At some point during the 45th Toronto International Film Festival (our first hybrid digital/live event, and the latest in a stream of such styles of festival that will likely be the industry-dominant model for the foreseeable future), we passed the six month mark of Toronto’s pandemic isolation.
Certainly, not everyone in Toronto (and not nearly as many as I’d like) went into deep freeze on or around March 15. We closed TIFF Bell Lightbox that day (or was it the 14th? or the 16th? that thing about “time,” lately… it isn’t just you). We entered Phase Zero that day, if the first step of “re-opening” was Phase One, a few months later. The pandemic came to us months before and got its start months before that, but March 15 was when it Began.
I already had a cold at that point, so I’d been home a couple days, and because having a cold during a global pandemic emergency wasn’t somehow anxiety-inducing enough, I watched Chernobyl from my couch and pretty much gave myself a panic attack.
I used to walk around the empty streets — at the beginning, before people started bugging out / resisting their advice / being dicks about everything, the streets were constantly empty — listening to music (the score from Annihilation was a fave) and just absorbing the I Am Legend-ness of it all. No cars. Animals wandering up the middle of streets (myself included). Nature healing. There was an essay that gave me some early comfort back then, also about Annihilation (actually, it may have lead to me listening to the score), about the cycle of destruction and transformation.
Among other things, it made me realize that I was holding my breath for what I initially presumed would be a (relatively) short time, a time that would end, upon which I would exhale, and things would be “back to normal.”
Well.
Like many folks, I’m sure that dream collapsed at some point before the end of the spring. I figured out that there would be no back-to-normal, no back-to-school, no back-to-anything. There is no back-.
At or around that point, my work life took over. The business of transformation became my literal business. And now, here we are: [not enough] months later, and we have a digital festival, and I’m sitting in my jammies watching movies, along with the ghosts of a host of other people theoretically doing the same thing at nearly the same time, “out there” somewhere I cannot see.
I’m not a programmer at TIFF. I don’t know if the films in this year’s selection were chosen because of their thematic adjacency to this year of destruction — “this year is wreathed in death,” I wrote in my review for one of them — and transformation. (“Rebirth” simply sounds too positive. Have you ever heard the sound a Transformer makes when it transforms? Like bones cracking. Breaking and rearranging themselves.)
I don’t know if I, personally, was drawn to films that speak of this moment in some way; I don’t even know if they actually do, or if I’m just seeing that everywhere, because these movies are the way some part of me is articulating the things in some other part of me that this year has dredged up: grief, and fear, and a suddenly startlingly present awareness that I am, indeed, going to die.
Bandar Band with its flooded headland, its van full of dreamers, its smashed and broken highways taken away by an annual emergency that will become more and more the norm for people all over the planet as this dreadful decade and century continues its course.
I Am Greta with its frail heroine, her tininess, her carbon-neutral sailboat, her rising tide of anger at the degree to which old men (myself included) can paternalize just about anyone if it gets us out of having to feel a moment’s shame for what we’ve done.
Nomadland with its world transformed, a landscape beyond modernity or civilization. Another van. Another broken and bleeding world remade as a community of small parts, small people, fires under open sky. Hope for something after “this.”
Fireball, with its reminder — as only Herzog can provide — that we ain’t shit.
Every day, it seems, a pilgrimage to a place where the apocalypse we’re living through is transformed into some other understanding of the world, or vice versa. Each time I come out feeling better and worse at the same time — closer to the centre of accepting this thing; further from the dream of the way things were. And the grief. So much grief. Walking on unsteady legs in the beginnings of the new world.