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In this episode of the TIFF 2024 podcast, Alex discusses three sports films for people who don’t like sports films from around the world: Julie Keeps Quiet, The Swedish Torpedo, and My Sunshine.
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Alex Heeney reviews Belgian filmmaker Leonardo van Dijl’s tennis-set film Julie Keeps Quiet about a teenage girl re-learning the importance of boundaries after a possible sexual assault.
Listen to our TIFF 2024 podcast on sports films — out Saturday — that aren’t about sports for a more detailed discussion fo the film. Subscribe to the podcast to stay updated
Read all of our TIFF 2024 coverage.
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Leonardo van Dijl’s Cannes Critics’ Week highlight, Julie Keeps Quiet, is a thoughtful character study about a teenage tennis athlete coping with the aftermath of a sexual abuse scandal from her coach. The eponymous Julie spends the film in a very internal world, removed from her surroundings; van Dijl uses shallow focus and deep frames to emphasize this. The star tennis player at her local tennis club, she already feels alienated as the only person in the club who isn’t paying her way through. When a former student of her coach dies by suicide, an investigation begins into the coach’s culpability.
The film is about a girl coping with what happens when boundaries have been so irreparably breached that you don’t even know what is appropriate anymore. Tennis, with its carefully outlined court and rules about what is in and out of bounds, is an excellent metaphor for this. Van Dijl is conscious of when sounds, like an unseen phone alert, and people breach the frame or push across it into another person’s space. Van Dijl directed Julie Keeps Quiet with an incredible formal precision, favouring carefully blocked still frames. One particularly tense scene finds two characters seated across from each other at a table, and the choreography is all in where their hands are.
Unlike other stories about adults inappropriately crossing boundaries with children, like Una and Slalom, Van Dijl models what good boundaries look like in the form of Julie’s replacement coach. As viewers, we are wary whenever he shares a frame with her: will he come too close? But there’s a casualness to his body language, an understanding of what’s appropriate when and where, and how he quietly but respectfully enforces this while ensuring he respects Julie’s boundaries. It’s a hopeful addition that renders Julie Keeps Quiet more than just an excavation of trauma but of the possibilities for moving forward.
The title Julie Keeps Quiet reminds me of the oppositely titled The Screaming Man, a film in which nobody actually screams — except on the inside. From the beginning, we sense that Julie has a secret, and it’s true that she never explicitly shares it. But she repeatedly hints at it to the people around her she trusts in ways she knows they couldn’t have missed. The script by Leonardo van Dijl and Ruth Becqueart is very thoughtful about how we talk around difficult subjects, communicating with body language and adjacent truths.
Unlike the hit tennis film of the year, Challengers, Julie Keeps Quiet stars a real teenage tennis athlete (Tessa Van den Broeck). As a story about bodies and people pushing their bodies, a non-professional actor who looks the part — in a way only possible from years of training — helps immensely. The performance feels very much crafted by van Dijl’s directorial eye, as the frame usually prioritizes his mise en scène over her reactions, and she’s only asked to play one note. Still, Van den Broeck has some incredible moments.
Introducing…our TIFF 2024 podcast season! Alex Heeney explains why this season is for you, even if you aren’t attending, and what to expect from our themed episodes and TIFF coverage.
Get exclusive access to our entire podcast archive, members’ only episodes, and early access to new podcast seasons.
Alex Heeney reviews Mahdi Fleifel’s films To a Land Unknown about Palestinian refugees stuck in limbo in Athens, trying to go to Europe. To a Land Unknown is one of the best sales titles at TIFF 2024./p>
Listen to our TIFF 2024 podcast on Palestinian films — out Friday — that aren’t about sports for a more detailed discussion fo the film. Subscribe to the podcast to stay updated
Read all of our TIFF 2024 coverage.
Click here to sign up for the Seventh Row Newsletter.
Athens becomes a hellish limbo for Palestinian refugees who have left the refugee camps behind in search of an ever-elusive passage into Europe for a new life. Based on the world exiled Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel encountered while making his earlier documentaries in Athens, the fictional To a Land Unknown wears its origins on its sleeve with its cinema-verité shooting style.
To a Land Unknown follows two cousins – Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (skateboarder and first-time actor Aram Sabbah) – dreaming of a new life. Chatila has left his wife and son in a Lebanese refugee camp to keep his drug-addict cousin on the straight and narrow and find their next step. They’ve been stranded in Athens for so long that the city isn’t even an attractive tourist site. They talk about seeing the acropolis everywhere, but we never actually see it. And in one scene where they overlook a fantastic vista of Athens, the backdrop of the city is completely out of focus, so we can’t enjoy it either.
