Female Film Critics 24/375
Filmmaker Ana García Blaya looks to her own childhood for inspiration for this semi-autobiographical family drama defined by its title. The divorced couple at its center—ne’er-do-well, middle-aged punk rocker Gustavo (Javier Drolas) and ex Ceci (Jazmin Stuart)—mean well. Their relationship is amicable enough, but an economic downturn in Argentina has Ceci and her new husband looking toward greener pastures in Uruguay.
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The achievements of award-winning Argentine-British filmmaker and artist Jessica Sarah Rinland make her a perfect fit for the Toronto International Film Festival’s experimental strand, Wavelengths. This year, her fascinating documentary Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Each Other explored questions about the relationship between original and imitation, and how this relates in both practical and conceptual terms to the field of museum conservation and beyond.
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Like so much at festivals of TIFF’s scale, the real treasures are often from filmmakers from around the world whose names are comparatively new, and this is certainly the case with this year’s women-made shorts. There was no lack of women filmmakers in the strand, with 56% of the Short Cuts program this year directed by women.
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Acclaimed Brazilian actress Regina Casé—a Special Grand Jury prize winner at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival for her work in The Second Mother—delivers a richly empathetic and immensely likeable portrait of a striver whose heart is as big as her ambition in Sandra Kogut’s diverting drama.
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One of the most original, honest and captivating films of the year, in her accomplished feature debut Chiara Malta throws orthodox approaches to the biopic into complete disarray as she privileges our own subjective relationship to the movies and those in them under the microscope.
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As the only woman-directed film in TIFF’s iconic Midnight Madness program in 2019, the world premiere of Saint Maud demonstrates British director and screenwriter Rose Glass’s flair for horror with this extraordinarily powerful feature film debut.
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Among the nearly 250 movies, from Hollywood blockbusters to independent foreign films, that screened at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, one of my favorites was Judy, anchored by an astonishing performance by Renee Zellweger. In her first musical performance since Chicago, Zellweger delivers a comeback role for the ages that puts her at the front of this year’s best actress Oscar race.
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While it’s far too easy to get swept up in the big name, red carpet glitz of a festival the scale of the Toronto International Film Festival, the real treasures are often tucked away beyond the limelight. As with last year, the Festival’s Discovery program whose mission is to identify and champion “directors to watch” as “the future of world cinema” in 2019 again provided a home for some of the festival’s most exciting movies.
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With its world premiere at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, the breathtaking success of Radioactive hinges on two extraordinary women. One, of course, is the film’s subject, the famous French scientist Marie Curie who was not merely the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, but the only person to win it twice in two different arenas of scientific study. The second is the film’s director, French-Iranian polymath Marjane Satrapi.
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Strong performances from a stellar ensemble anchor Human Capital, an adult drama about decisions made and consequences suffered, told from the perspectives of several characters from two different families — one wealthy, one not — in upstate New York.
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