Final dispatch from TIFF 2025: “Klee”, “Egghead Republic”, “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” and “Nino”

Several scenes into Kahlil Joseph’s unpredictable and eclectic “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions”, we cut to a clip from an old interview with French filmmaker Agnes. She’s expounding on the limits of film categorisation: “What is bad for cinema is the categories. This is real fiction, this is fake fiction, this is documentary, this is fake doc – this is a film.” By this point in “BLKNWS”, we recognise that Varda’s words are part of Joseph’s own direction for how we might respond to the ambitious designs of film: prioritising knowledge and emotion over categories and rules. Varda’s words have been stuck in my head for the pointed way that they bring Varda and Joseph’s blend of fact and fiction into focus. But beyond that, as I complete my dispatches on this year’s Toronto Film Festival, the idea of what it means for a film to be just a film, free from categorisation or structures, feels productive. How might perceptions of films change when experienced outside of the confines of classification?

It’s an idea that helped me to settle the swerves and surprises in the four dissimilar films that make up this final dispatch: whether moody alien encounters, tongue-in-cheek alternate realities, teasing blurring of lines between fact and fiction or even the seemingly straightforward but sly melancholy of an atypical illness drama. Considering these films without considering the rules or limits of their purported genres opened interesting possibilities in responding to their conceits and climaxes.

A scene from “Klee”; Image: Courtesy of TIFF

In Gavin Baird’s disorienting short film “Klee”, classifications do little to convey the intentional weirdness of this moody quasi-horror film. “Klee”, which premiered in the Strange Cuts section of shorts at TIFF, finds us in 1885 in a Saskatchewan village. A meteor strikes in an expansive field in the community, and an alien in the form of an Indigenous man steps out, thereby changing the lives of those who live there. His arrival in the remote village, surrounded by a sea of white faces, ruptures the semblance of calm in the area and suddenly strange things begin to develop. Just as provocative as the infiltration of the community is the moody way that Baird conveys the unsettling and unpredictable contours of this place, turning a droll and unsettling contemplation on race and bigotry into an unexpected descent into body-horror and dark-humour. “Klee” is a strange film, unexpected and needling throughout its brief running time.

At every turn, “Klee” seems to emerge from a mind completely unbridled by familiar ways of navigating a story like this. Metis filmmaker Baird capitalises on distorted sound design and moody cinematography to convey the strangeness of a time and place where something is very, very wrong. Whether in look, sound, form or tone, “Klee” is agitatedly pulsating with the energy of something intended to provoke, surprise, and ultimately unsettle. The disorienting aesthetics draw us closer to the thematic urgency, though. One does not need to look deep into “Klee” to find the critiques of colonialism thrumming through the “Klee”. As the mysterious alien figure ruptures the relative calm of a family in the community, causing tensions and then illness, the historical allusions of “Klee” are pointed. As daughter, then mother, then father find themselves swept up in the ineffable pull of this strange figure, the film (deliberately absent of context to explain things like character motivations or desires)  leaves the audience to fill in the emotional gaps and then opts to leave us equal parts confounded and amused at the lengths to which Baird means to tease us with the inexplicable.

By the time it swerves into an unexpected reflection on sexuality limned with a body horror aesthetic, “Klee” becomes both perversely funny and perversely jarring for the sheer audaciousness of its form and tone. I couldn’t think of how to contextualise or categorise the sheer strangeness of “Klee”, but with this film Baird has announced himself as an Indigenous filmmaker willing to interrogate the presence of Indigeneity onscreen in bold and surprising ways. One might imagine ways of stretching the tensions of “Klee” into a feature-length film, but the unanswered questions and teasing complications of the mystery in this form feel like the ideal way to confound and challenge audiences.

Ella Rae Rappaport in “Egghead Republic”; Image: Courtesy of TIFF

I wish the unsettling textures of “Egghead Republic” from directors Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja felt as instructive or meaningful, even if I find myself clinging to the sheer daring of their strange and earnest speculative sci-fi film. In an alternative reality where the Cold War did not end but became hot enough for an atomic bomb to fall on Soviet Kazakhstan, “Egghead Republic” follows a group of journalists on an expedition to a joint Soviet/American military base that monitors a Kazak radioactive zone. Rather than a dramatic foray into speculative fiction, though, “Egghead Republic” is all satire. These are not typical journalists. Instead, Kalamazoo Herald is a dubious publication owned by Dino Davis (Tyler Labine), who enlists illustrator Sonja Schmidt (Ella Rae Rappaport) for an unpaid internship. The naïve and impressionable young woman finds herself swept up in the chaos of her powerful idiot of a boss, as “Egghead Republic” swerves into a heady dreamscape of unreality.