To survive, the pair turn to petty crime, which escalates as their desperation does, forcing them to question to what lengths they’re willing to go for a better future – and whether that future is even possible. A tense and often harrowing thriller, To a Land Unknown charts how good people can do bad things in an impossible situation, which forces every man to be out for only himself.
Most recent films about Palestinian experiences tend to be about Palestinians trapped in Occupied Territories or struggling with the culture clash of Israeli life. To a Land Unknown offers a different perspective and asks, what if you escape the Middle East but are caught in limbo? What then?
Mahmood Bakri gives an incredible turn as the more morally ambiguous Chatila. Having shaved the luscious locks he sported in Alam (TIFF ‘22) and The Teacher (TIFF ‘23), I didn’t recognize him at all, but I knew this was an incredibly charismatic actor who found every single beat for this character, a man who is constantly fretting and plotting. But I was convinced Bakri is one of the most exciting emerging actors to watch at TIFF when I realized the same actor gave an impressive lead turn in Alam.
Alex Heeney picks 8 must-see short films at TIFF 2024 from around the world.
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Almost every year since 2015, Seventh Row has published an annual feature (2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022) on the best short films at the Toronto International Film Festival. Past festival highlights include Carol Nguyen’s documentary about excavating family trauma and silence, No Crying at the Dinner Table; Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s existential stop-motion musical The Burden; and Nikita Diakur’s comedic animated documentary backflip.
Seasoned feature filmmakers like Philippe Falardeau and Mina Shum agree that short films are more challenging to make than features. Festival shorts are also a great preview of rising talent. Most filmmakers must prove themselves with a short before making a feature. Some of the most vital, daring filmmaking at the festival can always be found within the shorts program; this year is no exception.
Below, I’ve compiled a list of eight must-see short films at the festival in alphabetical order. The films come from Norway, Kosovo, Croatia/France/Bulgaria, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Indigenous filmmakers in Canada and the United States. These fiction and non-fiction films are in various genres (including musicals and horror) and styles.
Atikamekw filmmaker Catherine Boivin excavates intergenerational trauma and a mother’s attempt to stop the cycle in Anotc ota ickwaparin akosiin. Told in split screen, the film’s opening image is of a mother doing dishes in one panel and a toddler playing in another room. In voiceover, the mother speaks to her mother about her childhood trauma, her desire to forgive her mother to let go of her anger, and the challenges of growing up with intergenerational trauma.
When we first meet the young girl in the adjacent frame, we assume she is the mother’s daughter, but as the film progresses, she also seems to represent the mother’s inner damaged child. It’s a brilliant and heartrending visual metaphor. Even doing basic domestic tasks, her childhood is on her mind. Here, her daughter isn’t just in another room or another frame, but she hopes she can keep her divorced from the intergenerational trauma that has marked her.
Anotc ota ickwaparin akosiin makes its world premiere in Short Cuts Programme 6.
It’s a little hard to talk about what makes The Beguiling great without spoiling it, but it’s one of the funniest, most original, most literal jaw-dropping films I’ve seen at the festival. Two Indigenous people end their date on the woman’s doorstep, where she invites the man in. Things seem to be going well, but she starts to ruin the mood when she wants to talk about the trauma of being Indigenous…on a first date? This horror-inflected film lives up to its programming slot in the “Strange Cuts” section, addressing some hot-button, hard-to-discuss-without-stepping-in-it issues with humour. Wait for the fantastic needle drop, which offers a lot to unpack, along with the rest of the film.
The Beguiling screens in the Strange Cuts programme
This year’s Short Film Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, is a brilliant and harrowing look at the early stages of the 1993 Bosnia genocide. In the film’s opening, a man pokes his head out of his train compartment to investigate why the train has suddenly stopped. A soldier informs the train conductor that they will be carding the passengers. The man is indignant that this should not be allowed to happen but returns to his compartment with his daughters, a pair of elderly gentlemen, and a terrified young man. The young man, he discovers, does not have ID.
Set almost entirely inside the compartment, Nebojša Slijepčević’s The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent is a tense thriller about how the most harrowing actions often happen just outside our door and after intense periods of waiting. Most of the film takes place in that waiting period of intense terror and false hope.
Like the passengers in the compartment, we can hear more than we can see of what’s happening to other passengers outside the compartment. Because the passengers listen intently for clues, Slijepčević’s sound design heightens every sound inside the compartment: the music leaking from the man’s teenage daughter’s headphones, objects touching, and the distant sounds of harassment just around the corner.
Fans of Quo Vadis, Aida? will love this look at how horrific acts begin with bureaucracy, anticipation, and boredom. Slijepčević has made dozens of shorts, some TV series, and a feature, and that experience shows. This is expert filmmaking that engages all the senses. Every shot, sound, and moment is carefully considered for maximum emotional impact. It’s an unforgettable film.
