Photos: The faces of TIFF

Celebrities visiting the Toronto International Film Festival were shot by Canadian Press photographer Chris Young on a toy camera, with interesting results.

As Canadian Press photo editor Graeme Roy explains the project: "The photos are the result of an experiment where we shot 35mm film in a toy camera that shoots 6x6 format - sometimes with the coloured gel flash on the camera, some with murky available light. Because of this mash-up of formats, the portraits spread across the entire emulsion of the film, sprocket holes and all, making for some really interesting photos ... The results are at times candy floss coloured or dark and brooding."

Actor Ryan Gosling

Actor Jay Baruchel

Actor Josh Brolin

Actor Sir Anthony Hopkins

Dame Helen Mirren

Actor Scott Speedman

Actor Paul Giamatti

Actor Frank Rautenbach

Environmentalist David Suzuki

Director Mike Leigh

Actor Josh Lucas

Kat Dennings

Actor Jim Broadbent

Geoffrey Rush

Director Oliver Schmitz

The Insider for Sept. 16

Sons and dads are the centrepiece of today’s must-see films.

What does it mean to be a man? A father? What is the most effective way to deal with a bully? The engrossing, beautifully shot Danish film In A Better World which plays at 2:45 p.m. at AMC raises these questions and many more about parenting, marriage, loss, friendship and conflict resolution. The action revolves around a physician who struggles to save lives in an African refugee camp and his son who flirts with vigilantism back in the presumptively more civilized upper middle class Denmark.

The director Susanne Bier told the Star that she juxtaposed the two seemingly disparate worlds to show “Western audiences that that part of the world is also part of our world. We keep thinking that ‘It’s fine, it’s remote, yeah, it’s very sad for them, but it doesn’t really concern us’ and it does.”

In A Screaming Man(Un Homme Qui Crie) a father and a son squabble over a job, leading to an act of revenge with terrible consequences - the tragedy that results when the bond between a parent and child is torn. Star critic Peter Howell says the film, which won Chadian writer/director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun a prize at Cannes is a “heartbreaker of pride and bitter reckoning.” Today, 4:45 p.m., Isabel Bader Theatre. Also on Sept. 19, 6 p.m., AMC Theatre.

The red carpet action’s dwindling, but there are still a few snap-worthy celebs in town.

Funnyman Jon Lovitz, two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey and a very pregnant Kelly Preston (Mrs. John Travolta) are expected at Roy Thomson Hall at 5:15 p.m. for the Casino Jack premiere. It’s based on the true story of the former high-powered lobbyist Jack Abramoff whose crooked schemes landed him behind bars in what has been called the biggest scandal to hit Washington since Watergate.

-Ashante Infantry

The Insider for Sept. 15

Get the hankies out.

I Am Slave screens again at 6:30 p.m. at Varsity. The emotionally wrenching film is about a 12-year-old Sudanese girl abducted from her mountain village, sold as a slave in an auction and forced to work in the country's capital, Khartoum, and then London as a servant for rich Arabic familes for six years.

It's based on the real life tale of Mende Nazer who wrote the book Slave about her travails after escaping to freedom in the U.K.

About halfway through the jam-packed premiere at AMC Tuesday the theatre was jolted by loud, gut-wrenching cries coming from the cordoned off talent row.

After the film, Nazer confirmed that she was the sobbing woman who'd fled the theatre during the scene of the young lead being beaten with a garden hose for playing with her mistress's daughter. "It's so real, it's so vivid, it's like it just happened to me today; I relive the slavery," she explained during the Q&A.

Audience members, who wiped their tears silently during the screening, pressed British director Gabriel Range about his government's efforts to aid the estimated 5,000 people enslaved in the U.K. Menzer, now, 29, lives in London where she received asylum and has established a foundation - www.mendenazer.org - to raise awareness about domestic slavery.

Though not on the same level of socio-political import, Blue Valentine is also quite moving. Star critic Peter Howell said "It hurts to watch this disintegrating marriage, with its many small insults and misunderstandings that add up to emotional devastation." The movie which premieres at Ryerson Theatre at 6:15 p.m. stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle WIlliams as a blue-collar couple in the searing portrait of a relationship on the rocks. "Awards-season attention for both is deserved and seems assured," Howell added.

-Ashante Infantry

Mirren on 'The Queen' and Tony Blair

Helen Mirren doesn’t put much stock in the suggestion by screenwriter Peter Morgan that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair lifted a line from The Queen in his autobiography.

