In this year’s Discovery and Platform sections at the Toronto International Film Festival, I saw three films about women navigating their twenties, their artistic ambitious, and their interpersonal relationships with their closest friends: Alexandra Pechman’s “Magazine,” Nyla Innuksuk’s “In The Heart of the South,” and Irene Dionisio’s “Idda.” Two of these films are far more successful at processing the growing pains of your twenties through the lens of cinema than the third.
Following up her debut 2022 alien invasion debut “Slash/Back,” writer-director Nyla Innuksuk’s doesn’t totally pivot away from genre filmmaking, although she does have plenty to say about why certain stories are only allowed to be told through the lens of genre. “In The Heart of The South,” a title that is in reference to Toronto being south of the arctic from which its main Inuk protagonist Yura Ivalu (Anna Lambe) hails. Yura is the current it girl of the Toronto art world after her immersive virtual reality piece about residential schools shoots her to stardom.
A few film offers follow. In one meeting Yura has the opportunity to adapt an Inuit novel that will help teach white audiences; the other company is less up front with their well-meaning racism, claiming they want to platform Yura’s personal story — just it has to have genre hook. But really, it’s her story they assure her. As she frantically attempts to write an outline based on a traumatic story from her childhood, her estranged friend Sesi (Zorga Qaunaq) re-enters her life, and soon the truth about their shared past comes back to haunt her.
Yura has no qualms about commodifying her culture for the great good, when she’s the only Native artist in the room. However, as soon as Sesi enters the picture, not only does Yura begin to question her own “Inuit-ness,” she begins to spiral about her talent as an artist as well. Like Yura’s VR piece, Innuksuk uses immersive sound design to bring the audience into her psychosis. As Yura’s self-doubt grows, it also manifests as rashes on her skin, showing for the whole world her insecurities.
Qaunaq is deeply ominous as Sesi, while also being wonderfully mordant. As the tides turn on Yura and Sesi’s strange behavior begins to make more sense, both actresses manage to ground the more melodramatic elements of the plot in sincere emotionality. Innuksuk’s razor sharp satire bites not only into the white guilt ridden art and film world that’s more than ready to exploit Indigenous pain for profit, but also those Indigenous artists who are willing to sell their pain – and the pain of their communities – to the highest bidder in the name of speaking “the truth.”
In Irene Dionisio’s dizzying drama “Idda,” two women reconnect in their hometown of Catania in Sicily during the festival of Festival of Saint Agatha with plans to climb to the top of Mount Etna. Idda, we learn, is the feminine name given by the locals to the active volcano. Adele (Tecla Insolia) is a photographer, whose mother passed away a few years ago. Sofia (Romana Maggiora Vergano) is a dance teacher and free spirit. As these two women crash back into each other’s lives, Dionisio continually flashes to the volcano, its grey ash and red molten lava, destroying in its beautiful path. Cinematographer Gergely Pohárnok brings a rich and tactile texture to this world, while the film’s sound design wholly transports the viewer into the realm of the mountain.
As the women make their way up the mountain, a strange resentment bubbles between them. Dionisio allows this fissure to rumble without quite exploding for most of the film, much like the mountain itself. It’s alive, but under the surface. And while the final reveal at the end of the film doesn’t quite work, the film’s immersive world almost makes up for the distance we’re kept from these characters. Dionisio also does a wonderful job of bringing the local festival back to its pagan roots, contrasting the procession of the candalora of Saint Agatha to an altar up on the mountain for the nymph Aetna, who is said to have carried her child to term on the volcano’s peak.
Time, like the volcano’s ash, will come for everyone and everything, even if you’re able to capture a moment of it with a photograph. As the film progresses, Adele must learn to live with the ghosts of her past, and feel the warmth of the memories that remain, because even the painful ones remind us of what once was, and what still remains.
Sometimes at a festival like TIFF you discover a bold new voice with a distinct point of view or singular cinematic vision. Other times you watch a first time director and wonder if they’re even a storyteller, let alone a filmmaker. Unfortunately Alexandra Pechman’s debut film “Magazine” falls in the latter category. Set in 2011, the film follows Arizona transplant and wannabe poet Nora (Lily McInerny, whose wide eyes aren’t enough to add texture or internality to the hollowness of her character) during her stint as an unpaid summer intern at Platen, a fictional prestigious quarterly lit journal a la The Paris Review or Granta.
Early on she makes it clear she does not come from money, unlike it’s implied most of the young people who are able to live and work in NYC unpaid are. However, the economic disparity of Nora’s situation with her peers and the way this system weeds out working class youth is not really touched on again beyond a broadly stereotyped “writer actress model” rich girl who can’t utter a word without dropping the name of a famous person. Nora quickly finds herself in a situationship with Thomas (Joshuah Melnick), the associate editor who hired her, the power dynamics of which are only briefly addressed towards the end of the film. Delaney Rowe, who terminally online folks might know from her satirical rom com videos, has a cameo as the managing editor of the mag that proves just because you can make people laugh for 60 seconds online does not mean who can actually act
There are also brief moments within this literary milieu that aim for satire by falling embarrassingly short of the mark. For a character who claims to want to be a writer, we barely get a hint at what Noa has to say or worse why she even wants to be a poet. If the film had even vaguely hinted that it was about how at twenty-two you still need to find your voice, that would have been cliche, but at least it would have been some kind of arc. Instead we get a whole lot of nothing. All the characters are either painted in the broadest strokes, or left completely undeveloped; never once did I care about the emotional stakes of any of these characters.
Along with the poor writing, Pechman’s filmmaking itself leaves much to be desired. The dramatic tension is inert, leaning heavily on montage and soundtrack to move things forward. The sound edits are incompetent, with most songs ending abruptly, without any editorial thrust as to why. Ultimately, it’s a New York movie that makes New York seem incredibly insular and boring. It’s a film that is perhaps so specific it never manages to strike on any universal feeling nor find any kind of wisdom or truth. As for its period setting, if you’re nostalgic for your BlackBerry or Peter Pan collars, maybe that would elicit an emotion beyond boredom. Alas, I mostly just felt relief. . .when the film finally ended.
