Stepping back and looking forward: From Toronto to 2007

10 woman-directed movies to look out for this year

By Rebecca Flint-Marx
Published: December 28th, 2006 | 6:14pm

This is the time of year when film critics and fellow celluloid obsessives tally their Best and Worst Of lists, combing through the previous twelve months' titles in a fevered attempt to canonize and demonize. But, heeding the advice of Martin Scorsese (and Belle & Sebastian), we at Venus' Brooklyn film bureau choose not to look back — rather, we prefer to look forward to what 2007 has to offer.

As it has in previous years, the Toronto International Film Festival, held in mid-September, provided an invaluable preview of what audiences can hope to see in the coming year. "Hope" is the operative word here, since many of these films may not find distributors, but even so, it is heartening to see what filmmakers — particularly female filmmakers — are doing across the globe.

What follows, then, are ten of the films that women brought to the festival, and here's hoping that they'll all see the light of the projector in 2007.

One film that audiences can definitely look forward to is Sarah Polley's Away from Her. Polley, a talented actress (The Sweet Hereafter, Don't Come Knocking), is making her directorial debut with this adaptation of Alice Munro's short story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." Starring Julie Christie as a woman suffering from Alzheimer's and Gordon Pinsent as her loving but unsaintly husband, Polley's film is an intelligent, uncompromising, and deeply compassionate look at love, its limits, and betrayals of both memory and loyalty. It will be released in May.

Toronto was full of promising feature directorial debuts: another was Andrea Arnold's Red Road. An English director whose 2003 Wasp, won an Oscar for best live action short, Arnold here turns her camera on the denizens of a derelict high-rise apartment complex in Glasgow. Among them is an ex-con named Clyde whose movements are tracked obsessively by Jackie, the complex's surveillance-camera operator. Jackie is watching Clyde for reasons that remain elusive for much of the film, and Arnold makes the most of this ambiguity, accumulating almost unbearable tension with each taut scene and ominous intimation. Red Road is scheduled for release in March.

Relative newcomer Julia Loktev also knows a thing or two about ambiguity and tension; they are two of the ingredients that make her fictional feature debut, Day Night Day Night such a potent cocktail. A documentary and video installation director, the Russian-born, U.S.-bred Loktev brings a spare, plainspoken sensibility to her film, which follows the seemingly mundane movements of an anonymous young woman. Played by Luisa Williams, she spends most of her time in a hotel room, waiting for someone or something that remains unclear almost until the story's conclusion. When her protagonist's motives are finally revealed, Loktev's story takes on a terrible new meaning.

Like Loktev, So Yong Kim is a new director making her mark with the story of a young woman adrift in a lonely world. The Korean-born filmmaker's In Between Days has as its protagonist a young woman named Aimie who moves from Korea to Toronto to study. The proverbial stranger in a strange land, Aimie goes through her days in a virtual trance until she meets a boy she develops a huge crush on. Kim frames Aimie's experience of first love and heartbreak against the backdrop of her cold, alien surroundings: the effect is as stirring and melancholy as the Cure song from which the film takes its title.

It's anybody's guess when Loktev's and Kim's films will be released in the States, but thankfully another festival highlight, Susanne Bier's After the Wedding is expected to hit theaters in late March. The celebrated Danish director has this time set her sights on disparity — between rich and poor, the vastness of the world and the increasing proximity of its inhabitants. At one end of the spectrum is Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen, last seen pummeling Daniel Craig's balls in Casino Royale), a Dane who runs an orphanage in a desperately poor region of India. At the other is Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard), a Copenhagen businessman and father who has arranged a meeting with Jacob that may be Jacob's best chance to save his struggling orphanage. When Jorgen cancels the meeting without warning, his seemingly arbitrary act sets in motion a series of life-changing events. Bier is, as ever, in top form, and After the Wedding will certainly be one of 2007's must-see films.

Like Bier, Margarethe von Trotta is a prolific director and Toronto regular. Her entry at Toronto this year, I Am the Other Woman, tells the story of a mysterious woman. Introduced as a slatternly, inebriated seductress in a red dress, she one night beds a young engineer at the hotel where he is staying, and then disappears the following morning. When she reappears the later that day, it's as a respectable member of the law firm where the engineer has an appointment. As they embark upon a relationship, von Trotta conducts a fascinating exploration of identity, dysfunction, and family ties. Given the German director's stature, it may not be too much to hope that her film will be released in 2007, albeit only on the urban art-house circuit.

Von Trotta's neighbor to the Southeast, Austrian director Barbara Albert, offered Fallen, a compelling portrait of five women who are reunited in their small town for the funeral of a much-loved schoolteacher. The women, who encounter one another for the first time in fourteen years, lead very different lives: one is an actor, another is expecting her first baby, yet another has a child and is on temporary leave from prison. All five are played by some of Austria's leading actresses, for whom Albert wrote her film. They are powerful, mesmerizing vessels for Albert's ideas about change, maturity, and how we become who we are.

Although she hasn't yet earned the name recognition or acclaim of directors like Bier or von Trotta, Katherine Dieckmann did win some positive festival notices for her second feature, Diggers. Slated to open in April, the film, set in 1976, follows a small community of clam-diggers on Long Island's South Shore. Avoiding laugh-at-the-crusty-locals cliches, Dieckmann examines small personal dramas — and comedies — against a backdrop of a slowly dying way of life. With big corporations encroaching on their livelihood, the diggers are confronted with changes they're not entirely ready to embrace. Boasting an ensemble cast that includes Paul Rudd, Josh Hamilton, and Lauren Ambrose, Dieckmann's film is a small, bittersweet, and often very funny indication that Dieckmann has a long and enjoyable career in front of her.

2006 was a good year for documentaries; if Toronto was any indication, there will be much to look forward to in 2007. Among those titles to watch for is Office Tigers, Liz Mermin's look at an American corporation whose largest office is located in Chennai, India. Mermin, who directed The Beauty Academy of Kabul, explores the ideas and motivations of both the company's Western bosses and Indian workers, the latter of whom find their lives being radically altered by the demands and opportunities of globalization.

Finally, Tahani Rached's These Girls offers a fierce, heartbreaking portrait of young women living on the streets of Cairo. The Egyptian-born Rached won an astonishing degree of trust from the teenagers whose hectic, often desperate lives her documentary follows. Rached put it to good use, capturing the deep complexities of street life and its violence, loyalties, contradictions, and surprising moments of levity. There's no telling if or when These Girls will be released in the U.S., but if, as with the other films mentioned above, it does, make haste to your nearest movie theatre, or, failing that, Netflix queue.