Toronto, Sept 07: The 32nd Toronto International Film Festival opened Thursday with a cautionary tale about the lasting impact of deeds, good or bad, through the eyes of a boy suffering from Holocaust survivor guilt.
On the red carpet, moviegoers screamed for Canadian filmmaker Jeremy Podeswa, the son of a Holocaust survivor himself, whose gala presentation "Fugitive Pieces" is based on Anne Michaels' 1997 award-winning novel.
"In many ways the book is like a sort of caution to humanity," said Podeswa, whose father survived a Nazi ghetto in Poland and a concentration camp subsequently, in an earlier interview with the Toronto Star.
"If you do good things or bad things, those things have a memory. People have a memory, the Earth has a memory ... everything has a memory. So you have to be very careful what you put out into the universe."
"Fugitive Pieces" is the 10th film produced by Robert Lantos to open the festival.
Its Holocaust survivor theme is also echoed in Paolo Barzman's "Emotional Arithmetic," which will close the festival on September 15.
In the film, Athos (Rade Sherbedgia) meets a seven-year-old boy (Robbie Kay) during an archeological dig in Poland who is hiding from the Nazis after witnessing the massacre of his family.
He and his sister Bella (Nina Dobrev) survived, but her fate is unknown and would haunt him eternally.
Athos smuggles young Jakob back to his native Greece and hides him, hoping to mend the shattered boy, but as Jakob grows into a man (Stephen Dillane), he is still haunted by his family tragedy and the mystery of what became of his beloved Bella.
The story travels seamlessly back and forth from World War II Poland and Greece to present-day Canada, where Jakob eventually settles and marries Alex (Rosamund Pike), a blast of sunlight in his somber life.
The film is "curiously drained of drama," commented the Toronto Star. "The message is uncertain. Jakob remains too much of a cipher, perhaps locked within the poetry of a novel that has made a difficult transition to the screen."
But "the performances are beyond reproach, especially Robbie Kay as young Jakob," the daily added. "His sad eyes gaze upon a world he is too young to grasp and a fate too cruel to believe."
The Globe and Mail gave it three stars out of five.
It is only Podeswa's third feature film in his 24-year career, and his first in nearly a decade.
He has directed episodes of the hit television show "Queer as Folk" and HBO's blockbuster series "Six Feet Under," whose creator Alan Ball is also premiering a film, "Nothing is Private," at the festival.
And Podeswa was recently hired by admirer Stephen Spielberg to direct an episode of the upcoming World War II drama "The Pacific," co-produced by Tom Hanks and to be shot in Australia.
Elsewhere in Toronto, US actress Jodie Foster entertained guests for the world premiere of "The Brave One" by Irish director Neil Jordan, who won a best original screenplay Academy Award for "The Crying Game" (1992).
In the film, Foster plays a gentle radio-host who seeks vengeance after she is molested and her fiance is killed during an evening stroll in the park.
Billionaire heiress Paris Hilton has been spotted shopping downtown.
Brad Pitt is expected to drop by to promote his latest role as America's most notorious outlaw in Andrew Dominik's "The Assassination of Jesse James," produced by Ridley Scott.
So too are George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Charlize Theron, Woody Allen, Paul Haggis, Michael Moore, David Cronenberg, Colin Farrell and Sean Penn, who was chastised for contravening a Toronto smoking ban at a press conference last year. Authorities have publicly warned him to butt out cigarettes this year.
Former US president Jimmy Carter is even slated to show, taking part in the festival's first geo-political roundtable for filmmakers.
He is the subject of a new documentary, "Man From Plains" by Jonathan Demme, the Oscar-winning director of "The Silence of the Lambs."
Unlike Cannes, Venice and Berlin, the Toronto film festival does not award a prize, but offers filmmakers a last chance to generate buzz ahead of a fall theatrical release and the next Academy Awards in February.
It is also the biggest in North America, with annual admissions of 340,000 people, and 349 films from 55 countries to be screened in the coming week.
Bureau Report
