Cinema


It is with considerable sadness that the TFCA notes the passing of our friend and colleague Peter Brunette, who died earlier this month while attending the Taormina Film Festival in Italy. He will be sorely missed at the Toronto film festival this fall.

The Toronto Film Critics Association has added its voice to the international groups calling for the release of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi and his fellow filmmaker, Mohammad Rasoulof, who have been in solitary confinement for the past two weeks in an Iranian jail.

“Polytechnique”, Denis Villeneuve’s harrowing examination of the Montreal Massacre, has won the Toronto Film Critics Association’s Rogers Best Canadian Film Award for the year 2009.

Xavier DolanXavier Dolan, the Québec director, writer, and star of “J’ai tué ma mère” (”I Killed My Mother”), an audacious and captivating first film that had its world premiere at the 2009 Cannes film festival, is the first winner of the Toronto Film Critics Association’s new Jay Scott Prize for an emerging artist.

Angela BaldassarreAngela Baldassarre — film critic, founding member of the Toronto Film Critics Association, wife, mother and a very good friend — passed away November 15th, 2007. I am writing this appreciation for her colleagues in FIPRESCI because, were it not for Angie, I wouldn’t know any of you. Angie brought the Toronto critics into the organization, placing us on film-festival juries around the world and helping our fairly insular group make new connections and new friends.