Lav Diaz’s sublime Magellan is an epic portrait of the Portuguese explorer starring Gael García Bernal.TIFF
While TIFF celebrates its 50th birthday and keeps on growing and growing, its festival within a festival, Wavelengths – named after Canadian artist Michael Snow’s landmark experimental short – hits 25 and finds itself on the brink of forced early retirement.
Devoted to promoting the art of cinema, which is not an oxymoron, Wavelengths has a loyal and committed following, with its avant-garde shorts programs attracting numerous aficionados from abroad. Tickets for those one-off screenings are as hard to come by as the most star-studded special presentations.
The diverse curation of the program (now by Andréa Picard and Jesse Cumming) is equally respected by its audience and by art-house filmmakers. Over the course of Picard’s tenure, which started in 2006, Wavelengths has hosted a who’s who of global auteurs, including Pedro Costa, Kelly Reichardt and Wang Bing, and artists such as Tacita Dean and Mark Lewis, who both had their debut festival screenings in Toronto. All along, Wavelengths has made a point of including cutting-edge work from such Canadians as Denis Côté; this year, Mexican-Canadian alumnus Nicolás Pereda brings Copper, his funniest film to date.
Wavelengths is not in need of defending. Why then has TIFF persisted in cutting down the program that arguably delivers it the most credibility? In 2016 – a banner program that included films from three filmmakers who competed in Cannes this year – Wavelengths had 15 features, four shorts programs and five installations, including Albert Serra’s five-screen masterpiece Singularity.
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The number of slots has decreased over the decade, and the 2025 incarnation sees just eight features – fewer than Primetime, the section that previews upcoming TV series – three shorts programs and zero installations. Blink and you’ll miss it. Even last year there were 11 features, among them perhaps 2024’s best film, the 14-hour-long exergue – on documenta 14, which is longer than the entirety of this year’s lineup, one that even includes a film from slow-cinema auteur Lav Diaz.
The marginalization of Wavelengths has to do with every major festival’s desire to throw their weight behind films that promise box office and awards-season success, along with the associated industrial fetish for world premieres to attract buyers and distributors. Wavelengths privileges quality over currency, with a program mostly composed of films that have premiered to acclaim and prizes at other festivals earlier in the year.
While its cornerstone remains its cherished yet truncated shorts program, there’s a misconception that Wavelengths is an entirely experimental showcase, where “experimental” has a negative connotation of something that may be good for you but that doesn’t go down easy. Sure, one finds artistic intention here, but rather than framing Wavelengths as challenging, see it as the epitome of cinematic independence. Expect the unexpected, and let the process of in-depth world-building take you somewhere foreign from your own perspective. Isn’t that what film festivals are actually about?
It’s a shame that the program has been drastically slashed at precisely the time that the true artists working in the medium are inventively expanding film’s boundaries. Indeed, each of the wildly dissimilar features in this year’s selection – every one of which is highly recommended – offers a different approach to cinema.
These works are all over the proverbial and literal map. Ben Rivers’s Mare’s Nest is a postapocalyptic world without adults. Maureen Fazendeiro’s The Seasons is a docufiction that twists time and space, set around an archeological excavation in Alentejo, Portugal. And Rhayne Vermette’s Levers (having its world premiere) is an unclassifiable and hypnotic Canadian oddity from – where else? – Winnipeg.
Dry Leaf – the third feature from Georgian auteur Alexandre Koberidze – is a moving ode to uncertainty, the impermanence of nature, and the strength of family bonds.TIFF
The most protracted films of the program are two of the most original and rewarding works you’ll see any year. Evoking the Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, Alexandre Koberidze’s exquisite Dry Leaf is a three-hour-long road trip through the desolate soccer fields of rural Georgia shot entirely on an old Sony Ericsson mobile phone. Wavelengths all-star Lav Diaz’s sublime and immersive Magellan is an unconventional epic portrait of the Portuguese explorer (played by Gael García Bernal) that will likely be the Philippines’ Oscars submission (and is, for Diaz, a breezy 160 minutes).
The anti-colonialism Diaz expresses in Magellan is an example of the political commitment that unites this year’s program, often reflected in a direct connection to the past to navigate the root causes of what’s wrong with the present. Looking back through the use of the archive, both public and personal, is at the core of Khalil Joseph’s raucous Black history mixed-tape BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions and Kamal Aljafari’s haunting With Hasan in Gaza, which finds the director revisiting camcorder tapes from a visit to Gaza in 2001.
This archival focus extends to the shorts, even when it’s combined with present-day technology in Jorge Caballero and Camilo Restrepo’s twisted “historical reconstruction” 09/05/1982. We see it whole hog in Wavelengths 2: Into the Blue, the second shorts program, which features works by Abdellah Taïa (Cairo Streets), Maryam Tafakory (Daria’s Night Flowers), Mingjun Kim (From My Cloud) and Mark Jenkin, who in the apropos I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash delivers a wry, rapid-fire narration over images he shot while travelling to attend screenings of his films, often at festivals.
Whether intentional or subconscious, such a thematic drive impels one to reflect on Wavelengths’ own history (The first shorts program launches with a tribute to recently departed Japanese filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa, who showed in Wavelengths six times.)
But as William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Simply put, there are two paths TIFF can take: complete capitulation to the industry, which is of understandable appeal, or the nourishment of the soul. For all the many problems the festival faces in its anniversary year, there’s an easy fix it can start off with: Make Wavelengths great again!
Special to The Globe and Mail
