SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2004
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
SUTTON PLACE HOTEL, WELLESLEY ROOM
955 BAY STREET

Gabriella Martinelli is one of Canada’s most innovative producers and has been working in the film and television industry for over twenty years. With her immense talent for selecting potent, dynamic projects, she has carved out an enviable career producing not only for Canada’s best directors but for major players all over the world. Martinelli has lent her great skills to some of the biggest Hollywood movies and international co-productions including Clive Barker’s NIGHTBREED (90), Edoardo Ponti’s BETWEEN STRANGERS (02), Baz Luhrmann’s mega-hit ROMEO + JULIET (96) starring Leonardo di Caprio and Claire Danes, David Cronenberg’s M. BUTTERFLY (93) and NAKED LUNCH (91), which won ten Genie Awards including Best Picture, and the miniseries “The Lives of the Saints” (04) directed by Jerry Ciccoritti, who directed this year’s Visions presentation BLOOD (04). She was also the production manager for Cronenberg’s DEAD RINGERS (88), executive producer of Christopher Cain’s THE AMAZING PANDA ADVENTURE (95), and producer – along with the Mirvishes – of the play “Scaramouche Jones,” which starred Pete Postlethwaite.

Martinelli is the strategic and creative drive behind Capri Films Inc., a company that she founded in 2000. With Martinelli guiding its direction and growth as President and CEO, Capri has become a dynamic entertainment company with Canadian roots and an international perspective that acquires and produces filmed and live entertainment. Its recently founded distribution division, Capri Releasing, released the much-acclaimed METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER (04) as well as four films screening in this year’s Festival: NOBODY KNOWS (04), BLOOD (04), WALK ON WATER (04) and TARNATION (04).

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2004
3 :00 PM - 4:00 PM
SUTTON PLACE HOTEL, WELLESLEY ROOM
955 BAY STREET

Despite a feature filmmaking career of only six years, Lukas Moodysson is widely regarded as one of the most dazzling talents in contemporary international cinema. His four features FUCKING ÅMÅL (99), TOGETHER (00), LILYA 4-EVER and A HOLE IN MY HEART (04) succeed beautifully in joining difficult – sometimes deeply disturbing – subject matter with an intense emotional depth that refuses sentimentality and cliché. He is extremely versatile at capturing a wide emotional range, from the lighthearted approach of FUCKING ÅMÅL and the comic parody of hippie communes in TOGETHER to the brutality and horror of an abandoned child in LILYA 4-EVER and the repulsive, dangerously ignorant monsters in the unsettling A HOLE IN MY HEART.

His intensely moving films are elegies for humanity: he explores contemporary society with an unflinching eye and a profound sympathy for his often young and struggling characters. He is certainly one of the most dynamic auteurs working today, receiving numerous awards including the Teddy Award from the Berlin International Film Festival and prizes from the Karlovy Vary, Rotterdam, Paris and London film festivals. A HOLE IN MY HEART, his most recent film, screens in this year’s Visions programme.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2004
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
SUTTON PLACE HOTEL, WELLESLEY ROOM
955 BAY STREET

Sally Potter is a veritable Renaissance woman, one of those rare luminaries who have made an indelible mark on experimental cinema and fiction narrative filmmaking. Her graceful films are difficult to classify; at once profoundly philosophical and aesthetically beautiful, they are rich, layered jewels. Potter exploded onto the festival circuit with the short THRILLER (79), perhaps the archetypal example of seventies feminist theory-based filmmaking. Her sumptuous groundbreaking experimental narrative feature ORLANDO (92) featured Tilda Swinton as a gender-shifting figure, granted eternal life by Queen Elizabeth I, who journeys through British history.

Put simply, YES (04) is about an American woman, masterfully played by Allen, who begins an affair with a Middle Eastern man (Simon Abkarian) in London. Programmer Kay Armatage describes the complex, majestic narrative as “two intelligent people in love try[ing] to work through their mutual misunderstandings in the sad reality of regional and ethnic conflicts.”

