Here I’ll be taking a look at some of the selections for this year’s TIFF Classics lineup. The diverse curation includes both narrative and documentary films from Canada, India, and the U.S. spanning over seventy years of motion picture history. Let’s get to it! 

THE SWEET HEREAFTER (1997) 

A haunting, meditative work about grief, trauma, guilt, and their commodification—centered around a tragic school bus crash. So, you know, the perfect date movie. Ian Holm (whose reanimated corpse you might’ve recently seen pop up in a certain blockbuster) headlines the ensemble as a lawyer who travels to the small British Columbia town to build a class-action lawsuit for a carefully selected group of grieving parents. That might make it sound like a righteous courtroom drama, but if Grisham is what you’re looking for, seek elsewhere. What the Canadian indie auteur Atom Egoyan is really interested in is weaving a rich, emotionally complex tapestry of a community destabilized by catastrophe. It’s a singular vision, bold in its refusal of easy answers or any comforting sense of catharsis. And bonus points for being set almost entirely amongst the icy winters of the PNW (for my money, there isn’t a finer cinematic canvas than the snowy landscape). If your date doesn’t love this movie, don’t sleep with them! 

MASALA (1991)

How to evaluate this one? Well, for starters, it’s set within a culture that has serious issues getting proper representation in Western cinema—in this case, Indian-Canadians. So there’s a plus. Secondly (and, I think, critically), it’s the work of a freshman filmmaker (writer/director/producer/actor Srinivas Krishna) so clearly excited to share his distinct perspective with an audience that he jams every idea he’s ever had about sex, drugs, and religion as a second-gen Canadian into a single 100-minute feature (perhaps knowing that in this industry non-white voices are on borrowed time, so better make it count). It’s overstuffed, respectfully. And I’m all for some tonal whiplash, but this just doesn’t cohere by the end. Anyway, I enjoyed the Bollywood-inspired musical numbers, and Saeed Jaffrey deserves a special MVP shout-out for playing three different roles (including a Hindu god). 

AWĀRA (1951) 

My my first taste of Bollywood cinema will certainly not be my last. This is a special film, a crime epic, equal parts romance, musical, comedy and neo-realist class critique (not to mention a perfect addition to my unofficial Daddy Issues canon). Quick rundown: the pregnant wife of a judge is banished to the streets; their son (director Raj Kapoor) grows up to be a career criminal before falling in love with the judge's protégé, unknowingly putting father and son on a collision course. It approaches that enduring nature-versus-nurture debate and screams “it’s obviously nurture, you morons!” while delivering a searing indictment of India’s caste system. Class consciousness like that is probably why Awāra was one of the most successful films in the history of the Soviet Union, as well as a personal favorite of Mao Zhedong. That’s some real socialist street cred! But don’t mistake it for a simple polemic—there are countless other highlights, including a heavenly extended dream sequence which deserves acclaim on par with some of the classic Hollywood musicals of the era. 

ESSENE (1972) 

Frederick Wiseman—arguably America’s premier documentarian—has made it his lifelong mission to chronicle various institutions and the individuals both working within them and supported by them. Here’s another one of those, not one of his best but still thoroughly absorbing to be a fly on the wall in a Benedictine monastery, listening to men (and women) of God having genuine philosophical discussions. Roger Ebert famously once said that “movies are like a machine that generates empathy”. Considering I’m a rather steadfast critic of organized religion and essentially an atheist, Wiseman’s unblinking camera made me feel deeply for the brethren and their austere dedication. The machine’s still running.