
The Toronto International Film Festival is a lot of things. If you’re a starfucking photographer, this is where you can meet all of the A-List celebrities you can possibly stalk. If you’re a regular person with a healthy love of film, however, it provides an awesome experience to cram your brain with all of the cinema that will be sparking conversations and making headlines over the next 12 months. We soaked in as much TIFF as we possibly could, so we decided we’d share our favourite films with you wonderful people, in case you’d like to trust our awesome taste in stuff.
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The Look of SilenceJoshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence is a companion piece to 2013’s The Act of Killing; a horrifying documentary about the Indonesian genocide, which wiped out one million communists, Chinese immigrants, political dissidents, and intellectuals between 1965-1966.In Oppenheimer’s first doc on the subject, the Danish filmmaker travels to Indonesia to meet the military perpetrators of the genocide, who are still in power. In The Look of Silence, Joshua accompanies Adi, an Indonesian man whose older brother was brutally murdered in the cleansing, to meet some of the perpetrators himself, and ask them extremely personal and heart-shattering questions that evoke an emotional range of discomfort, embarrassment, anger, and shaky boastfulness in his murderous subjects.Both The Look of SIlence and The Act of Killing are incredibly well-crafted documentaries that are as difficult to watch as they are expertly done. For the TIFF premiere of The Look of Silence, Joshua arrived with Adi, who was only able to make it through one of the Q&A questions before he had a breakdown. Having to go through the experience of confronting your brother’s killers, on camera, then travel around the world showcasing your work to strangers, when you cannot even speak English, must be an unspeakably traumatizing process.When I asked Joshua Oppenheimer about Adi (after Joshua mentioned he himself could never return to Indonesia safely after releasing The Look of Silence), to find out whether or not Adi can safely live in Indonesia, Oppenheimer explained that he helped facilitate for Adi’s family to move to another Indonesian community, thousands of kilometres away from his home, to a community of human rights activists and filmmakers. Oppenehimer explained that on certain shoots, they would have two getaway cars waiting, and that Adi would rarely carry identification in case they were threatened, hurt, or detained.
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Top FiveChris Rock’s latest directorial endeavour is pure entertainment gold. Not only is Top Five littered with extraordinary cameos, the likes of which we won’t spoil for you here, but it’s co-produced by Kanye West and Jay Z. Their contribution is unclear, but given that the instrumental for “Black Guys in Paris” plays throughout the film, they may have just received a credit in exchange for free music licensing.
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