Saw the world premiere of “Sharkwater” at Ryerson which was received with a unanimous standing ovation. What began as an endeavour to shoot sharks in all their splendour quickly turned into a much greater story, a pro-active document that goes so far as to show the documentarian alongside a fellow Canadian ship captain ramming into illegal shark poachers off the shores of Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Galapagos. Through incredible acts of bravery and covert ops, they expose a trillion dollar shark fin poaching industry based out of China/Taiwan that depletes the oceans of over 100 million sharks a year. Strongly recommended. For more information: www.sharkwater.com
\Sage and I wandered around Yorkville for the next couple of hours as we killed time before making our way to the Isabel Bader theater for Tsai Ming-liang’s “I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone.”

The film follows a trio of Malaysian urban youth, one a homeless vagabond, the other a construction worker, and the third a woman whose life consists primarily of dry bathing her comatose brother in law. The narrative unfolds without dialogue and through achingly long shots that linger long after the mind has grown weary. Within the hazy, polluted grit of industrial Kuala Lampur these three find a strange dreamlike peace within their silent painful communion. Given that one of my all time favorite films is Andrei Tarkovsky’s “The Stalker,” I was able to appreciate the somnolent observation of those moments that unfold beyond the contemporary abridged attention span. Challenging, but necessary.

Tomorrow I have to put myself on tape for a last minute audition for Brittany Murphy’s film “The Ramen Girl”, and then we are off to try to get in to white hot “Death of A President”. I overheard another filmgoer today recounting the presence of no less than 12 security guards at the first screening of the film here at TIFF 2006. Promises to be as charged as the widely protested screeening of the Kensingtion cat movie a couple of years back.

Then at midnight we have a pair of tickets to “Trapped Ashes” – the tickets given to us by the producer himself whom we ran into outside the Four Seasons today. Well it’s time I got my horror fix for the year, so what better way to do it than via a series of horror shorts. More bang for my proverbial buck.