Toronto Film Festival – The Sequel:
Among the films to be screened at the "Special Presentations" sidebar are Zabou Breitman's L' Homme de sa vie / The Man of My Life (France), which revolves around the unlikely friendship that develops between a bourgeois, happily married man (Bernard Campan) and a free-spirited gay man (Charles Berling) during a summer vacation in the French countryside; Eytan Fox's The Bubble (Israel) — the title refers to cosmopolitan Tel Aviv — which depicts the dramatic changes in the lives of three roommates when one of them (played by Ohad Knoller of Yossy & Jagger) 
begins an affair with a Palestinian (Fox co-wrote the screenplay with partner Gal Uchovsky); and Paris, je t'aime (France), a compilation film directed by a number of international names, including Isabel Coixet, Walter Salles, Gérard Depardieu, Sylvain Chomet, Alfonso Cuarón, Wes Craven, and Richard LaGravenese.
Also included in the "Special Presentations" sidebar are a series of classic Norman McLaren shorts, including Pas de deux (1968), Neighbours (1952), and La Merle (1958).
The "Gala Presentations" sidebar includes Steven Zaillian's much-delayed All the King's Men (USA), a remake of the 1949 Academy Award-winning film, starring Sean Penn in the old Broderick Crawford role (based on Louisiana governor Huey Long) of an ambitious and corrupt politician in the American South; Alejandro González Iñárritu's Best Director winner at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Babel (USA), about the lack of interconnectedness between human beings — including Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, and Gael García Bernal — 
in our dysfunctional world (the screenplay was written by frequent Iñárritu collaborator Guillermo Arriaga); and Pedro Almodóvar's Volver (Spain), which portrays the relationship between two sisters (Penélope Cruz and Lola Dueñas) and the ghost of their mother (Almodóvar veteran Carmen Maura). Volver won an ensemble Best Actress Award at this year's Cannes Film Festival, while Almodóvar took the Best Screenplay Award.
The "Masters" sidebar will showcase films by the likes of Alain Resnais (Cœurs / Private Fears in Public Places), Nanni Moretti (Il Caimano / The Caiman), Margarethe von Trotta (Ich bin die Andere / I Am the Other Woman), Gianni Amelio (La Stella che non c'è / The Missing Star), Volker Schlöndorff (STRAJK – Die Heldin von Danzig / STRIKE), Werner Herzog (Rescue Dawn), and Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes the Barley).
The full list of films to be screened at this year's edition of the Toronto International Film Festival can be found here.
Why the heroine of the film Carolin does resist her love for the sensitive and passionate young man, Robert, whom mere physical closeness to her can put into erotic trembling and who can risk near everything in order to be with her? This is the question von Trotta puts in front of the viewers. Indeed, why does Carolin try to avoid love? – Is it for the sake of loyalty to her father, a charismatic old man? Because of her childhood traumas and the personal complexes they trigger? Help to answer these questions comes from von Trotta indirectly – through the very form of the film: she composes it as a kaleidoscope of hero’s dreams of a pleasant, intriguing, prosperous and permanently renewed reality. More exactly, Robert’s dreams are not personal at all but quite standard and commercial, like ads, a tourist kind of dreams about being in the center of comfortably enveloping reality as collage of segments as if privatized for personal pleasures – standard hotels, restaurants, lobbies and tourist locations, enigmatic encounters, mysterious women. Robert‘s dreams are like today’s life of the upper middle class inhabitants of the West when reality of political clashes and existential dilemmas has disappeared and what is left is our sentimental sensitivity inflamed by commercial cinema. With “Ich Bin…” Von Trotta has joined other exceptional film-directors in the criticism of today’s mass-cultural sensibility – Liliana Cavani in “Beyond Obsession” (1982), Helma Sanders-Brahms in “Future of Emily” (1985) and Alain Tanner in “A Flame in my Heart” (1987). In her film she underlines the contrast between unreal values (including amorous sex and addiction to luxury) seductively imposed by commercial civilization, and a genuine reality we can barely discern through our nostalgic memories of a generalized authentic past. In “Ich Bin…” what from the first glance looks like a fight between adulthood (Carolin and Robert’s love) and her childhood fixations becomes a fight between taste for genuine experiences nurtured in Carolin by her father [although a person with authoritarian air] and the childlike frivolous imaginary inside all of us projected into our souls by the artificial conditions of our life. The Father is not always a “demonic” figure in our unconscious – asserts von Trotta’s film. In comparison with today’s frivolous and obsessive life style some old fathers deserve to win. Please, visit: http://www.actingoutpolitics.com to read about films by Godard, Bergman, Bunuel, Kurosawa, Resnais, Pasolini, Bresson, Bertolucci, Fassbinder, Alain Tanner and Liliana Cavani (with analysis of shots from films). By Victor Enyutin