FARPOINT PRODUCTIONS AT TIFF 2024 FEATURED IN CBC ARTICLE
The province of Manitoba is extraordinarily well represented this month at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Officially, the province lays claim to seven films at the festival, which opened Thursday: four features and three shorts, all with Manitoba connections. Never before in the 49-year history of the festival have so many Manitoba-made films been presented.
Aberdeen is a hard-hitting character study about a woman (a stellar performance by Gail Maurice of Night Raiders and Bones of Crows) on a journey to reclaim a life lost on the streets of Winnipeg. It was directed by Ryan Cooper and Eva Thomas and produced by Farpoint Pictures.
Four filmmakers at TIFF — Ian Bawa, Markus Henkel, Milos Mitrovic and Fabian Velasco — made their debut at the festival in 2016 with Imitations, a bizarre and comic take on celebrity worship. This year, three of the four are returning with their own projects.
Bawa is presenting The Best, a sequel to his 2020 TIFF entry Strong Son, a short that featured his own father, Jagdeep Singh Bawa, giving advice to his bodybuilder son (played by Mandeep Sodhi).
The Best, shot after his father's death, sees Bawa's surrogate Sodhi attempting to navigate the death of his dad, first by trying unsuccessfully to deliver his eulogy, then with a more shocking attempt to assert his autonomy.
Bawa actually has a feature film in the works that encompasses the cycle of films he made after the death of his parents, which he ruefully refers to as his "Sad Dad series."
Making the feature was a direct result of winning a berth at TIFF with Strong Son, Bawa asserted.
"It got into TIFF and was on all these top 10 lists and got me a deal with producers to get a feature," Bawa said.
Mitrovic and Velasco, meanwhile, are back as co-directors of Serve the Country, in which Mitrovic also stars as a compulsive liar who attempts to raise money to purchase a tennis racquet by pretending to be a former soldier fallen on hard times.
Mitrovic, in a phone interview, says the value of having a film at TIFF can not be overstated.
"We had been making movies six years before we had our big break at TIFF," Mitrovic said. "It was hard to get a job. It was hard to get any exposure really. Nobody really knew who we were."
But getting the film into TIFF changed that, he said.
"You suddenly get into every film festival under the sun. I don't even know some of the festivals that it played in, because once you get in TIFF, you get into everything. Suddenly you're playing into 100 film festivals in the following year.
"I started getting a lot more offers for work in the film industry as well," said Mitrovic, currently planning film courses as an instructor at the University of Winnipeg.
"That was one of the greatest years of my life."