Bunuel

As the festival winds up, despite the glut of stars in town, it’s now clear that TIFF 08’s cinematic vintage was far from stellar. In fact the star-studded galas were especially weak. But a couple of trends stand out. It was a good year for French-language cinema (L’Heure d’été, Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, JCVD, La silence de Lorna, Un Conte de Noël and C’est pas moi, je le jure! come to mind). And it was a good year for that small minority of female directors, some of them tackling material that we don’t associate with female directors (Kathryn Bigelow making her Iraq combat movie, Hurt Locker; Canadian Kari Skogland making Fifty Dead Men Walking, a gritty thriller about an police informant in the IRA.) And one of TIFF’s real gems, Les Plages d’Agnès comes from a veteran filmmaker who is both French and female: Agnès Varda.