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Mohamad Malas, recognized widely as Syrian cinema's first auteur, resurrects the ghosts of his country's thirty-year-old dictatorship with this searing drama, shot in Damascus under a shroud of secrecy and at great risk after the outbreak of the 2011 insurgency.

Shot in Damascus months after the outbreak of the 2011 insurgency, under a shroud of secrecy and at great risk to the crew, Ladder to Damascus is a searing drama that weaves fiction and documentary with elements of the fantastical. In a century-old home in the centre of the city, twelve young Syrians from across the country rent rooms, having moved to the capital in pursuit of studies or professional ambition after the insurgency broke out in the countryside. Huddled within the confines of the elegant house as the uprising gradually erupts in the city, they can no longer ignore the calls for freedom. Conceived as a huis clos, Ladder to Damascus is a captivating window into the psyche of ordinary Syrians grappling with a historic upheaval.

A veteran of Syrian cinema and one of the most accomplished Arab graduates of Moscow's VGIK film school, Mohamad Malas resurrects the ghosts of the chilling legacy of his country's thirty-year-old dictatorship as vividly as the clamouring in the streets. Gorgeously filmed by Joude Gorani and magnificently edited by Ayhan Ergursel, the film confronts the question of cinema's role in times of turmoil, employing its own unique visual language. It also draws, sparingly, on allegory — in image and dialogue — to lattice the complex existential questions that hound both its characters and its author.

Beginning with an homage to the late Omar Amiralay, a fearless Syrian dissident and documentary filmmaker, Ladder to Damascus concludes that emancipation can only spring from love, and revolution from desire. A majestic feat.

RASHA SALTI

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/laddertod...

Recruited as an informant by the Israeli secret service Shin Bet, a young Palestinian man finds himself caught between two very different kinds of loyalty when he discovers that his employers are plotting to assassinate his radical brother. First-time feature director Yuval Adler spent years interviewing Shin Bet officers and Palestinian militants to create this complex, intelligent, and timely tragedy.
One of the most unnervingly lucid films to be made about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Yuval Adler's Bethlehem is a bold and bracing feature debut. Shifting between Israeli and Palestinian societies to tell its story of secret strategies, precarious alliances, and terrible betrayals, this gripping thriller plunges us into a milieu of family, terror, and espionage.

At the centre of Bethlehem's fraught geometries is Sanfur (Sahdi Marei), the little brother of wanted Palestinian militant Ibrahim (Hisham Suliman) — and an informant engaged by the Shin Bet, Israel's secret service. Sanfur was only fifteen when first recruited by Shin Bet officer Razi (Tsahi Halevi), and the two quickly developed an intimate, almost fraternal relationship, one that granted Sanfur more tenderness, respect, and attention than he ever found at home. Still, as Shin Bet's plot to assassinate Ibrahim heats up, Sanfur finds his loyalties hopelessly divided. Tensions escalate, leading to a brutal climax that offers no escape from the morass, but deepens our understanding of it.

Dror Moreh's Oscar-nominated documentary The Gatekeepers helped familiarize Western audiences with the complicated history of the Shin Bet. Bethlehem takes us one step closer. Adler, who worked for Israeli army intelligence for several years, co-wrote the script with Ali Waked, a Muslim journalist. The two conducted interviews with Shin Bet officers, and Palestinian militants from al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and Hamas. Years of research went into developing this complex, intelligent, and timely tragedy. It will have you talking, and thinking, long after the end credits roll — and pondering the human price of conflict everywhere.

JANE SCHOETTLE

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/bethlehem

The estranged daughter of a famous, recently deceased Quebecois filmmaker undertakes a mission to mount a retrospective of her father's work, in this slyly funny family drama from director Terry Miles.
Grace (Lauren Lee Smith) had not spoken to her recently deceased father, the fabled Québécois filmmaker John Laurentian, in years. So even she's surprised when, on a trip to pick up some of his belongings, she offers to help put together a retrospective of his work. Not only has she not seen any of it (their rift was spectacularly traumatic), she knows nothing about curating. She's also a shut-in who rarely ventures outside the condo she shares with her husband, Ben (Ben Cotton). Grace struggles along fitfully, dozing off while watching her father's movies (all of them involving love triangles), and discussing her inertia with her confidante, Clem (Jennifer Beals).

By happenstance, she meets Adam (Kett Turton), a neighbour who's an expert on all things Laurentian and offers to help her out. As Grace digs deeper into her father's life and work — and after a disturbing encounter with his long-time lover and lead actress Sophie (Gabrielle Rose) — she finds herself taking on his persona.

