Home Truths and Other Fictions: Geopolitics at the Film Festival

Vanishing and the Emergent For the pathological cinephile such as myself, the annual Toronto International Film Festival is a veritable feast. For nine days each September I immerse myself in the latest celluloid offerings from countries near and far, from to the Balkans, South America to Iran, and all points in between. Indeed, the size of the festival and diversity of its programming (last year's festival offered some 300 films from 49 countries), plus its combination of industry wheeling and dealing and public accessibility has rendered the festival one of the most important in the world today. Film is, of course, both a cultural and political event. To be sure, as Lloyd Axworthy, Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, puts it: Through its visual impact and accessibility, film is one of the major means of mass communication and plays an important role in interpreting and cultures to audiences around the world. The Toronto International Film Festival contributes significantly to the realization of promoting culture as the Third Pillar of Canada's foreign policy. [1] The film festival, then, is a geopolitical event--a cartographicpractice that, in addition to placing on the map, makes sense of and regional space. And like most cartographies, the global map of the Toronto film festival is never fixed or static but constantly shifting, rearranging and reorganising its bounded spaces. Toronto's film festival was launched in 1975 and was in its early years a relatively small event with films programmed into series such as Galas (i.e., predicted crowd pleasers), Special Presentations (films by renowned directors), and Contemporary Cinema (which sounds more self-explanatory than it really is). Then, in 1983, a permanent program called Perspective Canada was created as a showcase for the growing Canadian film industry and its equally growing obscurity within Canadian movie theatres (wherein 98% of screens are reserved for American films). But as the festival grew, it seemed that the Contemporary World series was getting too crowded and in 19 91 two other permament program, American and Horizons, were introduced in order to focus more attention on emergent cinemas. And in 1995 the newest permanent section, Planet Africa, was created. As programmer Cameron Bailey explained, 'Planet Africa' will cover the continent from Carthage to Cape Town, and the African world from pole to pole. Why? Because Africa has long since exceeded its borders. [2] Permanence being but a fickle thing, in 1996 Latin America's Panorama and Asia's Horizons disappeared (although has kept its perspective and Africa remains a planet). Festival director, Piers Handling's reasoning for dissolving the Latin American and Asian programmes was that having now developed an audience for this work, we felt it was time to include films from these parts of the world in the Festival's other programmes. This cannot, however, be said of African and African diasporan cinema, which remains sadly neglected. [3] The festival's constant reconfiguration of local and global spaces, wherein nations, by way of national cinemas, either emerge from (or converge with) the rest of the world, brings together Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of territorialization and deterritorialization as a performance. For Deleuze and Guattari, modem social space is segmented and stratified, yet cannot be wholly contained within straight lines. As opposed to the geneological tree that takes root, plots a point, or fixes an order, the rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles. [4] In addition to being a point of connection and heterogeneity, the rhizome carries with it the possibility of rupturing the lines that segment social space into distinct territories. …

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