When 93-year-old Thelma Post (June Squibb) gets duped by a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson, she sets out on a treacherous quest across the city to reclaim what was taken from her.VVS
Five minutes into a conversation with the director of the Ageless International Film Festival, and already my questions are getting old.
“You keep focusing on the seniors coming to the festival,” Judy Gladstone says. “But we don’t exist to provide movies exclusively for an older audience. I definitely don’t see us as the seniors film festival or something.”
Point taken – “ageless” is in the title, not aged. Now in its fifth year, the Toronto festival, which kicks off this weekend and employs a number of downtown theatres, exists to illuminate stories about elders, not to cater to them. Certainly, one of this year’s films, Thelma, Josh Margolin’s delightful comedy starring veteran character actor June Squibb, was built to entertain crowds beyond the pensioners.
There was concern as pandemic restrictions eased that older filmgoers might not return to theatres in the same numbers. “The audience is just not there,” a Vanity Fair headline fretted in 2022, referring to films geared to adults.
When cinemas were closed because of COVID-19, audiences of all ages availed themselves to streaming options. The screen was smaller but the popcorn and Pepsi were cheap, and parking was on a couch, not a paved lot.
The pay-what-you-can Ageless festival was virtual in its first two years, 2020 and 2021. Speaking to The Globe and Mail in 2021, Gladstone, who co-founded the festival with the late Sylvia Lustgarten, said people were avoiding cinemas for all but the blockbusters. “They’re scared to go,” she explained at the time.
The festival’s third edition in 2022 was a hybrid of virtual and in-person screenings. Since then, the online screenings available to a countrywide audience have mostly been abandoned.
“We had people insisting they wanted to stay virtual, but they weren’t showing up online to watch the films,” says Gladstone. “It’s not worth it for us. It would be cheaper for us to write the virtual viewers a cheque and tell them to subscribe to Criterion Collection. At the end of the day, the people who are really interested do show up at the cinema.”
There is evidence to back that up. A recent study commissioned by the Beverly Hills-based United Talent Agency found that in a poll of 2,000 Americans between the ages of 15 and 69, 75 per cent said they planned to maintain their movie-going in 2023, especially if there were quality films to see.
A poll commissioned by AARP, an interest group in the United States focusing on issues affecting those over 50, found that older audiences returned to cinemas in 2022 at rates that outpaced prepandemic levels. The findings aligned with the mission of AARP’s Movies for Grownups program, which champions what it calls “movies for grownups, by grownups.”
The Ageless festival is on the same page. Highlights this year include The Second Act (Le Deuxième Acte), Quentin Dupieux’s French meta-comedy about a young woman who introduces a boyfriend to her father. It makes its North American premiere after opening this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Thelma, though a comedy, is based on director Margolin’s grandmother being duped by a phone scammer. After the Ageless screening (Oct. 5, at Innis Town Hall Theatre), author Barbara Gowdy will share her own experience of being taken for $15,000.
A continuing thread through Ageless programming over the years are films concerned with intergenerational interactions, such as Harold and Maude, Last Summer, The Cuban, Bruce LaBruce’s Gerontophilia and, last year, Faces Places, which gets an encore screening this year.
“Our goal is to implement change in terms of how people look at older generations,” explains Gladstone. “It’s important to have young people coming. They’re the ones who can make the change.”