A slyly funny family drama about what we inherit (and don't inherit) from our parents, Terry Miles' Cinemanovels is the director's most mature and sustained work to date, a sexy slow burn with a sumptuously oversaturated look, courtesy of Miles himself, and some beautifully mounted and often very comical excerpts from her father's films. Miles is supported by a fine cast, also including Catherine Michaud as the young Sophie, but his principal collaborator is Smith. As Grace, she's such a profound mystery to herself that her confusion is transfixing and strangely exhilarating. We're more than happy to stumble along with her as she tries to navigate unfamiliar terrain.

STEVE GRAVESTOCK

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/cine

Irish novelist John Butler makes his feature-film directing debut with this hilarious and heartwarming comedy, in which a bachelor party weekend in the great outdoors takes some unexpected detours.

No one makes a less likely candidate for a wild stag party than Fionnan (Hugh O'Conor), a set designer so comfortable in his masculinity that he feels no shame in micromanaging the decor for his forthcoming wedding. But his adoring fiancée, Ruth (Amy Huberman), feels that Fionnan really needs to cut loose in one last bachelor's hurrah with his mates. She recruits Davin (Andrew Scott), Fionnan's best friend — and her ex — to make the arrangements. The gents opt for a camping trip, but what promises to be a leisurely weekend of fresh air and some light hiking is about to get a major dose of testosterone. The Machine (Peter McDonald), Ruth's notoriously obnoxious brother, is determined to tag along.

The Stag is the feature debut from Irish novelist John Butler. At once ribald and heartwarming, this thoughtful comedy asks whether the film's titular ritual still has any meaning in an age of sensitive men who talk about feelings and wear penguin-print sweaters — and the answer is a resounding "yes!" The sojourn takes many unexpected detours, prompted by drugs, masturbation, an electric fence, an unexpected fire, a singalong, and a nocturnal naked whooping ritual that plays out like a parody of Iron John-style male bonding.

Old friendships will be fortified, new ones will be forged, and a spate of boyish behaviour will prove to help these men become a little more mature. Finely textured performances and the beauty of the Irish countryside combine with Butler's assured direction, culminating in a fun, hilarious and ultimately very moving experience.

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/stag

A young aviation enthusiast's obsession with the majestic Concorde is the basis for this poetic exploration of family, culture, and love, propelled by entrancing readings from Khalil Gibran's The Prophet.

Every Sunday, a Pakistani family watches planes land at the Montreal airport. This week, the famous Concorde is scheduled to make an appearance. For seventeen-year-old Akram it's time to take flight: he dreams of taking the Concorde to Paris. Propelled by Akram's father's reading of Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, Nous avions explores family, cultural expectations, and unconditional love. MS

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/nousavions

Subtly echoing the 2005 episode dubbed "the Greek Watergate," a pair of telecom engineers set out to investigate hacker activity — make a scandalous discovery— in this timely and politically charged debut from director Yannis Sakaridis.

For his first foray into feature direction, veteran editor Yannis Sakaridis had developed a project with Attenberg star Vangelis Mourikis, but, in the wake of the Greek debt crisis of 2009, funding for the venture fell through. Undeterred, Sakaridis penned a new script, assembled a crew of friends and former collaborators, and took to the streets for a twenty-three-day, guerilla-style shoot. The result is Wild Duck, a story in which, perhaps inevitably, reverberations of Greece's current economic turmoil abound.

Self-employed telecom contractor Dimitris (Alexandros Logothetis) is forced to close his business after becoming deeply indebted to a local loan shark. In urgent need of quick cash, he accepts an offer from his friend Nikos (Giorgos Pyrpasopoulos), a fellow telecom engineer who works for a major service provider. Parties unknown have succeeded in breaching the company's networks — echoing the 2005 scandal that saw the phones of the country's top politicians illegally tapped — and Nikos enlists Dimitris to aid him in revealing the culprits. Their investigation leads them to an apartment in a nondescript block of flats, but rather than a tidy resolution to the case, their discovery provides Dimitris with a far more personal and intractable dilemma.

Despite the heft of his politically charged subject matter, Sakaridis has fashioned a film that is quiet and introspective, as if edited in sync with its protagonist's emotions. Sakaridis's discreet yet penetrating gaze, evidently informed by his non-fiction work, is artfully conveyed by the fluid compositions of cinematographer Jan Vogel (co-director of 2011's Wasted Youth). Theirs is a vision of Greece seemingly in dialogue with the sea breeze, which, for all the country's recent ills, drifts through Wild Duck like a restorative force.

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/wildduck

A twentysomething single mother in Norway's expatriate Pakistani community struggles with her dysfunctional relationship with her perpetually disapproving mother, in this startlingly assured feature debut by Norwegian actor, singer and filmmaker Iram Haq.