There are several ideas of intellectual value at work in “Egghead Republic”, which filters its adaptation of Arno Schmidt’s 1957 novel “The Egghead Republic” through the experiences of Kågerman from her time at Vice during the height of the publication’s influence and significance. There’s an impressive daring in using this and the Cold War as the basis for something as deliberately flippant and teasing as “Egghead Republic”, but where the intentions of this satire might be clear, in existence, it’s more often ambivalent than exacting. There might, for example, be daring in the way “Egghead Republic” thrusts audiences into its alternate universe, but in its deployment of the way this alternate world is hauntingly similar to ours, riddled with abuse of power, patriarchal overreach and capitalistic rot, so much of the satire and surrealism feels schematic. “Egghead Republic” moves with the earnest sense of a pair of filmmakers willing to throw every idea at the wall, and there’s a charm in that decadence, but it also leads to a film that feels imbalanced by ideas and less thoughtful about its approach to form and structure.

Worse yet, as the avatar for our escapades, Swedish actress Ella Rae Rappaport is often out of place with the weight of the story on her shoulders. Her Sonja comes across as a character Megan Stalter might play in a sketch comedy, but without writing that makes the delusionality spark. It’s a performance that’s accurate in its grating naïveté but becomes increasingly imbalanced as the film struggles to develop Sonja into a character with her own sense of self. Labine meanwhile, is commanding the screen with his blustering boss, but there’s never enough tension or nuance in her villainous boss. Even the plot twist of an ending, depending on a series of events that should feel more explosive than they do in the film’s chronology, feels more neutered than fiery. On the very periphery of it all, Arvin Kananian is doing a compelling job as a cameraman experiencing the worst few days of his life. Even when “Egghead Republic” faltered, he kept drawing my attention.

Still, call it festival fever or the array of independent films I’ve seen over the few weeks at TIFF, I left “Egghead Republic” curious and intrigued by the dizzying strangeness of the places the film goes to, rather than disappointed with the sometimes-diaphanous approach to comedy, surrealism or satire. There’s merit in the strange, and even dissonant tones that Kågerman and Lilja make use of, as there is in the way it uses a decades-old futuristic science-fiction novel to tell a very contemporary story about agency, autonomy and gender. I can’t say I left “Egghead Republic” with a sense of clarity in its vision, or even certainty in its emotional fabric but I did leave it wondering where next Kågerman and Lilja might go in their explorations of conflicting tones and moods. 

It’s the navigation of conflicting tones and moods that Kahlil Joseph does best in the dizzying onslaught of ideas and emotions that “BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions” asks audiences to engage with. In this feature debut, expanded from a short film, Kahlil turns a sprawling memorialisation of African history and culture into an unpredictable, playful and sincere exploration of blackness onscreen.

A scene from “BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions”; Image: Courtesy of TIFF

Words on the screen speak to us, as if straight from Joseph’s pen, in opening scenes inviting us to partake in the experience of the film, and playfully guiding us on how to receive it. These early sections make use of meme iconography and pointed asides with a candour and quickness that immediately prepare for a different kind of foray into nonfiction filmmaking. Ostensibly, “BLKNWS” is a documentary, and yet the film immediately seems to reject this notion as part of the way scenes, like the one of Varda, intersperse as part of its rhythms encouraging us to consider how the form of a thing might restrict our relationship with it. When the film comforts the audience in the opening that this is not a documentary, it’s as much a tongue-in-cheek denial as it is a sly (but no less pointed) assurance to the kinds of people who are rarely prioritised as audiences of documentary to know that they have a place here. This is not a stuffy, and “proper” encounter with nonfiction. Joseph is inviting the Black audience in: sit, be comfortable, partake. This is for you, too.

