On the cultural tip there's an even greater disconnect: It's the public utterance of French -- not Spanish -- that sets many Anglo and black ears burning. And while gay marriage remains as much a hot-button electoral wedge in Toronto as it does in Miami, it's Canada's ruling Liberal Party (yes, they unabashedly embrace that label) that is hoping to force the issue, the better to embarrass the puritans among the opposition Conservatives and drive them even further into the political wilderness.
Into this most un-Latin terrain, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) annually unfolds, and for its ten days of September screenings, turns this city into the hemisphere's key industry gathering for Ibero-American movies. This year's edition was no exception, with 700 film buyers, another 750 members of the press, and tens of thousands of plain old movie buffs, all swarming in and out of the festival's 328 offerings. Despite that unwieldy viewing load, Latin film still grabbed its share of attention. Two of TIFF's hottest tickets were Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's latest psycho-sexual melodrama, Bad Education, and Brazilian director Walter Salles's biopic of a young Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, which portrays the famed guerilla's 1952 road trip, long before he discovered the joys of firing squads and forced labor camps. Both open in Miami next month.
"Latin film doesn't want to be ghettoized," explains Diana Sanchez, a TIFF programmer. "Here it plays on a par with cinema from all over the world." And, she adds, it's precisely that one-stop-shopping aspect which has helped make Toronto such a draw for product-hungry distributors doing the international festival circuit. Another advantage: working in a city where not only the trains but the screenings run on time. "I hate going to some festivals and having to travel for an hour to get to a screening that ends up showing in a different place -- or not at all," Sanchez says. By contrast, she laughs, "Canada is a nation that prides itself on being nice. How wrong can you go?"
Sanchez plans to carry that spirit to this February's Miami International Film Festival, where she does double duty as the director of Encuentros -- a festival adjunct that seeks to match a clutch of promising new Latin pictures with distributors and financiers. Miami festival director Nicole Guillemet -- who jetted from Toronto directly to Spain's San Sebastian Film Festival -- has long pointed to Miami's Latin music industry, citing a desire to mirror that primacy in celluloid. Sanchez agrees, but stresses that it isn't going to happen overnight: "It's a long-term project."
In the meantime, expect to see several of TIFF's nineteen Latin features in Miami. Sanchez is particularly bullish on Argentinean director Carlos Sorin's Bombón-El Perro and Patrice Guzmán's Salvador Allende, a bio of the overthrown Chilean president. Just don't ask her to formally commit to any names yet: "I love all my children equally," she quips.
So what does the current state of Latin cinema look like? Well, it looks a lot like 25-year-old heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal, the star of both Bad Education and The Motorcycle Diaries, and a figure who managed to charm grizzled journalists, swooning teenage girls, and more than a few equally enraptured boys as well (a hat trick his Y Tu Mamá También co-star Diego Luna is having a much harder time achieving).
All four of Toronto's daily newspapers gave the festival continuous front-page coverage, making Miami's media treatment of the MTV Video Music Awards look positively restrained in comparison. And Bernal was a constant presence amid it all, whether being featured in gushing profiles or jauntily captured in late-night party snapshots. The local headlines said it best: "Sexy and Idealistic, Too"; "The Soul of Che, The Eyes of an Idol"; and Kulchur's personal fave, from a lone dissenter nauseated by the nonstop Bernal lovefest: "Hey, It's Just Acting."
Best not to turn on the television then: Toronto's answer to C-SPAN broadcast a Bernal press conference with the gravitas better suited to a Defense Department briefing, while the city's homegrown version of Deco Drive invaded the sold-out opening of The Motorcycle Diaries with a giddiness that would've made even Joan Rivers blush.
It wasn't as if Bernal didn't have competition. "This is the starting gate for the Oscars," festival co-director Noah Cowen boasted to Variety. "Either you're here or you have a reason for not being here." With the paparazzi chasing what seemed like half of Hollywood through Toronto's nightclubs and restaurants, it was hard to argue with that statement.
But you didn't even have to leave your hotel to catch a taste of the industry buzz. Entering the swanky Hotel Le Germain's breakfast dining room one morning was like stepping into a Fellini film: A photographer loudly argued over her cell phone with her editor back in New York over which up-and-coming directors were truly "hot," an Israeli distributor sailed through a PowerPoint presentation on his laptop computer, somehow managing to work his mousepad and stuff a croissant into his face with the same hand, and two gamine French actresses looked glamorously dishabille from the night before while pondering their crepes.
Kulchur befriended the sole American there, a writer for InStyle.
Got any good gossip?
"Nick Nolte's publicist is having a nervous breakdown," she offered with a shrug.
Of course, that was hardly news. Nolte, when he wasn't plugging his new film Hotel Rwanda, was earning boldface ink by smashing his glass of vodka down on a barroom floor, falling asleep during interviews, staggering into rush-hour traffic, and generally encouraging speculation that a return to court-ordered rehab was in his immediate future.
On the independent front, there were plenty of Miamians furiously networking. Photographer Bruce Weber made the rounds to promote his TIFF entry, the disjointed but gorgeously shot A Letter To True. Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival manager Jaie Laplante was scouting queer-themed prospects to show for his own event, while also celebrating the imminent American run of Sugar, a Canadian production he co-wrote.
Juan Carlos Zaldivar, previewing flicks for October's Florida Room documentary film festival at the Miami Beach Cinematheque, also got good career news. His own handiwork, Soldier's Pay -- co-directed with David O. Russell and intended as a real-life followup to Russell's earlier Gulf War drama Three Kings -- landed a deal with fledgling distributor Cinema Libre Studio after being unceremoniously dumped by Warner Bros., which felt its examination of the current Iraq war was too partisan for release during an election season.
Also making political waves was Fahrenheit 9/11's Michael Moore, who circulated the outline for his next project, Sicko, a critical look at America's health-care system, complete with an ending sure to endear him even more to el exilio's heart -- a visit to Cuba with several HMO-lacking American patients hoping to avail themselves of that island's socialized medicine.
Even presidential hopeful John Kerry's daughter Alexandra made the scene, attending a documentary on her father's Vietnam years, Going Up River, and developing another wardrobe malfunction in the process. In a sequel to her décolletage-baring Cannes appearance, where her sheer dress turned see-through under the glare of popping flashbulbs, Alexandra angrily tangled with a photographer who snapped a picture featuring her bra riding up out of her top. Reshoot it, she insisted, as the Kerry presidential campaign seemed about to take an even more surreal turn.
Then again, perhaps Alexandra was merely serving up a rejoinder to the Bush daughters's own take on family values. Or as Gael Garcia Bernal put it, correcting an interviewer who despaired at seeing Che Guevara's revolutionary legacy reduced to a T-shirt image: "Che would be troubled by poverty and war. But his face on a T-shirt, and underneath is a beautiful girl? He would not mind that."
