Screen Slate's Maxwell Paprella on the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. Includes Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Joana Pimenta and Adirley Quéiros’s Dry Ground Burning, Daniel Goldhaber's How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and Steven Spielberg’s The Fablemans.
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"Since the last time I visited Toronto, in 2019, the view from my friends’ Parkdale apartment has changed completely. The city is in the midst of a massive development wave, coinciding with a massive housing crisis. Brand-new luxury towers loom over tent encampments whose inhabitants must soon brace for winter. “A change is proposed for this site” signage abounds, denoting planned demolitions. Even the Scotiabank Theatre, where I spent much of my time while in town, is on the chopping block, never mind the architectural significance of its turn-of-the-century Rubik’s cube cornice. Appropriately or otherwise, the brand identity for the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival is all colorful skyscrapers, the distinctive shadow of the CN Tower falling atop one of them.
"As I sat down for the first film I would see, I received news of Queen Elizabeth II’s death. I usually have no reason to think or feel anything about the House of Windsor, but I had just seen its matriarch on the crisp polymer $20 bills coming out of the ATM as I changed currency. I had forgotten I was in the Commonwealth. Within days, her face was everywhere: on TTC subway screens, on CP24’s delightfully bizarre split-screen news broadcasts, even on a t-shirt for sale at a discount store on Spadina Avenue, the main artery of Toronto’s Chinatown. When Jean-Luc Godard ended his life five days later, I and many others experienced some approximation of that grief evinced by those for whom the Queen’s work had meant so much."