Twentysomething single mother Mina (Amrita Acharia) is seriously at a loose end. She wants to be an actress but blows every audition. She seems uninterested in, and incapable of pursuing, any other career. And she's in a casual relationship with an already-attached and painfully self-absorbed man. A chance meeting with a Swedish filmmaker (Ola Rapace) opens up new possibilities, but looming over everything is the one constant in Mina's life: her mother's disapproval — a disapproval so deep and so gargantuan it's brought about Mina's relentlessly self-destructive behaviour, which has apparently made her entire family outcasts in Norway's expatriate Pakistani community.

A startling and sure-footed feature debut from Norwegian actor, filmmaker and singer Iram Haq, I Am Yours builds on the work of directors such as Sweden's Josef Fares (Jalla! Jalla!), one of the first filmmakers to deal with the experience of Middle Eastern and South Asian immigrants to the Nordic region. But Haq's film is distinct in the ways it presents the phenomenon through the prism of a mother-daughter relationship, which it deals with in a decidedly courageous, mature way.

Haq unflinchingly catalogues Mina's faults. She's a terrible mother, easily convinced to leave her child alone in order to appease a needy lover. Yet, for all that, we sympathize with her, most notably in scenes with her mother, Samina (Rabia Noreen). Acharia is alternately forlorn and infuriating as the confused Mina. Noreen, though her character is monstrous at times, also elicits sympathy as a sad old woman who can't relate to her daughter.

In its incisive portrait of familial relationships and of a woman who tries to live on her own terms but can't seem to stop screwing herself over, I Am Yours is reminiscent of modern feminist classics such as Gillian Armstrong's High Tide. An indelible debut, it poses a pressing question: How can we recognize or give love when we haven't yet received it?

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/iamyours

Filmmaker Juraj Lehotský returns to the Festival following his 2008 documentary Blind Loves with his riveting, narrative feature debut about a 15-year-old named Ela (newcomer Michaela Bendulová) sent to live in a correctional facility.
Forced into a correctional facility by her mother, fifteen-year old Ela is a troubled teenager trapped by the confines of authority. Cut off from the outside world, she keeps to herself, preferring to spend her time in solitude writing letters to her thirty-year-old security-guard boyfriend, Roby. After escaping during New Year's celebrations, she moves in with him, in the garage below the train tracks he calls home. Ela is willing to look past his drug addiction and lack of prospects, going so far as to offer to sell her body in a scheme that would wipe away his debt. Although she succeeds, she is disillusioned by Roby's apathy and returns to the correctional facility where, pinballing from one unstable relationship to another and hardened by the necessity of relying on herself in the real world, Ela is faced with a life-changing decision.

Filmmaker Juraj Lehotský returns to the Festival following his 2008 documentary Blind Loves with his narrative feature debut, a film driven by the strong performance of newcomer Michaela Bendulová. Discovered by Lehotský in a detention centre during a two-year casting process, Bendulová plays Ela with unwavering and emotionless confidence, giving a natural performance in which layers of nuance reveal themselves throughout the film's silent passages.

Lehotský is aided by his co-screenwriter Marek Les?cák (of Martin Šulík's Gypsy, which played the Festival in 2011) in creating an authentic portrayal of teenage isolation and self-sufficiency. The camerawork recalls the Dardenne brothers' penetrating observance of individuality, and through Ela's unflinching gaze, Lehotský demonstrates his skill at capturing the subtle changes that will eventually lead to the film's life-affirming miracle.

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/miracle

Inspired by the artist and writer Hasan Hourani's wondrous reveries, this poetic, first-person essay chronicles filmmaker Mais Darwazah's first-ever visit to her homeland, charting an exquisite journey to the seafront of Jaffa.
When director Mais Darwazah discovered for the first time the drawings and poems of Hasan Hourani, she felt the rapture of having found a kindred soul. Hourani had drowned a couple of years earlier while trying to save his cousin from drowning. A singular painter and poet, in his work he created a fantastical world where he was a character stuck in boyhood, unaffected by the prohibitions of the occupation of the West Bank in which he grew up. In Hasan Is Everywhere, a book he published shortly before his death, he lives underwater and sleeps in the clouds, consoles a lonely dinosaur, and falls in love with a fish.

Darwazah is a second-generation Palestinian, born and raised in Jordan. Inspired by Hourani's wondrous reveries, she decides to leave her life of seclusion and journey to occupied and historic Palestine, to the seafront of Jaffa, where Hourani lost his life. She seeks answers to the question: how do you return to a place that has only existed in your mind?

