Despite the tiredness it can generate, there is always one obvious advantage to participating in a major film festival, such as the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). By watching so many movies by so many first-time directors almost back-to-back, it is possible to experiment with a kind of rush, delivering to the eyes a comprehensive and unfiltered look at the preoccupations, the worries, the obsessions of the new auteurs. It mirrors where the cinema is, for better or worse, in 2024. Of course, each work is different, but you can always feel a unity of purpose linked to the fears and the unanswered questions defining a specific generation, talking here through the medium of movies. The Discovery section of this year’s TIFF is a place as good as any, and probably better, to seize this undefined image to make sense of it.
At first, what is presented is quite regular, even predictable.
Toxic masculinity, which has become a fixture of movies of all kinds (the Cannes selection is a case in point), is present, as it should, with some welcomed nuance, like in the Greek drama Meat (Dimitris Nakos, Greece 2024), which follows the consequences of a single act of gratuitous violence. It is apprehended in the Fipresci winner, Mother Mother (K’naan Warsame, Somalia, 2024), as the backdrop of the tragedy that falls on the story’s heroine. It’s present in Saba (Maksud Hossein, Bangladesh, 2024), or The Courageous (Jasmin Gordon, Switzerland, 2024), simply by the environment crushing the women at the heart of the movie or by the absentee fathers that are legion in those stories. But the silver thread running through the selection is something new that speaks to the current state of the world, plagued by wars and natural disasters. Trauma is at the heart of many pictures shown at this year’s TIFF. They’re here, always present but, strangely, never indeed seen.
In U Are the Universe (Pavlo Ostrikov, Ukraine/Belgium, 2024), the end of the world is the inaugural event of the whole tale, plunging the hero into absolute loneliness, stuck in space. The death of the son in Mother Mother, the past wounds in Village Keeper (Karen Chapman, Canada, 2024), the personal and historical tragedies of the wounded woman named Aberdeen (Ryan Cooper, Eva Thomas, Canada, 2024), and the First Nation through her in the movie of the same name. All those events create a world filled with guilt and dread, with the ever-present idea of a disaster looming in the shadow, ready to appear at any moment. There is then a necessary therapeutic virtue to almost all these visions. They are all about survival. Not so much in a physical sense but more a psychological one. The world is what it is, and the young generation of filmmakers seems lucid about its state and more concerned about the consequence of the disaster rather than any avoidance of it. How to live with it? How do we live with war, trauma, and violence? How do you survive and even feel joy again? As a snapshot of the state of mind of the young cinema in 2024, the image is pretty straightforward. The battles for a better world are lost, the healing is now the main war.
By Pierre-Simon Gutman
Edited by Anne-Christine Loranger
© FIPRESCI 2024