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2004
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
SUTTON PLACE HOTEL, WELLESLEY ROOM
955 BAY STREET

Gregg Araki is perhaps the most raucous of the directors who spearheaded the New Queer Cinema of the early nineties. He was one of the first filmmakers to devote his energies to representing the joys, pains, sexual humiliations and chemical highs of queer teens, setting most of his films in a surreal, pop culture-soaked Los Angeles wasteland. His films are particularly fascinating for mixing an encyclopedic knowledge of film history and a deep sensitivity to the subtle sea changes in youth culture. He seamlessly channels everyone from Jean-Luc Godard to Nine Inch Nails, Jerry Springer to Howard Hawks, in his portraits of alienated and dispossessed young people in crisis.

Araki has directed over a dozen short films and several features including: the micro-budgeted THREE BEWILDERED PEOPLE IN THE NIGHT (87) and THE LONG WEEKEND (O’DESPAIR) (89), the quintessential AIDS road movie THE LIVING END (92) and the teen apocalypse trilogy TOTALLY F***ED UP (93), THE DOOM GENERATION (95) and NOWHERE (97). Beneath what seems like a nihilistic facade lies a serious and even soft-hearted concern for the marginalized and damaged people wandering through his challenging and aggressive films. This sentimental side is in full force in the romantic comedy SPLENDOR (99), which was a Festival selection in 1999.

Araki returns to the Festival with MYSTERIOUS SKIN (04). Based on the acclaimed novel by Scott Heim, it is being screened in the Contemporary World Cinema programme.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2004
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
SUTTON PLACE HOTEL, WELLESLEY ROOM
955 BAY STREET

Bruce LaBruce is the fairy godmother of the queer punk scene in Canada and a local hero to bent Torontonians. He created the seminal queer fanzine J.D.s and, starting in the late eighties, he began making underground small-gauge shorts. His first feature, NO SKIN OFF MY ASS (91), a grainy Super 8 romance between a mute skinhead and a flamboyant hairdresser, set the tone of work to come. He switched to 16mm with SUPER 8½ (94), the Toronto queercore remake of Federico Fellini’s 8½, featuring the struggles of a confused young porno artiste. His first colour film, HUSTLER WHITE (96), took leave of Hogtown and focused on the seamy world of West Hollywood male prostitution. All of these early films toyed with autobiography, featuring LaBruce himself in starring roles. His films are all marked by an intelligent and wildly irreverent sense of humour that makes mincemeat of all sacred cows. They are catalogues of alternative culture filtered through the glazed eyes of an unrepentant film buff and the razor-sharp mind of a jaded queen.

A self-proclaimed pornographer, while LaBruce’s work has always incorporated sexually explicit content, he tipped the scales toward hardcore with SKIN GANG (99), an often disturbing and understandably controversial neo-Nazi porn movie that shatters political correctness while commenting subtly on gay male body fascism. THE RASPBERRY REICH (04) focuses on the opposite end of the political spectrum. It is a critique of radical chic dressed in a slogan- and sex-heavy romp about a bumbling gang of extreme left terrorists who model themselves on the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Gang).

His most visually inventive and accomplished work, THE RASPBERRY REICH proves that LaBruce is still as fierce and funny as ever. It is being presented in this year’s Midnight Madness programme.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2004
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
SUTTON PLACE HOTEL, WELLESLEY ROOM
955 BAY STREET

Todd Solondz is one of the most intelligent and thoughtful satirists in contemporary cinema and a pioneer of the nineties American independent film scene. His razor-sharp films dissect middle-class American values with jet-black humour and pervasive sorrow. This dangerous mix has led to the accusations of exploitation and misanthropy that have dogged his career, but Solondz has never capitulated. His breakout film, WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (96), won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and announced a fresh talent to the world. With sublime young actress Heather Matarazzo, he created Dawn Wiener, the archetypal geeky girl who was a touchstone for a generation of young outsiders. In HAPPINESS (98), which won a FIPRESCI Prize at the Festival de Cannes, Solondz crafted an ensemble of characters – whose sins include child rape, murder, obscene phone calls and theft – all struggling to achieve happiness but failing due to their inability to break out of destructive patterns. Named one of the ten best films of the year by “The New York Times,” STORYTELLING (01) was an ambitious diptych on art and ethics that ended with a mistreated domestic worker gassing to death her wealthy employers. Clearly, Solondz has never shied away from difficult subject matter.

In his new film PALINDROMES (04), presented in this year’s Visions programme, Solondz continues to challenge viewer identification by casting several actors of varying sizes, ages, races and demeanours as a single teenaged girl named Aviva.