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TIFF is starting with a big bang this year. An international roster of stars, including Jane Fonda and Danny Glover, is boycotting the festival due to a program titled City to City. City to City is a
new Festival programme that will explore the evolving urban experience while presenting the best documentary and fiction films from and about a selected city.The selected city this year happens to be Tel Aviv, in conjunction with celebrations of its 100th year.
The acerbic, hard-core leftist, Naomi Klein, of the No Logo fame, even weighs in on the issue in her usual convoluted manner. Her Globe and Mail article starts with a Palestinian sob story. Writes Ms. Klein (actually, under normal conditions she would be Mrs. Lewis - of the famous Jewish family here in Toronto - but she opts for feminist nomenclature instead):
When I heard the Toronto International Film Festival was holding a celebratory “spotlight” on Tel Aviv I felt ashamed of my city. I thought immediately of Mona Al Shawa, a Palestinian women's-rights activist I met on a recent trip to Gaza. "We had more hope during the attacks," she told me, "at least then we believed things would change."The Hope And Change of Obama has infiltrated the globe. I wonder when we'll be rid of it.
The amusing thing is that Cameron Bailey, the co-director of TIFF, has no inclination to celebrate Israel. His (and TIFF's) decision to hold Tel Aviv as the premier city in TIFF's new City to City program seems to have been based on clever marketing and publicity strategies by Israeli consul-general in Toronto who started a "Brand Israel" campaign a year ago to include Israeli films in TIFF. The idea is to clean up Israel's image to the world through artistic presentations, including theatre, film and literature.
Cameron Bailey writes in the festival program that:
The ten films in this year's City to City programme will showcase the complex currents running through today's Tel Aviv. Celebrating its 100th birthday in 2009, Tel Aviv is a young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity.There's that favorite Toronto word which has crept in - diversity. And apparently Tel Aviv is just like Toronto in that regard.
So, there is no need for Naomi Klein and the usual suspect of leftist movie stars to get so worked up. Bailey and the "Brand Israel" group agree with her more than not. And I'm 99.9% sure (leaving out a margin for error) that the films selected will not displease any Palestinians (or Torontonians).
Here is a sample of the films:
* Bena: a Tel Aviv man brings in a Thai migrant worker for help with his schizophrenic son.
- Big Eyes: the main actor - and the director - of this film is Uri Zohar, described as an "an actor and comedian in the fifties, [who] headed up an ad hoc troupe of performers and rock-'n'-roll-styled pacifists." The surprising ending to Zohar's real life is that he "left bohemian Tel Aviv behind and became an ultra-Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem."
Maybe Jerusalem should have been the choice for City to City.
* The Bubble: A story of a homosexual tryst between an Israeli and a Palestinian.
* Kirot: a Ukrainian "sex worker" and an Israeli "abused wife" bond over language lessons.
* Jaffa: how the supposed peace between Arabs and Jews is broken in the port town of Jaffa when two teenagers a Jewish girl and Arab boy, fall in love. But, as the program informs, this is not about Arab/Jewish conflict, but "the pain of...all-too-human broken hearts."
* Life According to Agfa: a film set in a fictional Tel Aviv bar named "Barbie", but in the real Tel Aviv, Barbie stands for Abarbanel Mental Health Center.
* Phobidilia: yet another film (the third in the series) about a mentally challenged character.
The only one I might watch is the take on the great French comedy director Jacques Tati's film Play Time. Ephraim Kishon's Big Dig is about "an enterprising madman [who] comes across an unattended jackhammer, as though it had been waiting for him all his life. Lugging the tool into downtown Tel Aviv, he sets up on Allenby Street and starts digging...all the way to the Mediterranean."
There's that madman again. At least Tati's character was idiosyncratic - never mad. Perhaps that is the ultimate message of these Tel Aviv films - that the city is trying to come to grips with its schizophrenic (call it diverse) self. Sounds like Toronto to me.
