John Nyman
Arts Editor
You’ve been hearing it for weeks: it’s TIFF time in Toronto, and that means glitz, glamour and whatever other buzzword bullshit will get stargazers flocking to the ticket booths.
Scratch a little at the festival’s shiny surface, though, and you’ll find a stew of envelope-pushing, innovative and sometimes downright weird cinematic offerings for edgier film lovers to enjoy. And guess what? A lot of it comes from right here at York University.
TIFF doesn’t get much stranger than York alum Bruce LaBruce’s L.A. Zombie, a heavily genre-focused art film that’s also a hardcore gay porn. For 63 minutes, and with absolutely no dialogue, an alien zombie from the Pacific Ocean mourns for the corpses of Los Angeles’ poor and downtrodden citizens – and fucks them back to life.
“I make no bones about what this film’s about,” said LaBruce. “It’s a hardcore gay zombie porn movie.”
At the same time, LaBruce considers himself “an artist who works in pornography” and makes a strong case for why his work should be taken seriously, referencing a tradition of gay avant-garde pornographers including Andy Warhol. Aside from TIFF, L.A. Zombie was featured at this year’s Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland and will be screening at several other European festivals.
“There are so many things to hate about this film […] but for me, the idea that a hardcore gay porn film has competed […] at an A-list film festival or is showing at the Bell Lightbox is part of the achievement,” said LaBruce.
The work of York alum Daniel Cockburn is much tamer than LaBruce’s, but still made for an extremely innovative and genre-pushing addition to this year’s festival; his first feature film, You Are Here, stars recently deceased Canadian actress Tracy Wright.
The non-narrative philosophical adventure feels like Waking Life, though it possesses a completely different visual style. It presents a series of thought-provoking vignettes, including a child’s story of a man who invents a robotic eye and a filmic adaptation of John Searle’s “Chinese room” thought experiment. These scenes intertwine as the film approaches its surprisingly dark and haunting end, and while they remain unresolved, the deep questions of identity and existence that the film poses are clear.
Nadia Litz, a former York film student who stars alongside Wright in You Are Here, also directed one of the several York alum short films that showed at the festival. Litz’s 15-minute short How to Rid your Lover of a Negative Emotion Caused by You! examines relationship difficulties as oozing internal growths to be surgically removed; it’s a simple parable with some deep underlying questions about blame and guilt in relationships.
Michael Zryd, graduate program director of York’s department of film, explained that York students’ tendency to push the boundaries at festivals like TIFF is linked to the department’s faculty and educational process.
“I would say there’s definitely a real indie strain to the faculty, so they expose the students to a lot of independent work, experimental work […] and that distinguishes us,” he said. “York students […] get exposed to what I like to call ‘the limits of film.’”
With that kind of background, it’s no surprise that films by York students have emerged as some of the greatest challenges to the image TIFF creates for itself in the Canadian and international media.
“But to [TIFF’s] credit […] they program everything,” said Zryd.
At the end of the day, TIFF is a gigantic festival that brings together a huge variety of opinions on what film is and should be, not just the ones we see in the most popular media outlets. “It’s not about the Hollywood thing,” said York alum Ryan Redford, whose feature, Oliver Sherman, was also shown at TIFF. “It’s about the movies.”
