The Toronto International Film Festival issued its final wave of announcements this morning, laying out the Masters, Mavericks and Discovery programs and releasing the complete film schedule.
I know what you’re thinking: after a month of carefully timed rollouts, what could possibly be left? Rather a lot, as it turns out.
For example: Amour, Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, will make its North American premiere in the Masters program, alongside Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond The Hills, Manoel de Oliveira’s Gebo And The Shadow, Hong Sang-soo’s In Another Country and Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone In Love.
Other international debuts are Olivier Assayas’s Something In The Air, Darezhan Omirbayev’s Student, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Me And You, Kim Ki-duk’s Pieta, and Night Across The Street, the final feature of the late Raul Ruiz.
We’ll be getting the world premiere of Michael Winterbottom’s Everyday, about a couple (John Simm and Shirley Henderson) enduring five years of separation when the husband is sent to prison on drug charges. Winterbottom and his actors shot it piecemeal over five years, which sounds absolutely fascinating. Also making its world premiere in the series is the new film from Cabaret Balkan director Goran Paskajlevic, When Day Breaks.
The announcements in the Discovery series are, by definition, less flashy – just a bunch of unknown directors making their first foray into the festival circuit. But everyone has to start somewhere, right?
Killer Joe’s Juno Temple and Red State’s Michael Angarano co-star in Ramaa Mosley’s The Brass Teapot, which makes its world premiere here Pernilla August and Sofia Karemyr topline Mikael Marcimain’s Call Girl, a Swedish-Irish-Norwegian-Finnish co-production set in late-70s Stockholm.
A number of Discovery titles explore the collapse of the American dream from unlikely angles. Rola Nashef’s Detroit Unleaded is a drama about a young Arab-American man stuck in a go-nowhere job Andrew Williamson’s The Land Of Eb is set in Kona, Hawaii, where a patriarch struggles with a terminal diagnosis. And Grace Lee’s Janeane From Des Moines looks at the country’s current political turmoil through the eyes of a conservative housewife following Republican presidential hopefuls on the campaign trail during the Iowa primary. (Given that Mitt Romney, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum are listed among the cast, we can assume this one’s a documentary.)
And then there’s TIFF’s Mavericks series, which brings celebrity personalities onto the Lightbox stage to confront their own image. This year, uberproducer David Geffen appears for a Q&A after a screening of the American Masters profile Inventing David Geffen Toronto filmmakers Graydon Sheppard and Kyle Humphrey, creators of the Shit Girls Say web series, will appear for a conversation and present a new episode of their show Jackie Chan will sit down with Cameron Bailey for a long-form interview and preview of his next film, Chinese Zodiac.
Director Sophie Fiennes and her frequent subject, philosopher and cultural commentator Slavoj Zizek, will screen their new documentary The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology, and producer-star Javier Bardem and director Alvaro Longoria will present Sons Of the Clouds: The Last Colony, about the disintegration of Northern Africa and Bardem’s attempts to bring some attention to the tragedy of Western Sahara.
Tom Donahue, whose new film Casting By digs into the world of Hollywood casting directors, will follow his film with a conversation with Danny Glover and casting director Ellen Lewis, and Amy Berg, Damien Echols, Lorri Davis, Johnny Depp, Natalie Maines and Peter Jackson (via Skype) will discuss West Of Memphis, Berg’s new documentary about the West Memphis Three – of which Echols, wrongfully placed on Death Row, was the most infamous member.
The Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 6 to 16. Complete details of today’s announcements can be found at tiff.net.
