TOTO HITS HOME

Toto steals everyone’s hearts in a robotic form.

One of the best shorts of the year that is brilliant and heartwarming is Toto from director Marco Baldonado which should receive awards after it runs in the festival circuit.  Screening at this year’s Blood in the Snow Canadian Film Festival, Tota focuses on a 90-year old Italian grandmother named Rosa Forlano, who plays herself in the film, who is given a robot named Toto to give her companionship and to help her around the house.  A quick friendship is built between Toto and Rosa that she has the robot doing things that she wishes.  Starting from a tabula rasa state, Toto begins to understand Italian, making pasta from scratch, cooking spaghetti and setting the table up for dinner.  Nonna Rosa passes on the Italian traditions to Toto that she has the robot right where she wants and needs him.  Unfortunately, she has to babysit her grandaughter Santina one day, played by Gabriela Francis, where her selfishness and naivety change the home and stop those traditions of her grandmother.

Do you remember those feelings that hit you in the heart when you watched a film like E.T., The Extra Terrestial which made you want to watch the film again and again?  Those are the feelings you will get when you watch Toto because it is so charming in its narrative.  You want to watch the connection between a futuristic artificial intelligent life form like Toto and a nonna who in the last stanza in her life and ready to teach what she knows.  It should come out as awkward but it is surprisingly beautiful as two opposite forms of life working towards making the perfect pasta.  Director Marco Baldonado will make you want to relish every minute you have with your grandparents and paradoxically to teach your children to not be foolish.  It so funny when Rosa talks to Toto in Italian without a care in the world if he understands or not.  So brilliant but God do I miss my grandmother.

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