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Photo By Steve Ramos
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Toronto Film Festival staff read the breaking news
about the World Trade Towers attack outside a
Yonge Street movie theater.
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The news was matter of fact and on schedule. At a 4:30 p.m. press conference on Sept. 11, Toronto International Film Festival President and Executive Director Piers Handling announced that festival screenings and industry functions would resume the following day. The film festival had come to a halt as news of the terrorist attacks reached Toronto earlier in the day. It would be the first time in its history that the Toronto Festival had completely shut down.
"The atmosphere is so muted," Handling quietly told a crowd of reporters. "I don't think people want to go into auditoriums and celebrate film."
The real story reached me in haphazard fashion. It was the morning of Sept. 11 and I was writing in my hotel room. My roommate was asleep. The TV was turned off. Movies were the focus of my attention. All that changed with a phone call from my wife.
"Did you hear the news?" she asked frantically. Her question made no sense until she explained all that had happened some 30 minutes earlier. Terrorist attacks had destroyed the World Trade Center and severely damaged the Pentagon. All commercial flights were grounded. New York City was chaos. The casualties would be severe. It was hard for me to completely understand all that was happening back in the United States. TV news would quickly provide all the horrifying details.
I've often said that a film festival is a bubble temporarily detached from the real world around it. Only movies, acquisition deals and interviews matter in this cinematic sphere.
Later in the afternoon, some friends and I gathered in a restaurant near the festival's hotel headquarters. A television above the bar replayed the gruesome footage of a jet airliner crashing into the World Trade Towers countless times over and over again. It was an unbelievable sight that you'd expect to see in some Hollywood action movie. But this image was frighteningly real.
Some friends heard the news after leaving an early morning press screening. They had just watched Indian director Mira Nair's joyful romance, Monsoon Wedding. But the news that greeted them at the theater exit was terrifying. My friends told me that they initially refused to believe the news. It was too fantastic. They thought people were kidding until they saw the news reports on a television in the cinema lobby.
Other journalists were in the middle of interviews when the news first hit them. A panicked publicist came into the hotel room and brought the interviews to an abrupt finish. All the film studios and distributors have offices in New York City. Many of them are located in Lower Manhattan. The publicist had a family member who worked in the World Trade Center. Interviews no longer mattered.
By late morning Tuesday, the festival completely shut down. No press conferences. No interviews. No screenings. Theater staff stood watch at the entrances to empty festival auditoriums. The bold headlines from late-afternoon editions of the Toronto newspapers told the story: America Attacked.
There would be no time for watching festival movies on Sept. 11. Phone calls and e-mails had to be sent to friends and family members in Manhattan and Washington, D.C. People who were on re-routed flights tried to call home. The hope for everyone was that the news would not become too personal.
One critic breathed a sigh of relief. His ex-wife worked in the World Trade Center, but she took Tuesday off to stay home and supervise workmen reupholstering her couch. For the time being, he avoided heartache.
Festival-goers unsure about how they would return home placed phone calls to the Canadian railroad and rental car companies. None of it really mattered. The Canadian border was closed. Nobody was going anywhere.
Tuesday became the day when critics stopped thinking about movies and focused on friendships. The day would be spent watching TV updates. The news footage described how the terrorist attacks happened, but couldn't explain why.
Later that afternoon, an argument broke out in a nearby restaurant after two local men switched the TV to a soccer broadcast. They weren't interested in what was happening in the United States.
"All of this will be on all week," the portly man yelled at us. "The game is on now." A fight was avoided when the restaurant's manager allowed them to watch the soccer game on another TV.
Locals questioned the safety of Toronto. But the dark joke was that there was no safer place for us than Toronto. Terrorists would never attack Canada. That is, unless they're terrorists taking a stand against extreme politeness.
After Handling's 4:30 p.m. press conference announcement, everyone expressed varying opinions. Some people felt the festival should cancel completely. They would feel uncomfortable watching movies in light of America's tragedy. Others agreed with Handling's decision to resume on Sept. 12. They felt that watching movies was exactly the diversion they needed.
Back to Business
It's the next day and festival-goers try to go back to business as usual. Canceled screenings have been rescheduled. Audiences have returned to theaters. At an afternoon press conference, French star Jeanne Moreau greets the press to speak about her performance in the drama Cet Amour-là. In the film, Moreau plays legendary French author Marguerite Duras. After taking her seat at the conference table, Moreau understands that there are matters other than her film that need to be addressed.
