19th May 2012
Bill Gates and Bruce Springsteen Join Toronto Festival’s Mavericks
7th September 2010
Microsoft pioneer Bill Gates and American rock star Bill
Springsteen are among the surprising keynote guests participating
in the Mavericks sessions at the 35th Toronto International Film
Festival (TIFF) during 9-19 September.
Gates and Springsteen join established film names who will discuss
their creation of, support for or participation in major new
releases.
Gates sits on a discussion panel centred on Waiting For Superman,
a cinematic indictment of the US school system by Davis Guggenheim,
director of the award-winning global-warming documentary An
Inconvenient Truth.
Springsteen is the subject of The Promise: The Making of Darkness
On The Edge Of Town, his seminal breakthrough album. He will be
interviewed by Hollywood actor/indie director Edward Norton about
the influence of movie-making on his music.
Also participating in Mavericks is Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the
Thai director who won this year's Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film
Festival; screenwriter/director Kelly Reichardt, who discusses her
first non-contemporary movie Meek's Cutoff; while the respected
actor/theatre director Philip Seymour Hoffman introduces his
directorial debut movie Jack Goes Boating.
Among the directors whose works "push boundaries and notions of
mainstream cinema" for the TIFF's Visions and Vanguard programmes
is Romanian Andrei Ujica.
His entry, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, examines the
life of the former Romanian dictator from Ceausescu's own point of
view.
Other films in this session are The Four Times, by Italian
Michelangelo Frammartino; k.369 A Journey By Train, from UK-based
Douglas Gordon; At Ellen's Age, by German director Pia Marais; and
Cold Fish, from Japan's Sion Sono.
Photography by Michael Zemanek