My Love Awaits Me by the Sea is a poetic, first-person essay that chronicles the filmmaker's first-ever visit to her homeland. A voyage of discovery, encounters, reckonings, and inward drifts guided by Hourani's drawings and poems, the film contemplates the meanings of belonging, affiliation, and love. A luminous invitation to be enchanted.

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/myloveawa...

Returning to his rural hometown after his father's death, a fiery student activist finds himself forced to sort out his family's very tangled affairs, in Uruguayan writer-director Manolo Nieto's sensitive and poetic coming-of-age story.
A story about inheritance and all that comes with it, The Militant is the second feature from Manolo Nieto, a thoughtful, soul-searching companion piece to the Uruguayan writer-director's memorable feature debut The Dog Pound, which screened at the Festival in 2006.

At The Militant's centre is Ariel (Felipe Dieste), a student activist far more involved in activism than studying. Upon learning of his father's passing, Ariel abandons his life in Montevideo and returns to his hometown of Salto, just in time to witness his father's burial — and to be assailed by the man's notary, who gently insists they meet as soon as possible to discuss the many debts Ariel's father had accumulated. Ariel's father had a house, but it's being taken over by his father's mistress. He also had a cattle ranch, but the ranch hands haven't been paid in six months; the property is now co-owned by the notary, who wants to sell off the cattle to recoup his investment and settle some of the debt. More accustomed to negotiating protest strategies than balancing a ledger, Ariel is in over his head. He is also on the cusp of real adulthood.

With his orb-like eyes and oddly stunted speech, Ariel is hard to read. He seems always to be an outsider looking in. We come to know him only gradually, through Dieste's carefully controlled performance and the patient, sensitive gaze of the camera, which most often seems to strive for something close to pure observation. By The Militant's poetic resolution, we know we have sensed a true coming-of-age story, and that whatever path Ariel chooses, he will follow it with conviction and a deeper understanding of life.

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/militant

A bratty ten-year-old boy and his tough-minded Filipina nanny have a rocky but ultimately rewarding relationship — which ultimately threatens the bond between the boy and his mother — in this soulful and sensitive autobiographical feature debut from Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen.

Soulful, subtle, and sensitive, this autobiographical feature debut from Anthony Chen makes good on the promise of the twenty-nine-year-old Singapore director's acclaimed and award-winning short films.

Set during the Asian financial crisis of 1997, Ilo Ilo tells the story of an ordinary Singapore family struggling under increasing economic and domestic pressure. Teck Lim (Chen Tian Wen) has lost his job as a sales executive, but he can't quite bring himself to tell his family. Hwee Leng (Yeo Yann Yann), his wife, is pregnant, but still works full-time at a gruelling secretarial job. Ten-year-old Jiale (Koh Jia Ler), the couple's only child, seems to respond to the rising tensions by acting out at school, at home and in the streets, so his parents hire Terry (Angeli Bayani), a Philippine nanny, to help look after him.

Jiale immediately sets about tormenting Terry — he unsuccessfully attempts to get her arrested for shoplifting. Terry decides not to squeal on Jiale, opting to negotiate with him directly instead. Not one to take such abuse lightly, she speaks to the boy matter-of-factly, letting her anger be known. It's a rocky start to what will prove to be a rewarding relationship — so rewarding that it will come to threaten the relationship between Jiale and his mother.

Named for the Philippine province from which Terry hails, Ilo Ilo is a tender, unobtrusive study of cultural, generational, and familial relations, and the way nannies can at times slip inadvertantly into the roles of surrogate mothers. More generally, Ilo Ilo is about the many ways people connect and come to better understand each other's personal trials. It is a truly remarkable statement from one of Asian cinema's new rising talents.

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/iloilo

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The stunning conclusion to Austrian provocateur Ulrich Seidl's Paradise trilogy unfolds in a diet camp, where its 13-year-old heroine falls for the 40-year-old camp doctor.

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/paradisehope

Raisa Bonnet's naturalistic short sketches an almost wordless tale of the relationship between a young girl and her grandmother. Beautifully shot, it never tries to do too much within its limited running time.

The first feature-film collaboration between celebrated artist-filmmakers Ben Rivers (Two Years at Sea) and Ben Russell (Let Each One Go Where He May) follows a nameless protagonist (played by musician Robert AA Lowe) as he explores three very different existential options: as a member of a commune on a small Estonian island; living alone in the breathtaking wilds of northern Finland; and fronting a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway.

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/spelltowa...

Provocative Swedish auteur Lukas Moodysson (Show Me Love, Together) returns with this raucous and ebullient tale of three pre-teen outcasts who form an all-girl punk band.

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/wearethebest