"It's very hard to find words," Moreau says, speaking solemnly. "We're all concerned, all over the world, you know. I was a little girl when the last war was on. I have a certain knowledge of devastation and terror. But the power of imagination has no bounds. It's important that we are here together. Cinema is more than just superficial glamour. It is something else. It's a mirror on the world. When people want to see what life is like, they watch our films."
In the days after the Sept. 11 tragedy, some of the re-scheduled festival films prove to be helpful diversions. Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti's heartfelt melodrama, The Son's Room, offers a realistic look at a married couple coping with the loss of a teen-age child. Moretti's matter-of-fact directing style and understated lead performance make the film's drama all the richer.
Director David Lynch twists characters, time and space into the unforgettable puzzle that's Mulholland Drive. On the surface, Lynch's film is an old-fashioned tale about a starlet named Betty (Naomi Watts) who arrives in Los Angeles intent on becoming a famous actress. After she befriends a dark-haired mystery woman, Lynch takes Mulholland Drive into a terrifying direction.
Spanish director Julio Medem's Sex and Lucia is a dazzling portrait of two Madrid lovers (Paz Vega and Tristán Ulloa) and their up-and-down romance. Its story unfolds through a clever mix of fact and fiction. While Sex and Lucia makes an impact with its graphic sexual imagery, its greatest attribute is Medem's adventurous storytelling.
French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet's childlike fantasy, Amélie, remains the festival's best diversion from America's terrorist attacks. Jeunet's eye-popping tale follows the adventures of a pixyish waitress (Audrey Tautou) in Paris' Montmartre neighborhood. Amélie thrives on Jeunet's amazing capacity to think like a child. After hours spent watching TV footage of the World Trade Towers wreckage, Toronto audiences feel a special kinship with the pretty Amélie.
"Children have a big power of imagination and usually people lose this power as they grow older," Jeunet says, speaking late in the festival. "I don't know why, but I kept it. Part of my brain doesn't work with mathematical problems. It's like a spider's web. But with imagination, I have no problem. It's a gift."
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Photo By Steve Ramos
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Amélie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet understands that
his film’s childlike sense of fantasy is a welcome
diversion from the week’s tragic events.
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Other festival films only remind us of the real-life terrors waiting outside the cinema doors. Hungarian director István Szabó's Taking Sides is a lush attempt to make a statement about the importance of art in times of devastation. In the film, an American Major (Harvey Keitel) sets out to prosecute the music director of the Berlin Philharmonic (Stellan Skarsgard) as part of the Allies' de-Nazification program. Skarsgard's steely performance fails to compensate for Taking Side's lulling storytelling. Then again, in light of the week's events, the film's subject matter probably hit too close to home.
"This is not a time for words," Szabó quietly told the Toronto audience, introducing his film. "This is a time for silence."
Each day brought additional news about the terrorist attack's impact on the American film industry. The opening dates for the films Sidewalks of New York, Big Trouble and Training Day have been postponed. It's not certain when audiences will see the Arnold Schwarzenegger actioner, Collateral Damage. In the film, Schwarzenegger plays a fireman who loses his family to an office tower explosion. After Sept. 11, it's clear that Collateral Damage is the last thing audiences want to see.
At a festival screening of the girl-meets-girl comedy, Kissing Jessica Stein, the audience groaned every time the film flashed a panoramic shot of the New York skyline and the World Trade Towers. Leaving the auditorium, everyone agreed: Director Charles Herman-Wurmfeld would have to remove the World Trade Towers footage from his otherwise likable comedy.
By the festival's closing weekend, talk about festival screenings had been replaced with nervous speculation about whether the Canadian border would remain opened. All of my friends traded their airline tickets for spaces on the Canadian railroad. One U.S. distributor charted a bus to bring staff and filmmakers back to Los Angeles. Others rented limousines to New York City. I was one of the lucky ones whose flight remained operating.
It's Saturday Sept. 15 and I head to Toronto's Pearson Airport four hours before my flight's scheduled departure. I'm willing to wait all day if it means I finally get to go home. At the airport gate, I pass the time speaking to a friend from the Sundance Film Festival. Earlier in the week, the only thing that mattered to us was the festival's movies.
Today, movies are the last thing on our minds. ©
