TIFF15 REVIEW: Ninth Floor [2016]

“The individuals were all part of a mosaic” The 1969 Sir George Williams Affair seems like something we should all know about. It occurred only a year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and proves a defining moment in race relations throughout Canada, yet it’s taken over four decades for someone to document what happened during its fourteen-day student demonstration of civil disobedience. The importance increases even further when you think about where it happened—our neighbor’s up north with a reputation of open arms and tolerance to which we couldn’t…

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TIFF15 REVIEW: Laila Acharon [One Last Night] [2015]

“I wish we could stay like this forever” Despite many aging punk rockers going strong—or maybe they’re the punk poppers—the punk-rock game is for the young. It’s easy to be anti-establishment and anarchist when life has yet to drag you into its tractor beam of responsibility. To party all night and not worry about the consequences an evening in jail brings isn’t something you can sustain into your late-twenties when life replaces fun. Noa (Michal Korman) understands this because she finds herself at a crossroads between following love for love’s…

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TIFF15 REVIEW: Wolkaan [2015]

“Do you remember the rest of the poem?” Writer/director Bahar Noorizadeh had this to say about her latest experimental short Wolkaan on its Kickstarter page: “As an immigrant from Iran, I am facing the slow and painful loss of language and culture from my intimate life on a daily basis. I feel a connection in this with the city of Tehran itself. Tehran is a forgetful city, always relying on the present moment and not withholding to its past. Through an apocalypse I want to give Tehran the opportunity to…

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TIFF15 REVIEW: Quelques secondes [A Few Seconds] [2015]

“I don’t want him to have his face” It starts with sex—violent sex. Out of context you don’t quite know the exact circumstances, but everything makes sense once you hear Zenib’s (Charlotte Bartocci) voice against starkly quiet images of the Parisian hosting center where she resides. Raped and left with a child she’s begun to love, Zenib prays he will look like her so as not to become one more remembrance of an assailant that haunts her dreams. This group of haunted souls that has become her friends helps, providing…

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