culture
The 5th Biennial Toronto International Deaf Film and Arts Festival Has Its Day
The singular fest introduces important works by and about Deaf, hard of hearing, and Deaf-blind people.
Still from The Tribe.
In a city rife with mini film festivals that seem at times to be scavenging over TIFF’s leftovers rather than carving out an identity for themselves, the Toronto International Deaf Film and Arts Festival manages to stand out from the pack. Since 2006, the festival, which the organizers claim is one of the fastest growing Deaf film festivals in the world, has served as not just Toronto but also Canada’s flagship venue for films made by and in collaboration with Deaf, hard of hearing, and Deaf-blind people.
The fest kicks off on Thursday with a gala presentation of Mathias Schaefer’s documentary The Wall, which screens at the Royal. Co-presented by the Goethe Institut,the film follows seven subjects as they give an account of their lives before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The film takes a particular interest in how the Berlin Wall bifurcated the Deaf community, and how its fall necessitated a tentative reconciliation between both sides.
On Friday night, the Royal is also screening Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe ahead of its June run at TIFF Bell Lightbox. A critical darling at Cannes last year, the film follows wayward teen Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko) as he settles into his new Deaf boarding school, an assimilation that puts Joshua Jackson’s bumpy ride in The Skulls’ thinly veiled Yale to shame. The school turns out to be a den of scum and villainy to rival Mos Eisley, and Sergey soon finds his moral code compromised amidst his burgeoning relationship with one of the tribe’s escorts. The Tribe is brutal stuff, composed of punishingly long, unsubtitled takes that deliberately seek to alienate, but it earns its provocation, its total reliance on sign language forcing viewers to attend to bodies and gestures in startling ways.
The festival runs from May 28 to May 31, with screenings at the Royal and the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. Except for The Tribe, which Slaboshpytskiy has deliberately left untranslated for maximum impact, all films are subtitled, and will have ASL-English interpreters, International Sign language interpreters, and Quebec Sign language interpreters on hand. For a complete list of screening dates and times, visit the festival’s website.