culture
Diverse, Thought-Provoking, and Free of Charge: Regent Park Film Festival 2014
The festival, devoted to Toronto's inner-city communities, celebrates its 12th year with emerging local talents as well as Canadian and international hits.
Still from Rhymes for Young Ghouls.
Regent Park Film Festival
Regent Park Film Festival Micro-Space at Daniels Spectrum (585 Dundas Street East)
November 19-22
Free
Anyone frozen out by the prohibitive pricing of most of Toronto’s cultural events ought to check out the Regent Park Film Festival, a free multicultural spotlight on local and international films that explore some of the most relevant issues faced by the city’s diverse inner-city communities. Entering its 12th year, the fest spotlights emerging local talents whose work pushes up against racist and classist stereotypical images of marginalized communities and offers special screenings of more established hits from recent years—films that don’t necessarily come out of Regent Park but speak to it.
Still from Still.
The festival kicks off on Wednesday with a program called NEXT: Emerging Directors Spotlight, a presentation of shorts from four local directors aged 26 and under, one of whom will emerge with the RBC Emerging Directors prize. We were struck by the aesthetic and thematic diversity of the slate, which ranges from Richard Fung’s The Journey, a nonfiction portrait of how art is central to the lives of Regent Park’s residents, to Slater Jewell-Kemker’s Still (well-received at TIFF), a low-key thriller about a young woman whose efforts to extricate herself from an abusive relationship put her in a tough spot with her newly discovered doppelgänger. The screening is paired with a panel discussion on emerging filmmakers and methods of exhibition with TIFF Artistic Director Cameron Bailey and celebrated First Nations documentarian Alanis Obomsawin.
Still from Black Men Loving.
The mixed nature of the shorts program is reflective of the rest of the festival’s offerings. On the non-fiction side, we were impressed by the complexity of Mark Magnusson’s Hope Heights, which allows a number of Lawrence Heights residents, mostly teachers and educators, to combat outside impressions that the priority neighbourhood is a hopeless place, or as one subject memorably puts it, a place peopled by stereotypical “Omar from The Wire types.” At times, the film leans a bit heavily on its own model minority stereotypes, but to Magnusson’s credit, he’s assembled a rich cast of characters who put one another’s experiences into perspective. We’re also curious about Ella Cooper’s Black Men Loving, which was commissioned by the festival. A multidisciplinary artist who has worked in gallery installations and beyond, Cooper turns to documentary to dispel common media representations of black fathers, attempting to offer a more nuanced glimpse into their lives through a series of intimate portraits.
Still from Wadjda.
The festival’s scripted offerings stray a bit from this local focus, but nevertheless showcase stories that reflect the diverse transnational backgrounds of Regent Park. First up is Jeff Barnaby’s award-winning Rhymes for Young Ghouls, an audience and critical favourite among the Canadian titles at last year’s edition of TIFF. Barnaby’s impressive and somewhat pulpy feature debut follows Aila (Devery Jacobs), a scrappy 15-year-old who sells pot and fights to stay out of residential school in the mid-1970s. Later in the week, the festival screens the equally acclaimed Wadjda, Haifaa Al Mansour’s film about an enterprising young woman (Waad Mohammed) who resists the social expectations placed upon her as a girl in her conservative Saudi Arabian milieu. The film is a nice riff on Vittorio De Sica’s neo-realist masterpiece The Bicycle Thief. It can also claim to be both the first film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia and the first Saudi feature directed by a woman.
For more information on the festival, including its school programs and workshops, visit the RPFF website.