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A Bread Factory, Part One (2018).Courtesy of What the Film Festival

At one point in A Bread Factory, filmmaker Patrick Wang’s unclassifiable opus on the American imagination, a tour bus pulls in front of a local arts centre, spilling out a half-dozen outsiders eager to explore all that the fictional upstate New York hamlet of Checkford has to offer. Suddenly and unexpectedly bursting into song – A Bread Factory is not, strictly speaking, a musical – the group’s guide marvels at the parking lot before spouting a nonsense bit of trivia: “The oldest parking lot in America / designed by Benjamin Franklin!” she croons, as her enthusiastic followers bust out their selfie sticks. Not too long afterward, Checkford’s main café is transformed into a pop-up stage, as various diners trade their club-sandwich lunches for tap-dancing routines. And in-between, Wang lets the meat of his narrative fall to the background, devoting nearly half an hour to a staging of Euripides’s Hecuba.

Viewed, or described, in isolation, these moments may seem needlessly jarring. But taken together with the rest of Wang’s 242-minute epic – technically two films, each with the potential to be viewed as standalone works – they reveal what A Bread Factory is all about: community, creativity and how there is a performative element in every little thing we do. By mining a disparate group of influences – the multicharacter narrative walkabouts of Robert Altman, the patient docudrama of Frederick Wiseman, the touching small-town goofiness of Christopher Guest – Wang has created a singular work of contemporary idiosyncratic cinema. Which makes it a perfect fit for the fifth edition of Toronto’s What the Film Festival, which aims to celebrate work that feels both foreign and essential to the medium. Not quite “outsider art,” but movies with distinct, assembled-with-care DIY sensibilities that don’t fit into flashier festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival or the city’s more genre- or ethnically skewed film fests.

“On a thematic level, A Bread Factory says so much about the importance of why I do what I do, and anyone who is interested in art, and its importance to individuals and a community at large, will be moved,” says Peter Kuplowsky, WTF’s programmer, whom most local cinephiles will recognize from his higher-profile gig as ringmaster for TIFF’s Midnight Madness slate. “Patrick takes so many fresh risks, not assuming any conventional structure, and that’s always been important for the films I want to showcase: films that don’t fit comfortably into preconceived rubrics of what a movie or film festival should look like.”

Five years in, WTF can safely be described as not looking anything like the 130 or so other annual film festivals that call Toronto home. Last year’s weekend-long run at the Royal Cinema included a screening of Anchor Zone, a long-lost Newfoundland-shot dystopian thriller about fascist villains and the skateboarding heroes who defy them, but also Green House, a stylistic mix of Hal Hartley and Wes Anderson. Then there was Junk Head, a stop-motion oddity that took eight years to film, mostly because Japanese director Takahide Hori had no idea how to make a stop-motion film when he began. But if previous years of WTF leaned toward Midnight Madness-y excess, this year’s inclusion of A Bread Factory indicates Kuplowsky’s desire to expand into formally daring work that, for myriad reasons, bypasses even Toronto’s formidable art-house scene.

“I hope this year sees real growth in terms of audience-reach,” says Kuplowsky, noting that the critical acclaim A Bread Factory has received during its extremely limited U.S. run may translate to more curious audiences coming out to WTF and sticking around. “I want to provide a space for what I think are interesting movies, movies made with meagre resources but big ideas.”

A Bread Factory has more than a few of those. Ostensibly about the plight of a small cash-strapped arts centre (located in a former bakery, hence the title), Wang’s film frequently deviates from the central narrative to spend time with the many townsfolk of Checkford, including a heartbroken teenage journalist, an aging theatre critic, a first-time actor and a director exhausted with the market forces of independent film (played by Janeane Garofalo, one of a handful of familiar faces Wang mixes in with amateur performers). By hop-scotching around characters and devoting large chunks of screen time to the performative aspect of art, Wang crafts a passionate argument on how community fosters creativity, and vice versa, and one which doesn’t neatly fit into any programming block.

“I wanted to show the daily nature of art, to show its place in someone’s life. What’s important in life is our connections to each other and ourselves, and art is a powerful way of getting us there,” says Wang, who shot both parts of A Bread Factory over an intense 24-day shoot in Hudson, N.Y. “When I started this, I thought it might be a traditional musical, and I was writing numbers from the beginning. But then I realized introducing elements like that later on aligned to the content, because at that point, other forces are coming in and tearing at the fabric of this town, so it tears at the fabric of the movie, too.”

Like his first two movies, the similarly unconventional dramas In the Family and The Grief of Others, Wang is self-distributing A Bread Factory. But what was once a more navigable strategy has quickly become exhausting (it’s not hard to see the source of Garofalo’s many digs early in the film). “I first did this in 2011, and a lot has changed in eight years, including that some of the theatres we played at back then don’t exist any more,” says the New York-based filmmaker, who will attend WTF’s Toronto screenings. “I’m older and have less energy and less money now. But the critics have also rallied around this film now. It’s no longer about people suddenly showing up at the theatre a day after a review comes out, but more like the review comes out, and someone in a small town reads it and then gets in touch with me wanting to play the movie.”

The exhibition has also taken up so much of Wang’s time that he has yet to figure out his next project. “There was a time when I was thinking about the next movie, but right now I’m thinking about the survival of this movie. Can you exist after the theatrical or first licence period of a movie? How do you not disappear to the world? That’s something occupying a lot of my thoughts,” he says. “[Digital] platforms are changing the rules and royalties and practices all the time.”

For now, though, Wang is happy for whatever exposure unorthodox festivals such as WTF might bring. “You always want the same thing, for people to find the work. I was just under the impression it got easier, finding an audience and your way into the world,” he says with a laugh. “But it’s very hard to predict how that’s going to happen, and who will help you. I’ve learned you have to start from zero each time. But you look for new possibilities and new friends, and what Peter is doing is extraordinary for films that don’t quite fit in anywhere. They can still have this moment to exist.”

What the Film Festival runs March 1-3 at the Royal Cinema in Toronto (theroyal.to); A Bread Factory Part 1: For the Sake of Gold and A Bread Factory Part 2: Walk with Me a While screen back-to-back March 1 starting at 7 p.m.

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