The Australian Dream (Daniel Gordon, Australia/UK) — TIFF Docs
By Beatrice Loayza In Cinema Scope Online, TIFF 2019
By Beatrice Loayza It's no coincidence that the title of Daniel Gordon's documentary portrait of Australian footballer Adam Goodes echoes the concept of the "American Dream": after all, the history of Australia, like that of the United States, is a story of colonization and of the violence and racism that both fuelled it and still [...]
Africa (Oren Gerner, Israel) — Discovery
By Beatrice Loayza The halcyon days of a recent vacation to Namibia linger in the mind of retiree and former engineer Meir (Meir Gerner), the grumbling 68-year-old father of the filmmaker whose depressingly impotent mad scramble to regain purpose in life is the subject of this debut feature. Working in the space between fiction and [...]
The Fever (Maya Da-Rin, Brazil/France/Germany) — Wavelengths
By Beatrice Loayza In Brazilian documentarian Maya Da-Rin's first feature film, an indigenous man, Justino (Regis Myrupu, weathered but warm) must reckon with his daughter's impending departure to med school. A recent widower, Justino works as a cargo port watchman while his daughter, Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto), juggles several jobs at local clinics. Their lives are [...]
Corpus Christi (Jan Komasa, Poland/France) — Contemporary World Cinema
By Beatrice Loayza Jan Komasa does redemption à la Paul Schrader in this tale of the sacred and the profane, which follows a 20-year-old ex-con, Daniel (Bartosz Bielenia), who poses as a priest in a small Polish town. While some presumably symbolic moments (a burning pyre, a climactic disrobing) register as self-administered profundity, Corpus Christi [...]
Coppers (Alan Zweig, Canada) — TIFF Docs The Audition (Ina Weisse, Germany/France) — Discovery