RENDEZVOUS WITH MADNESS FILM FESTIVAL 2007

Running Nov 8-17 at the Workman Theatre (1001 Queen W). www.rendezvouswithmadness.com.

I'm not sure who signed off on the “insanely good films” subtitle for the 15th Rendezvous With Madness Film Festival, but it's glib in a way that the movies themselves tend to avoid. Questionable tagline gags aside, this year's lineup solidifies RWM's status as one of Toronto's best programmed annual festivals, thinking locally and also trawling abroad to find worthy films treating issues of addiction and mental health.

One definite out-of-town highlight is Mainline (Nov. 16, 7:30pm), directed by Iranian filmmakers Mohsen Abdolvahab and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and featuring the latter's daughter Baran Kosari in the lead role. She plays Sara, a bratty Tehran teen killing time awaiting her fiancé's return from Toronto by nurturing a brutal heroin habit. Her mother Sima (Bita Farahi) tries to intervene but gets cowed into driving Sara around on her scores. Her solution is to drag her daughter kicking and screaming out of town to a treatment centre. Where most movies about drug users struggle to aestheticize addiction, Mainline gains power from its restless, arm's-length P.O.V. and washed-out DV cinematography, which feels as drained as the characters. Although it has its moments of hysteria (with Kosari giving a bracingly unsympathetic performance), the film gets at the exhausted, head-hung resignation that attends addiction – both for users and the ones who love them.

Another RWM standout is Macky Alston's pause-giving doc The Killer Within (Nov. 13, 7:30pm), which centres on septuagenarian University of Arizona professor Bob Bechtel. As the title suggests, there's more here than an affable, Rockwellian family man: with his immediate family at his side, Bechtel drops a bombshell on his friends, colleagues and students. He reveals that as a college student in the 1950s, he methodically murdered a bullying classmate in their Pennsylvania dorm and served time in a mental institution. Bechtel claims his coming forward has to do with stemming the tide of American school violence, but the film resonates beyond the topical – it puts a naggingly inscrutable human face to the dramatic cliché of the mild fellow with the excitable-boy backstory. AN

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