Noel Ransome

TORONTO - Oakville, Ont., native Adam DiMarco is experiencing the sort of breakout opportunity that would make anyone consider meditation.

“How am I handling it? I’ve been like, pretty anxious,” says DiMarco, who on a virtual call, asks his manager to corroborate how nervous he truly is. “She doesn’t want to talk. She’s blushing.”

Samantha Bee is taking a pause from the world of politics.

During her seven-season run as host of the TBS late-night talk show, “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,“ and 12 years as a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” Bee covered a wide spectrum of political and social events with a layer of satire on the side.

While the topics were inexhaustible — from U.S. presidential elections to the 2021 attacks on Asian communities — the show, as it turns out, was not.

TORONTO - Lido Pimienta isn’t a fan of the word humble. There’s a kind of twisted history, she says, behind the term.
“Being humble is a word that is rooted in humiliation,” says the multidisciplinary artist, known for her Polaris Prize-winning album, “La Papessa” and its critically acclaimed followup, “Miss Colombia.”
“When someone tells you to go back to your country as many times as they’ve told me, there are two choices, you either humble yourself or you empower yourself,” Pimienta, who i...

TORONTO - Diligent wordsmith, artist, author, and director Ian Keteku spares no effort to ensure that you understand the meaning behind his CBC Gem animated poetic anthology, “Dreams in Vantablack” — or more specifically, the word Vantablack.

“It’s known as the darkest black that ever existed,” says Keteku, explaining the way the branded dark coating allows objects to disappear in low-lit spaces.

Steven Spielberg's debut at the Toronto International Film Festival proved to be a hit with audiences, as his semi-autobiographical film "The Fabelmans" snagged the coveted People's Choice prize on Sunday.

Canadian films also saw a strong showing at TIFF's award breakfast, with "Riceboy Sleeps" winning the prestigious Platform Prize.

But in what observers saw as an auspicious start to an Academy Awards campaign, the viewer-selected People's Choice Award went to "The Fabelmans," a coming-of-ag...

Heart and vulnerability weave through Steven Spielberg’s late-career offering “The Fabelmans,” loosely based on the filmmaker’s childhood.

But more than just being about the beginnings of one of Hollywood’s most successful visionaries, this is a story about family, relationships and heartbreak.

The opening scenes are dedicated toa young, inquisitive Sammy Fabelman, played by Gabriel LaBelle, who develops an obsession with a train crash. After seeing it in a theatre, hebecomes preocc...

TORONTO — Midway through Sally El Hosaini’s new film “The Swimmers” a decrepit motorboat on the Aegean Sea carrying sisters Yusra and Sara Mardini begins to stall.
Their passage had up to that point been harrowing but optimistic — fleeing from a war-torn Syria to the Turkish coast, where they would cram into a packed dinghy boat with other refugees towards eastern Europe, through Greece.

Portraying Black male vulnerability on screen should not feel like a radical or difficult idea, but Canadian director Clement Virgo says that is how he felt when he embarked on his latest feature, “Brother,” screening at the Toronto International Film Festival.

On a sunny, dreamily warm September afternoon, Donald Shebib is lounging on a placid, backyard deck at a colleague’s West Toronto home. The filmmaker, often considered as one of the more vital voices in Canadian cinema, is uneasy about his upcoming feature, “Nightalk,” premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“It’s a film written by two 80-year-old guys that’s about female sexuality,” says Shebib. “And that’s going to get me in trouble right off the bat, right?”

“I’ll be honest, I was close to hitting that moment several times,” admits Brandon Gonez, former CP24 anchor and host of the weekly YouTube news and entertainment program, The Brandon Gonez Show. At this particular moment, he’s providing context to an old story; the type of moment journalists of colour often hear about, likely live, and intimately know:

In the era of collaborations, the designer who can work with Disney can call themselves a king, queen, or any godly thing in between. It’s a process: the established company hooks up with the unbaptized designer, who devises the thing that needs a certain tang—giving their product a new swath of tactile flavour. In this case, a movie is coined Sneakerella, a career on the Venn diagram is introduced and Eske Schiralli presents his offering: A medley of kicks.

Somewhere, within the first five minutes of Revenge of the Black Best Friend, a CBC Gem six-part series, is a familiar but very unfamiliar moment:

“When you realized the cheers were stolen, did you stop performing them?” asks the lead Black cheerleader with her fellow head-tilting teammates. The lens homes to the accused, her stunned expression at the ready.

Melisa Ellis understands what it is like to work in spaces where no one looks like her.
While employed with a Canadian bank, a supervisor once told her that she didn’t seem to be the right fit for corporate. “He said this to me on my very first day of training,” Ellis (BA 2015 UTSC) recalls.

A side effect of playing a villain whose villainy is both clear and unmistakable is that it can be surprising when they make you laugh. That’s currently happening with the once part-time Cobra Kai villain Jacob Bertrand, who when asked a question—the sort that attracts your media-trained answer—he doesn’t disappoint:

Desire inspires motivation, and at times, self-destruction. But in the grand scheme, it’s a dance between one of the two. Enter Jamal Burger, a Toronto photographer turned non-profit starter who comes from that in-between.