Letter from the Editor
In March of this year, Co-Chairman of Sony Pictures Amy Pascal made headlines for a speech she gave at the LA Gay & Lesbian Center gala. She talked about how the industry needs to start scrutinizing its depiction of LGBT characters in film and television. She said, “How about next time, when any of us are reading a script and it says words like fag, or faggot – homo – dyke – take a pencil and just cross it out”. Her comments caused quite a bit of controversy with calls of “censorship!” being the chief complaint amongst her detractors. Let’s...
As I was watching the Academy Awards just a little over a week ago, it struck me yet again just how vast the discrepancies are in how the media represents gender. While the pre-show coverage of the red carpet arrivals is devoted primarily to admiring how the women are dressed and coiffed, the actual ceremony itself featured very few women actually accepting awards. In fact, only one of the nine Best Picture nominees this year was directed by a woman, and there were very few women nominated in the majority of the prestigious behind-the-scenes categories like Best Director, Best Original...
Okay, so this is a pretty shameful confession. When the Toronto Film Scene team sat down to plan out our February issue on French Canadian cinema, we were all immediately faced with a big dilemma: none of us really knew all that much about the subject. Sure, we’ve all seen at least a few of the films that have made the big break into the Canadian mainstream (Incendies, Monsieur Lazhar and Denys Arcand’s filmography), but when it comes to wracking up the titles that are less well known in the English-language world, we were all sorely lacking. Clearly this...
The end of a year is always a time to slow down and take stock of what you did in the past 11 months. If you’re like me, it’s also a time for intensive house cleaning and making plans for the coming year. For my last Letter from the Editor in 2012, I’d like to take you back to 2009. After two solid years of rocking the film blogosphere, I looked around at the very wonderful group of people I knew who all lived in Toronto and wrote about film and realized no one wrote about film IN Toronto. So...
World cinema is often overlooked by the average Canadian moviegoer. Somehow we believe that the resulting film will be difficult to watch (especially if it’s subtitled), it will be filled with things we don’t understand and it will be, quite simply, uninteresting. But it is vitally important to remember that cinema is a global medium. Watching a film on a rainy Sunday afternoon on this side of the world can instantly transport us to a sunny day on the other. Most importantly, experiencing the ways in which other cultures tell their stories is simply part of being a human. We...
