TIFF20 REVIEW: Akilla’s Escape [2020]

The bigger you get, the less you touch. To be born a prince is sometimes to be born a slave. Your birthright becomes your fate and there can be no deviation from it. Your duty is as much a part of your identity as your name because it’s the filter through which everyone sees you. And that goes for good and ill—for kingdoms and cartels. It’s why a general in the Jamaican drug trade’s Garrison Army out of New York City (Ronnie Rowe‘s Clinton Brown) named his son Akilla (Thamela…

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TIFF12 REVIEW: 2012 Short Cuts Canada Programmes

Programme 1 “So a TV killed your father” What do you get when you mix the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the ancient metallurgical science of alchemy, and the namesake of inventor Philo Farnsworth? The answer is Connor Gaston‘s short film Bardo Light—titled for the bright glow none of us can avoid at the end of our lives. Told via the police interrogation of the younger Farnsworth (Shaan Rahman) after his adopted father (Bill Gaston) was found suffocated to death in their cabin, we quickly learn of successful experiments using…

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