Toronto International Film Festival 30th maddness strikes back

this year was pretty good,a dn although I was too lazy to get a pass like previous years, I still managed to see 10 movies.
I'm going to go through them daily:






Day 1
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Gilaneh - Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Mohsen Abdolvahab, Iran, Thusrday 9 pm at the ROM
didn't have a ticket so rushed o the rush line and ended up being the first person - hence lots of hassle followed- but they almost sold the entire rush line.
now my feelings about this movie are kind of mixed:
Acting was almost super, specially Fatemeh motamed aria, which sole the show.I have been a fan of rakhshan's social comedies and even her more recent melowdramas, but I think the second part of this movie is her best work (that I have seen).
the problem of the movie was the inconsistency between the first and second halves.that is partially justified as she basically took the second movie (which was a seperate entity in a 3 episode movie about war) and attached the first part as introduction, and besically wrote the movie based on that short movie.
now this isn't quite working in my opinion and anyone who cares to analyze the structure and form of the movie can figure that out.
the second part is a gem in it's own rights, maybe one of the most real and touching Iranian movies that I have seen, the acting, the athmoshpere, and the cold realism surrounding the movie are quite unique , and given a woman has directed it, makes it more fascinating. she shows much maturity in terms of finding the language that she had experimented before.
one thing which didn't make sense though was that all the characters from tehran, were merely cliches of rich , shallow people, whereas the local people were "real" and that contrast could be strongly felt. as I mentioned before, it seems that the fisrt part had just been tacked to the second part to kind of give the audience an intro to what the characters were coming from and to provide a background, but the 2 just don't go together vey well.
the Iranian turnout was lower than my expectations and the high number of Canadians attending was interesting, furthurmore, the Iranians dominated the rush line as opposed to the Canadians who had tickets, just shows how organized we are as a nation and how much we value planning!
all in all a very good and powerful movie.