Blair recalls his first meeting with Queen Elizabeth in his new bio A Journey that when he met the monarch she said; “You are my 10th prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born."

It echoes closely a line in the 2006 film The Queen, one Morgan says he invented.

“I don’t know. Maybe she did say that to him. Who knows?” Mirren said in an interview with the Star Tuesday.

“We weren’t there and neither was Peter Morgan. But maybe that conversation came up. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

- Linda Barnard

Nicole Kidman exposed

Actress Nicole Kidman and husband Keith Urban are seen at the red-carpet gala for 'Rabbit Hole' at the Toronto International Film Festival, Sept. 13, 2010.(Richard Lautens/Toronto Star)

When your name’s Nicole Kidman, people tend to return your calls. That’s how easily the Nashville-based Australian movie star made the transition from actor to producer after reading a rave New York Times review of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pultizer Prize-winning play Rabbit Hole over a morning coffee back in 2006.

“I called Per (Saari), my production partner, and he sent me the play, which I read (immediately), and we called David … we just got lucky. Just a phone call, and at the end of it we were making a film.”

John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and The Angry Inch, Shortbus) may seem the unlikeliest of directors to helm a picture about a couple “making their way out of the abyss (of grief, after their young child was killed in a traffic accident) and towards the light,” he told attendees at Tuesday’s press conference promoting Rabbit Hole’s premiere at TIFF. But the proof of his ability to capture the essence, elegance, humour and sadness of Lindsay-Abaire’s elegant script is manifest in the buzz the movie is getting at the Festival.

“I feel very exposed, very nervous,” Kidman said about her role as a first-time producer. She has two children from her previous marriage to Tom Cruise, and one with her second husband, Australian country music star Keith Urban.

“I’m responsible for the film. It’s a big weight.”

Kidman and Urban, who live in Nashville – “It’s a very quiet life there, which I relish,” she said – attended the movie’s TIFF gala Monday night, drawing huge crowds.

Her first movie epiphany, she admitted, was when she “wagged (skipped) school for a Stanley Kubrick festival when I was 16 or 17. I ate him up. He’s my biggest influence.”

Kidman noted with some pride that she has been reasonably successful in bringing Urban along, film-wise.

“I took him to his first ever subtitled movie. He loved it. Now he loves reading films.”

Watch video from the Rabbit Hole press conference.

- From Greg Quill

Indie music gets its moment

Popped by the Festival Music House Monday for the first night of its three-night showcase. Looked like the changes to the old Canadian Music Café were having a desired effect.

Previously, the CMC was in the middle of the afternoon and many filmmakers couldn’t make it because it conflicted with screenings. Now organized by local record label Arts & Craft, the buzz factor has definitely been taken up a notch and it was a pretty packed house at the Roosevelt Room.

We caught Chilly Gonzales’ and Couer de Pirate’s set. Gonzales, best known for collaborating with Feist (who was in the house), gave an interesting performance wearing a plaid bathrobe. He had no problem interacting and antagonizing the talking audience. He rapped a song about not being able to get arts grants – but said he didn’t mean it, if someone in the house had the power to get him one. It was a pretty amusing audience, and a bit of an interesting and provocative choice for a music industry showcase.

Meanwhile Couer de Pirate’s set was rather lovely. Also known as Beatrice Martin, and the 20-year-old French singer played solo, and easily won over the crowd.

The organizers were adamant that the showcase is not about celebrities, and for the most part, it seemed to be curious industry folks. There were some Canadian celebs in house, though, including Trigger director Bruce McDonald and Michael Riley and Joanna Douglas from Being Erica.

--Raju Mudhar

The Insider for Sept.14

It’s all hail The Boss as Bruce Springsteen hits Roy Thomson Hall at 8:15 p.m. for a rare red carpet appearance on behalf of The Promise: The Making of Darkness On the Edge of Town.

The doc captures Springsteen with his E Street Band during the recording of their pivotal 1978 album. Extensive, never-before-seen footage of home rehearsals and recording sessions are combined with new interviews for an unprecedented close-up of the everyman rocker.

Also on the manly man tip, Ryan Reynolds makes the scene at Ryerson Theatre at 8:15 p.m for Buried. Star critic Peter Howell dubbed the claustrophobic thriller which stars Vancouver-born Reynolds as a U.S. trucker in Iraq whose convoy is ambushed by insurgents a “pulse racer.” The protagonist awakes to find himself beneath the desert in a wooden box planted six feet under, with oxygen running out and sand pouring in.

Yikes!

