Results tagged “filmfestivals”

The Worldwide Short Film Festival has two things perpetually working against it. One, any feature-length program of short films, in any context, is almost necessarily going to be a mixed bag; there will be one or two works of sustained brilliance, two or three self-satisfied efforts that try your patience despite their limited lengths, and then a handful of other interesting but mostly unremarkable entries. Two, the WSFF—this year running June 16–21—always comes at the end of Toronto's busy spring festival season, following Images (early April), Sprockets (mid-April), Toronto Jewish (late April), Hot Docs (early May), and Inside Out (mid-May); it's sometimes received as an afterthought in the scheme of things.

ART: Take a trip to another world, experience its history, and be back in time for last call. Artist Andrew Wilson's first solo exhibition, "A World's History," features sketches and paintings of imagined landscapes. Think of it as Richard Scarry's "Busy Busy World" meets David Cronenberg, on magic mushrooms. Magic Pony (649 Queen Street West), 7–10 p.m., FREE, exhibition runs until November 30.

Reel Asian is a festival that, we must admit, we've never made it out to before. Along with a couple of the other fall festivals (imagineNATIVE, Planet in Focus), we make a point of browsing the lineup for something worth making an appointment to see and then, whether we find something or not, inevitably forget about it. Hopefully, this time will be different. It has to be. Reel Asian, entering its twelfth year, has now reached the level of institutional maturity at which it possesses the resources to branch out and appeal to people outside of its traditional constituency.

It's an interesting week for film, with direct competition between two kinds of films—one that wants to make you feel like a kid again by bludgeoning you with special effects and nostalgic licence, and another that wants to make you feel like a kid again by simply recalling, well, what it was to be a kid.

When we ran our Sprockets preview last week, we tried to give the piece a theme, and we couldn’t stick to it. In all honesty, we probably overstretched ourselves in trying to give a post on a children’s film festival a theme any grander than "children’s films," and when you get down to it, why bother?