The film explores two strands. One is a celebration of W.E.B. DuBois’ Pan-Africanist focus, using his unfinished Encyclopaedia Africana as a way of moving through several key moments of historical Blackness. The other concerns a fictional story of a journalist reporting on Afro-futuristic transatlantic art, the echoes of the transatlantic slave trade serving as a sobering focus for key sequences in the film. “BLKNWS” is sprawling, living up to its name of Black News. And so, the film unfurls like a series of charged and potent moments of Black importance, sometimes asking audiences to draw their own connections. If there’s a sense that some of “BLKNWS” might not immediately, consistently, live up to the liveliness of those opening sessions it’s only because there’s a charged sense of Joseph inviting the audience into his headspace to sit with him while he unravels the tomes of information here. There’s something immediately arresting and tender in that approach. In some moments, it is as if Joseph has made us co-conspirators in his audacious way of seeing things. And that’s what this film is – a way of seeing things, a way of seeing Black things that insists (and just as much resists) drawing connections between them instead asking us to embrace them in their full and vivid difference.

It’s all suffused with a level of muchness that I immediately suspect that BLKNWS might be the type of film that invites and even rewards multiple viewings. The instinct to greedily soak up every allusion is soon shuttered when the mass of information begins to increase and you realise that “BLKNWS” is asking us to sit in this space and immerse ourselves in the vignettes as part of a mosaic of Blackness through the ages. Even when I found myself wondering if the film might not improve without the fictionalised, I found the delirious swerves of BLKNWS asking me to consider just how much the performed “fictive” bits might ask audiences to consider about the performance and existence of Blackness. There’s a thrumming intellectual core running through BLKNWS, as it problematises our ideas of history, the documentary as a form, archival work and political filmmaking.

And for all the things that BLKNWS does not do (and even the things that it does do), one recognises a film singularly devoted to the rhythms of itself. “BLKNWS” wants us to leave it thinking, and that’s a rewarding gift for any film to leave us with. And critically important at the present.

And it’s the query of how a film might want us to leave it that I found most pressing at the end of “Nino”, the debut film from director Pauline Loquès and the least unusual of this final quartet of films at TIFF.

Théodore Pellerin in “Nino”; Image: Courtesy of TIFF

When Nino (Théodore Pellerin) is unexpectedly diagnosed with throat cancer at the beginning of the film, he spends the rest of his weekend in a state of emotional cloudiness, faced with confronting his mortality before beginning chemotherapy in a few days. The ticking time bomb of the film concerns the likelihood that the treatment required will prevent him from having children. Faced with this reality, Nino must spend the next few days deciding whether to freeze his sperm to give his future self the chance to have children. The built-in urgency of both the diagnosis and the treatment could create a film that is heartbreakingly dramatic or absurdly comedic in its development. Instead, Loquès, who co-writes the film with Maud Ameline, chooses neither. “Nino” opts for something a lot more tempered and restrained. A kind of ambling waltz through a few days with the shy and self-effacing Nino as he reveals a little more of himself to the people around him, and to us, as the film goes on.

In Pellerin, Loquès finds a dependable performer to build this kind of restless character study on. In the opening sequences, a nonplussed Nino tries to make sense of a diagnosis being read to him that he has little context for. Loquès is thrusting us, as well as him, into the unexpected situation, providing no context for what’s at stake. Watching Nino politely trying to make sense of the situation, while exuding a painful amount of embarrassed politeness, establishes the stakes of this. How can this shy young man become a subject, and not an object, in his life?

I found myself thinking of Joachim Trier’s “Oslo August 31st” for several scenes throughout the middle of “Nino” as we watched an emotionally controlled Nino struggle to make connections in the city around him. Trier’s film is sadder and more melancholic in its existential concerns but thinking of Trier did help me to refit the dimensions of “Nino” in my head, allowing me to appreciate the modest ambitions of this slight film but also recontextualise it within the framework of the films I saw at TIFF this year. In prioritising independent, and primarily non-English language films at TIFF this year, I was able to focus on unassuming, and oftentimes sharply outré approaches to familiar conceits existing outside of the structure of Hollywood cinema. Nino (and “Nino”) is on a journey of self-actualisation. His great heroic act is an insistence of something he wants in a hospital aisle towards the film’s end – a declaration wrapped up in a careful wish for living that proves so important. Rather than hyper focusing on the potential tragedy of a cancer diagnosis, “Nino” opts for something more whimsical and warmer. The friend from the past that becomes a key figure in Nino’s journey even avoids the expected trappings we might expect from this kind of would-be romantic encounter and turns “Nino” into a surprisingly clear-eyed film about people trying to do their best amid the haziness of the contemporary world. Even in its simplicity, I appreciated the way “Nino” – like the other films of this final TIFF dispatch – found value in resisting the overtures of its categorisation.