Speaking of pulse racer - Keanu Reeves is slated to walk the fan plank at 8:15 p.m. at Elgin/Winter Garden Theatre for Henry’s Crime. The romantic comedy which also stars Vera Farmiga, James Caan and Judy Greer finds Reeves playing a toll booth operator who trades his humdrum life for a new career in armed robbery. The afterparty for the film and whatever kind of facial hair Reeves is currently sporting is at Brassaii.

The big I’ll-sell-my-grandmother-for-a-ticket shindig tonight is the InStyle soirée at The Windsor Arms Hotel.

-Ashante Infantry

Ryan Reynolds is buried alive

There was not much in the way of cinematic trickery during the 17-day shooting schedule of Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés’ claustrophobic opus Buried, star Ryan Reynolds revealed at Monday’s press conference promoting the movie’s TIFF debut.

“It was pretty miserable, let me tell you, physically an emotionally exhausting.” he said. “I’ll never complain again on a film set as long as I live. They strung me up and threw me all over the sound stage in New Orleans for The Green Lantern, but it was nothing compared to 17 days in a box with this dark overlord of oppression (Cortés) standing over me.

Make that seven boxes. That’s how many coffins were built to accommodate different camera angles and the various positions into which Reynolds – playing a truck driver who wakes up inside a buried coffin, and must mentally reconstruct events in his life in order to figure out how he came to be there – had to cram himself.

“On the last day of shooting they put glass over one side of the coffin I was in, and started pouring sand into it, leaving about an inch of air. I noticed there were paramedics on the set, and I asked what scene we were shooting. Rodrigo said, ‘They're here for your safety.’ ”

Despite the apparent horror-flick setup, screenwriter Chris Sparling insisted his story doesn’t belong in the horror genre in which it seems to have found a niche.

“It’s not a horror film, just a horrible situation,” Sparling said. “The underlying idea is the disconnect between people and corporations and government. Everyone has an agenda. Everyone worries first about themselves, and how the actions of others affect them.

“(Reynolds’ character) is an ordinary, working-class guy. He’s not a superhero, he doesn’t have the answers, he’s not going to find a way out. He’s angry and frustrated because all he wanted to do was support his family, and it turned out this way.

“The conceit of a guy buried alive in a box has always been secondary to me.” 

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Catherine, Queen of Comedy: Some malcontents in her homeland have suggested French movie queen Catherine Deneuve – she appears on the poster publicizing director François Ozon’s latest opus in curlers and a bright red track suit – must be desperate to allow her enduringly noble image to be so debased.

Quite the contrary, Deneuve said at Monday’s press conference promoting the TIFF-scheduled adaptation of the popular 1970s Pierre Barillet/Jean-Pierre Grédy play Potiche. She plays the gone-to-seed trophy wife of a factory owner who finds herself in charge of the business during a strike, confronting a cunning union official played by Gerard Depardieu.

“I love comedies,” said Deneuve, who worked with Ozon on his 2002 film 8 Women. “I love inventive, cheerful comedies. In Europe comedies are much more popular than they are in America. I have so much fun. So I am not ‘going down’.

“Life is not funny enough.”

From Greg Quill

Party of five anyone?

TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey has tweeted a special offer today for ticketbuyers: buy four, get the fifth one free. In person or by phone only. No reason stated for the offer not being offered on the TIFF website, though the site has already crashed once, last Friday under the weight of online orders.

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ET Canada’s Festival Central lounge on the rooftop of a Yorkville parking garage had a few inaugural spots of bother over the weekend.

The site, converted by the Liberty Entertainment Group into a tented fairytale land for pampered celebs and VIPs, offers various kinds of swag and “ET branded” golf carts to whisk them from ground level to the roof (and away from the hoi polloi and, possibly, competing media). Saturday night saw spirits dampened by a heavy downpour while a generator breakdown took some of the sizzle out of Sunday night.

Still, it’s a better location than Casa Loma, where the ET celeb lovefest has operated in past years.

From Bruce DeMara

Actor enjoying TIFF experience

Girlfriend star Evan Scheider is making the most of his first film festival.

The 31-year-old Massachusetts native, believed to be the first actor with Down syndrome to play the lead in a feature film, enjoyed a moment onstage at the street party for Bell Lightbox Sunday afternoon.

He introduced his co-star Jackson Rathbone’s (best known for the Twlight series) band, The 100 Monkeys. “They played wonderful music,” Sneider said. Girlfriend had its world premiere Sunday.

From Linda Barnard