The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent screens at TIFF in Short Cuts Programme 4
Dorothy Sing Zhang takes some huge formal risks in Masterpiece Mommy, a musical about the alienation of medical care and a fraught mother-daughter relationship. I don’t know if it fully hangs together, but I’m absolutely in awe of what does. Unfolding nonlinearly, the film unpacks why a middle-aged woman is getting a mammogram, accompanied by her young adult daughter, who may be assuaging some guilt and processing other complex emotions. Showing the process of getting a mammogram, the way your body turns into bits to be squeezed and examined, with mise en scène and sound design choices that emphasize the alienation, would be laudable enough.
But Sing Zhang also stealthily turns it all into a musical to excavate the collective experience of individual alienation, which is the anxiety of getting medical treatment and the feeling of being utterly alone despite being in a room full of people in the same situation. Following in the footsteps of classic musicals (rather than some of the recent drivel), the songs are an outlet for expressing repressed emotions that can’t be spoken. As an audience, we hear the chorus, but the characters don’t, a clever little device. Not every swing Sing Zhang takes lands, but it’s a film brimming with ideas. I can’t wait to see what she does next.
The latest film by Oscar-winning animator Torill Kove (The Danish Poet), Maybe Elephants, is a memory piece in which a woman recounts how her whole family moved from Norway to Kenya during her adolescent years. Her mother’s “dark cloud” sparks the move. The animation allows for some wonderful visual metaphors: her mother’s depression that sparks the move becomes a literal “grey cloud” that surrounds her; when the protagonist and her sisters grow up and take divergent paths, Kove shows the lines of their paths on screen. The film also immerses us in Nairobi culture, which marks an exciting change of scene for the teenagers but loses its lustre for their depressed mother, who left her architect job to become a glorified family chauffeur.
Told with wit and humour, Maybe Elephants hits you in the feels while riffing on the coming-of-age narrative. This is more the story of a woman who feels distant from her beloved mother than the excitement of an adolescence abroad. Still, there is much love and joy in the family.
Maybe Elephants makes its world premiere in Short Cuts Programme 1.
In Samir Karahuda’s formally rigorous On The Way, a filmmaker and his son contemplate the challenges of living in Kosovo while travelling to collect an award sitting at customs that the father has received for his films. The film is about the father and son’s divergent experiences with a possible Russian invasion, the mass exodus of friends and family from the country, the day-to-day financial troubles, and the hassle of even collecting an award from customs. That’s partly because the father attempts to keep these challenging realities outside his son’s experience.
Much of the film takes place inside a car en route to pick up the award, where Karahuda places father and son in closeups shot from different angles to create a separate world for parent and child. It’s some time before we see them share a frame except in wide shots. Karahuda uses long takes and wide shots to invoke the alienation and desolation of the characters. The film’s central set piece, which finds the father in a Kafkaesque situation trying to pick up his international award from customs, plays out in a wide shot through the car’s back window where his son sits in waiting, not seeing any of this play out. Shooting in the academy ratio, Karahuda’s characters feel confined within the frame. This is exceptionally thoughtful, emotionally resonant filmmaking.
On the Way screens in Short Cuts Programme 4.
This amusing three-minute animated short imagines a future where everyone has a carbon quota measured by their smartphones. Whenever you use electricity, burn wood, or do anything that might contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, your phone beeps to warn you that your quota is going down. What will happen when people’s quota gets used up, and will they do anything to stop it? Somewhat nihilistic and somewhat realistic, the film’s conceit is a clever way of visualizing our resource depletion and indifference. I’m not sure that it will inspire action (or is designed to), but sometimes, you need to laugh when the alternative is to cry.
Quota screens in Short Cuts Programme 5.
Mi’kmaw filmmaker shalan joudry transports us into the sweetgrass picking process, bringing us to ground level where we can hear the wind in the grass, our heads to the ground with the characters’ hands. The film’s title is a Mi’kmaq word that roughly translates as “It smells good.” You might not be able to smell or taste the sweetgrass in the film, but joudry engages all the other senses. The sound design makes the experience tactile: watching someone else touch the sweetgrass and be immersed in it makes us feel that way, too, because we can hear the effects.
welima’q screens in Short Cuts Programme 1.
Introducing…our TIFF 2024 podcast season! Alex Heeney explains why this season is for you, even if you aren’t attending, and what to expect from our themed episodes and TIFF coverage.
Get exclusive access to our entire podcast archive, members’ only episodes, and early access to new podcast seasons.
