I’m in Toronto for 24 hours. There was a magazine in my hotel room with an extensive write-up on the Toronto International Film Festival. There are so many great-looking films at the festival, I thought I’d link to a few:
I heard about Blindness about a year ago, and it sounded really promising. It’s adapted by Canadian screenwriting icon Don McKellar, and features a great cast:
Based on recently declassified information and the personal wartime experiences of journalist Mark Boal (who adapted his experiences with a bomb squad into a fact-based, yet fictional story), director Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker presents the ongoing conflict in the Middle East from the perspective of those who see the fighting firsthand — the soldiers. As an elite Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal team tactfully navigates the streets of present-day Iraq, they face the constant threat of death from incoming bombs and sharp-shooting snipers.
Oh, and hey, look, it’s Joshua Jackson. He’s kind of the new Jason Priestly, if you get my meaning.
It’s festa or ‘feast’ week here in Gharb. What’s a festa? It’s a little difficult to explain, and I plan to write up my observations next week, once the festivities are over. In the meantime, here’s a decent introduction.
We’ve been to a couple of the processions that occur during the week, and I’ve been taking a bunch of photos. I’m not a particular skilled photographer, and unpracticed at night photos, so they’re kind of a blurry, grainy mess. I do think they kind of capture the spirit of the event, though. Here are three of my favourites:
Things come to a head tomorrow, on Sunday, so I may add some photos to that set.
UPDATE: I did add a few more photos from Saturday night’s festivities. This is the weirdest one:
Let me explain. Many of the installations have kinetic elements–mostly there are spinning rings of fire and so forth. This one was something a little different.
It took me a little while to figure it out, but it’s a depiction of Mary’s visitation to Elizabeth. That’s Mary in green, and she started at the left side of the street. You can see the edge of the frame she’s gliding along if you click through to see a bigger version of the photo.
I shouldn’t say ‘gliding’, because her path was far more jittery than that. After all, she was propelled by gun powder. She made it to the other side (and impressive feat in itself) and pretty much burned out.
I was disappointed that Elizabeth didn’t have a visible John the Baptist embryo in her fiery womb. As per the Bible, it could have leaped with joy when Mary crossed Elizabeth’s threshold.
