Festival News – July 2024

Festival News – July 2024
by Ralph Lucas – Publisher

(July 4, 2024 – Toronto, ON) Lots to report from film festivals in Toronto, Ottawa and elsewhere. The 22nd annual Female Eye Film Festival runs from July 18 to the 21st. Screenings will be at the TIFF Lightbox and the Paradise Theatre. The schedule includes 75 films from Germany, Iran, Spain, China, UK, Sweden, Poland, Kyrgyszstan, Armenia, Estonia, Norway, Belgium, Egypt and of course Canada and the United States.

The Canadian films, because that’s what interests us, include an Ontario Filmmaker Series screening at the Paradise. A selection of seven Dramatic Shorts kicks off at 10AM followed by a program of international short and feature-length documentaries at 12:30PM. This is followed by a series of international shorts at 2:30 and a program of shorts titled Bittersweet Funnies begins at 4:45PM. The day at the Paradise wraps with two programs. Both offering a short and a feature.

With 75 films to explore we don’t have the space to detail them all, but the Female Eye website is easy to follow with each day of the festival having its own page.

The Water Docs festival ran a program inviting elementary school students from Toronto to Saint John to take part in this year’s Water Docs at School Action Projects program. Click here to watch the Best Film Winner, which runs four minutes and is titled The Plastic Tide, which came from the Morning Star Middle School – Ms. Vrancart’s Class.

You can also watch The Best Project Winner, titled The Innovation Fashion Project from Birchmount School here.

Not a Canadian festival, but filmmakers Guy Maddin, Galen Johnson and Evan Johnson had their dark comedy feature, Rumours, screen 3 times at the 41st FilmFest Munchen. The last screening was today. It had its world premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in May.

Canadian director Lowell Dean’s action-horror Dark Match will have its World Premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal this month. Set in the 1980s, the wrestling film stars Canadian actors Ayisha Issa, Steven Ogg and pro wrestling legend Chris Jericho. Maurie Alioff will report on Fantasia later this month.

Finally, The Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) has announced the seven animated feature films that have been selected for this year’s Official Competition. “It’s remarkable to see how diverse and interesting feature animation has grown, especially with this year’s competition being one of the strongest we’ve had in years,” said OIAF Artistic Director Chris Robinson. “We’ve got a handful of lesser-known gems that are sure to travel the festival circuit (the astonishing Olivia & The Clouds, the mysterious Journey of Shadows, and the hypnotic weirdness of Boys Go to Jupiter) alongside a trip of films that have already been recognized globally (Flow, Sultana’s Dream and Memoir of a Snail).” 

The films are:
Boys Go to Jupiter (dir. Julian Glander, United States)
El sueño de la Sultana (Sultana’s Dream) (dir. Isabel Herguera, Spain, Germany and India)
Flow (dir. Gints Zilbalodis, Latvia, Belgium and France)
Memoir of a Snail (dir. Adam Elliot, Australia)
Olivia & Las Nubes (Olivia & the Clouds) (dir. Tomás Pichardo Espaillat, Dominican Republic)
Reise der Schatten (Journey of Shadows) (dir. Yves Netzhammer, Switzerland)
Sunburnt Unicorn (dir. Nick Johnson, Canada)

This year’s OIAF runs from September 25 to September 29.

Ralph Lucas is a former broadcast executive and award-winning director in high-end corporate video production. The founder and publisher of Northernstars.ca, online since 1998, he began writing about film and reviewing movies while in radio in Montreal in the mid-1970s.