Canada-Man
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does TIFF supports the cover up of pedo-rapist hollyood?
In 2014, the Toronto International Film Festival turned down An Open Secret. Now, its makers wonder whether the festival may have played a part in upholding Hollywood’s culture of silence.
On July 15, 2014, Academy Award-nominated documentary maker Amy Berg was pleading with the Toronto International Film Festival to reverse its decision to reject her latest film, which concerned allegations of sexual abuse of minors in the movie industry.
In an email to TIFF CEO Piers Handling, she pressed the urgency of the subject matter, writing she was informed of Bryan Singer “sitting in mediation with four underage boys he drugged and raped, and trying to pay Mike Egan and the rest of them millions of dollars to shut up and go away.”
At the time, Singer, the director of blockbuster films such as X-Men and The Usual Suspects, was in the headlines as he faced a pair of civil lawsuits alleging sexual abuse against minors.
Months prior, news had broken that Berg was developing An Open Secret, shining a light on what it would characterize as the pervasiveness of pedophilia in Hollywood. Upon hearing of Berg’s film, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers called her to ensure she would be submitting it for consideration for that September’s festival. Two of Berg’s three previous features had screened at the festival (the other premiered at Tribeca), including her 2006 debut, Deliver Us from Evil, an exposé of pedophilia within the Catholic Church that would go on to be nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 79th Academy Awards, losing to An Inconvenient Truth. (The two films she has made since An Open Secret have played at Sundance and TIFF, respectively.)
But upon viewing An Open Secret, Powers and other programmers at TIFF decided to decline the film a slot at their 39th annual festival, telling Berg that the media had already “covered different aspects of this terrain”:
How TIFF Rejected A Documentary Exposing Sexual Abuse In Hollywood
In 2014, the Toronto International Film Festival turned down An Open Secret. Now, its makers wonder whether the festival may have played a part in upholding Hollywood’s culture of silence.
On July 15, 2014, Academy Award-nominated documentary maker Amy Berg was pleading with the Toronto International Film Festival to reverse its decision to reject her latest film, which concerned allegations of sexual abuse of minors in the movie industry.
In an email to TIFF CEO Piers Handling, she pressed the urgency of the subject matter, writing she was informed of Bryan Singer “sitting in mediation with four underage boys he drugged and raped, and trying to pay Mike Egan and the rest of them millions of dollars to shut up and go away.”
At the time, Singer, the director of blockbuster films such as X-Men and The Usual Suspects, was in the headlines as he faced a pair of civil lawsuits alleging sexual abuse against minors.
Months prior, news had broken that Berg was developing An Open Secret, shining a light on what it would characterize as the pervasiveness of pedophilia in Hollywood. Upon hearing of Berg’s film, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers called her to ensure she would be submitting it for consideration for that September’s festival. Two of Berg’s three previous features had screened at the festival (the other premiered at Tribeca), including her 2006 debut, Deliver Us from Evil, an exposé of pedophilia within the Catholic Church that would go on to be nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 79th Academy Awards, losing to An Inconvenient Truth. (The two films she has made since An Open Secret have played at Sundance and TIFF, respectively.)
But upon viewing An Open Secret, Powers and other programmers at TIFF decided to decline the film a slot at their 39th annual festival, telling Berg that the media had already “covered different aspects of this terrain”:
How TIFF Rejected A Documentary Exposing Sexual Abuse In Hollywood
