More Titles Announced This Week

The titles keep coming, though at a much slower pace than I anticipated. I suspect TIFF is saving the big guns for Tuesday's full list, so in the meantime we have these. First up is a small set from the newly announced Sprockets programme. Sprockets is Toronto's children's film festival and the small selections announced thus far are their usual fare:

• The White Planet (Thierry Piantanida and Thierry Ragobert)
• The Ugly Duckling and Me (Michael Hegner, Karstan Kilerich)
• U (Serge Elisalde)
• The Hairy Tooth Fairy (Juan Pablo Buscarini)
• Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker (Geoffrey Sax)

It's probably a good set for the kids, but there's not much here for the rest of us. Incidentally, the three films in the middle are CGI flicks with rodents in central roles. Coupled with the likely-at-Toronto Flushed Away and next summer's Pixar release Ratatouille, that's a baffling trend in animated rats in children's films. Just an observation I find curious, I guess...

Anyway, the next list is from the New Crowned Hope selection. This is a series of films commissioned for the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. All of them relate in some capacity to the themes which Mozart's music addressed. Here's the list:

• Half Moon (Bahman Ghobadi)
• Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
• I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-Liang)
• Hamaca Paraguya (Paz Encina)
• Opera Jawa (Garin Nugroho)
• Daratt (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun)
• Mogeko and the Stickfighter (Teboho Mahlatsi)

My excitement detector seriously went off at the mention of Tsai Ming-Liang, who directed my favorite film of 2005's festival, The Wayward Cloud. Definitely want to catch this one.

Lastly, we have today's announcement of nine features from African and African-diaspora cinema. They are:

• Catch a Fire (Philip Noyce)
• The Last King of Scotland (Kevin Macdonald)
• Indigenes (Rachid Bouchareb)
• Kinshasa Palace (Zeka Laplaine)
• Abeni (Tunde Kelani)
• When the Levees Break: A Requiem in Four Acts (Spike Lee)
• No Place Like Home (Perry Henzell)
• Sistagod (Yao Ramesar)
• Antonia (Tata Amaral)

I have little to say about any of these, though all sound intriguing on one level or another. I'm curious about the presence of Spike Lee's Katrina documentary, not on an aesthetic level (it's Spike Lee), but because it's airing in America on HBO next week and thus seems oddly out of place on TIFF's roster. Oh well, that's the list. Do with it what you will...