20 series, which honors past favorites from previous editions, runs almost nightly at the Bloor Cinema until the fest begins, starting with a screening of Manufacturing Consent this Sunday, March 24, and culminating in an “audience choice” selection, screening on April 24.

At rep cinemas this week: A visionary look at commercial fishing, an experimental homage to novelist W.G. Sebald, and a Canadian film festival.

Leviathan
Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Showtimes

It’s no accident that Leviathan, easily the scariest movie about fish since Jaws, sets up shop in the same waters where Ahab famously started his hunt for Moby Dick. Yet where Herman Melville’s novel derives much of its sublime horror from the ghostly white whale, rarely seen but seemingly everywhere at once, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s radical documentary turns to the less specific threat of the sea itself, embedding itself in the monstrous, ever-churning systems involved in deep-sea fishing.

Castaing-Taylor and Paravel are colleagues at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, and Leviathan is the fruit of their labour, a visceral dissection of the lives of both the fishermen and the catch. Documentaries about procedure tend to take a long view, but this is as close to cubism as the genre gets. The directors pin dozens of lightweight cameras to different parts of the boat, including the fishermen’s bodies. Sometimes, the tiny cams are even left to slosh indiscriminately beneath the nets of a fresh catch, sliding up against the bulging eyes of the dead. That eccentric approach yields some of the most demented and striking nature footage you’ll see in this lifetime, including a pair of gorgeous and terrifying night raids by ravenous seagulls, glimpsed from the point of view of their dinner.

Some will no doubt gripe that Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s method cedes authorial intention to the sea, effectively putting the film in the hands of a surging, blood-stained tide. But that’s precisely the point: Leviathan is ultimately a kind of ghost story told from the perspective of the natural world that we’ve chopped and gutted to our specifications. Without uttering a single word, it reminds us that the sea has plenty of muscle, ready to be flexed whenever we get too big for our britches.

Patience (After Sebald)
Directed by Grant Gee

TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Thursday, March 21, 6:30 p.m.

Midway through Patience (After Sebald), Grant Gee’s experimental documentary homage to W.G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn, a critic points out that for the author, meandering without intention was a moral imperative: it was the only real way for him to begin processing the catastrophic losses that marked his historical moment. Both a portrait of the author and a light exegesis of his novel—pitched “after” Sebald quite literally, given his sudden death in a 2001 car accident—Gee’s film is likewise an illuminating stroll in no particular direction, as well as a playful meditation on the pleasures of mapping alien territory as one ambles through it.

Published in 1995, Sebald’s novel describes a walking tour through Suffolk, which becomes an erudite and moving reflection on history and memory—not to mention, a bit more unexpectedly, a treatise on silkworm cultivation. Gee retraces Sebald’s steps through black-and-white 16mm photography of the countryside, and also through a range of hushed talking-head interviews from scholars and enthusiasts like novelist Rick Moody.

With his background in music videos and feauture-length documentaries on prickly subjects—Meeting People Is Easy captured Thom Yorke on the last leg of Radiohead’s OK Computer tour—Gee is well-suited to this imagistic approach to a difficult text. He never stoops to heavy-handed psychological explanations for Sebald’s delicate sadness or European temperament, and he shies away from plot summary as much as he can. That might make the film near impenetrable for those coming at Sebald’s work for the first time, but even novices should respond to the deep melancholy strain running through this psychogeographic walking tour

Patience (After Sebald) screens as part of TIFF Cinematheque’s Free Screen programme.

Canadian Film Fest 2013
Various directors

The Royal (608 College Street)
March 20 to 23

Following a three-year hiatus between 2008 and 2011, the Canadian Film Fest this week returns to The Royal for its seventh installment. As its name suggests, the CFF serves as a spotlight for Canuck-crafted cinema, and this year’s edition boasts a lineup of six features and 18 shorts from a selection of promising homegrown filmmakers.

Wednesday night’s curtain-raiser is Rouge Sang (The Storm Within), the debut feature from Martin Doepner, who cut his teeth as an assistant director on projects as varied as 300, The Fountain, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Given the diversity of Doepner’s previous work, it’s perhaps unsurprising that his first self-helmed effort is something of a mashup, combining elements of historical drama with paranoid thrills and claustrophobic, cabin-in-the-woods horror. And while his story—of a habitante settler (Isabelle Guérard) compelled to shelter a squad of menacing Redcoats—suffers from some curious casting and similarly questionable plotting, Doepner deserves credit for the sheer chutzpah of his Heritage-Minute-meets-Midnight-Madness conceit.

More successful is Friday evening’s feature, The Disappeared, from award-winning author-turned-filmmaker Shandi Mitchell. An account of six men adrift in the North Atlantic and their increasingly desperate struggle against exhaustion and the elements, her spare, intimate narrative is a welcome humanist counterpoint to the laboured spiritualism of fellow high-seas survival flick Life of Pi. And while it lacks the CGI pyrotechnics of Ang Lee’s visual-effects Oscar winner, The Disappeared amply compensates with compelling performances from a cast of talented character actors, including east-coast natives Brian Downey and Shawn Doyle. It also benefits from Christopher Porter’s immersive cinematography, captured entirely on location on the open ocean.

Other notable programming initiatives at this year’s CFF include a series of workshops and discussion panels, open to industry pros and the public alike. Sessions are scheduled throughout the festival, but the highlights will be Wednesday’s masterclass with Toronto-based director Warren Sonoda, and Thursday afternoon’s roundtable addressing the state of the Canadian film industry, moderated by film critic Richard Crouse, and featuring local filmmaker Ed Gass-Donnelly (The Last Exorcism Part II, Small Town Murder Songs), as well as TIFF Canadian programmer Steve Gravestock.

The 85th Academy Awards are on Sunday, and while they’ll probably be worth watching just for the sake of hearing host Seth MacFarlane do all the voices from Family Guy, you’ll probably get more out of the broadcast if you’ve actually seen a handful of the films that are up for awards. Today and tomorrow are your last opportunities to catch this year’s Best Picture nominees in theatres, but which ones should you skip? Links to our reviews of all of them (except Les Misérables, which we somehow never got around to seeing—though you can check out the trailer, above) are after the jump.

DJANGO UNCHAINED DIRECTED BY QUENTIN TARANTINO Showtimes

LINCOLN DIRECTED BY STEVEN SPIELBERG Showtimes

AMOUR DIRECTED BY MICHAEL HANEKE Showtimes

LIFE OF PI DIRECTED BY ANG LEE Showtimes

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK DIRECTED BY DAVID O. RUSSELL Showtimes

ZERO DARK THIRTY DIRECTED BY KATHRYN BIGELOW Showtimes

ARGO DIRECTED BY BEN AFFLECK Showtimes

BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD DIRECTED BY BENH ZEITLIN Showtimes