There’s a fine line between close friendships and toxic ones, and for teenage girls, there’s perhaps an even finer one between sapphic love and best friends. Melanie Laurent’s Breathe joins the ranks of such female-centric and female-directed films as Ginger and Rosa and Me Without You, which explore when two female best friends can become poisonous to […]
Essays
TIFF15 shorts showcase emerging female directors
According to the Data Visualization firm Silk, only 27% of the films screening at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival — 69 of the 400+ films — were directed by women. The numbers get worse if you exclude short films entirely. Worse, only 9% of the films in TIFF’s Discovery section, a program dedicated to […]
TIFF15: Unearthing the dead past in Demon
There’s a troubling absence in Marcin Wrona’s Demon: there are very few Jews in this adaptation of a Jewish story. Protagonist Piotr (Itay Tiran) is a gentile, his intended bride (Agnieszka Zulewska) is a gentile, and all the people in their nameless Polish town are gentiles, too. There are only two Jews in the entire […]
TIFF15: Young love and dying tradition in Song of Songs
Eva Neymann imbues ordinary moments and domestic tasks with a magical quality. Yet this sense of wonder is as fragile as shtetl life itself. Read our coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival.
A weekend with women at TIFF15: Saturday Sept. 19
The Seventh Row presents a guide to spending your weekend immersed in films directed by women in our end-of-TIFF series #AWeekendWithWomen (named after #AYearWithWomen because a weekend is a good start). Here’s how we suggest you spend your Saturday. 9:15 a.m. Semana Santa at Scotiabank 9 (85 mins) — Tickets available OR 10 a.m. Body […]
A weekend with women at TIFF15: Friday Sept. 18
As we head into the final weekend of TIFF, we at Seventh Row suggest that you take a Weekend with Women: spend the next 3 days seeing exclusively films directed by women. If you can’t swing that, make sure you add at least some of our highly recommended films (in purple) to your viewing schedule. […]