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Toronto International Film Festival
Toronto, Ontaro, Canada
September 9-18, 1999
It is best to arrive at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) with a careful road map that includes room for diversion. My map this year took me to the Planet Africa program with detours into documentary, experimental work and a few tailgate picnics of international cinema.
Planet Africa was programmed again this year by British curator and writer June Givanni, and one of her revelations was that hardy and mutant blossoms are rising from the scorched earth of apartheid. The South African series "SA Short and Curlies," financed primarily by Film Four (UK) and the South Africa Broadcasting Corporation, showed the exciting directions in which film and television are moving in the Mandela era. Three selections from the series depicted a brutal and brutalized nation, in styles utterly devoid of sentiment. All share searing performances and startling cinematography. If this flowering of uncompromised vision is permitted to continue, South Africa will have a world-class cinema. Interestingly, two of the films dealt with the violence that haunts white South Africans. In Lucky Day (1999) by Brian Tilley, a black day laborer is hired by a white farmer for what turns out to be a grisly job: to absolve the latter of the crime of murdering his child by witnessing his suicide. Tactful editing makes Lucky Day not sensationalist but deeply eerie. Husk (1998) by Jeremy Handler shows the unique inertia of violence. In a desolate country village, a young woman's father is so drunk and useless that she must use her own wit, and her pet viper, to corner and kill a slimy debt collector. Intercut with this nasty transaction is a scene of her father at a bar, flipping coins into a bottle. The most stomach-churning of these three powerful shorts, Portrait of a Young Man Drowning (1999) by Teboho Mahlatsi, takes place in a South African township scarred by intercommunal violence. The young man of the title is a vicious killer, but, even though the members of the township fear his violent nature, they use it to their advantage by attempting to make him kill an accused rapist, running him out of town when he refuses. The unnerving cinematography by Dewald Aukema conveys...