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Skipping back to the first day of TIFF.

My fest had a rather inauspicious start with The Valley, an international co-production from a Senegalese director working in Lebanon. It sounded potentially promising. It starts with a heard but not seen car crash in the desert, from which emerges a man with a head injury and no memory. He goes in search of help and finds four people whose car has broken down. When he fixes their car, they feel they have to take him in. But as is gradually revealed, they're not innocent travellers. They run a drug lab in a desolate area of Lebanon. And a war is gradually closing in around them.

You could make an interesting film with that premise. The Valley is not that film. It's full of people staring into the middle distance while not much happens, or sitting tensely together while not much happens, and one character is occasionally seen creating ominous charcoal drawings that I'm sure are meant to be highly significant but don't really do much. But ultimately, it doesn't amount to much more than a line voiced by one character after war finally breaks out: "The Middle East is fucked."

On the positive side, the director knows how to compose an image, and he does incredible things with sound. (He manages to create a complete invasion with only sound and a few distant CGI effects.)

Fortunately, my second film of the day was a huge improvement.

The Dead Lands is an epic set in pre-colonial New Zealand, with dialogue entirely in Maori. It starts off with two rival tribes meeting years after a war between them to honour the bones of their dead ancestors. But the visiting tribe desecrates the bones and accuses the son of the other tribe, and uses this as an excuse to come back and massacre all the men of the tribe. The only male survivor is the teenage son, who feels he then has to track down the killers of his tribe.

He's outnumbered and outclassed, but then the rival tribe decides to take a short cut home through the dead lands, a place where another tribe was killed, and now said to be the home of a flesh-eating demon. The son seeks the help of the demon, who turns out to be the last member of the missing tribe, and a great warrior.

The film is gorgeously shot, and has a number of well-choreographed fight scenes. And the demon warrior is played by Lawrence Makoare, who amongst other roles played Lurtz, a.k.a. the Orc that killed Boromir in the first LotR movie.

As an added bonus, the entire cast came out and did a Maori haka during the credits. And someone filmed it!

Now I really want to go back to New Zealand...