Denis Villeneuve, Ingrid Veninger, Jennifer Baichwal, Michael Dowse, Bruce McDonald, Bruce Sweeny, Catherine Martin, Peter Stebbings and Robert Lepage will present world premieres at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival, it was revealed at a press conference earlier today.
Appearing before the massed media at the Fairmont Royal York, TIFF co-directors Piers Handling and Cameron Bailey announced dozens of Canadian features and shorts for next month’s festival.
Villeneuve, whose thriller Prisoners was announced as a TIFF title last month, will also be bringing his thriller Enemy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mélanie Laurent and Sarah Gadon, to the festival. It will screen in the Special Presentations program, alongside Dowse’s The F Word, a romantic comedy starring Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan, McDonald’s The Husband, starring Maxwell McCabe-Lokos as a father trying to care for his young son after his wife goes to prison, and Baichwal’s Watermark, a high-definition meditation on our relationship with water co-directed by the visual artist Edward Burtynsky.
Louise Archambault’s Gabrielle and Xavier Dolan’s Tom At The Farm will have their North American premieres as Special Presentations.
Martin’s A Journey, Veninger’s The Animal Project, Sweeny’s The Dick Knost Show and Stebbings’s Empire Of Dirt will screen in the Contemporary World Cinema program.
Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes For Young Ghouls, a drama about Canadian residential schools, will make its world premiere in the Discovery program. Appearing at the press conference, Barnaby – who’s brought several short films to TIFF – joked about having to rush back to Montreal to finish the film.
Also announced for the Discovery program were All The Wrong Reasons, Gia Milani’s ensemble drama co-starring the late Cory Monteith, and Chloé Robichaud’s Cannes premiere Sarah Prefers To Run, starring Sophie Desmarais as a young Quebec woman who takes potentially drastic measures to further her running career.
Perpetual provocateur Bruce LaBruce will return with Gerontophilia, making its North American premiere in the Vanguard section. The program will also feature the world premiere of Asphalt Watches, a feature-length animated road movie from Seth Scriver and Shayne Ehman.
Magali Simard and Alex Rogalski announced this year’s Short Cuts Canada program, which comes with a new online component: shorts will be made available for viewing on YouTube 24 hours after their TIFF premiere, and stay available until September 19.
Among the 39 shorts selected this year are Subconscious Password, directed by Oscar-winning animator Chris Landreth (Ryan), and Claire Blanchet’s The End Of Pinky, a hand-drawn animated work produced in 3D. And a year after her brother Brandon brought Antiviral to the festival, Cassandra Cronenberg will make her directorial debut with Candy, an experimental short about “art and the artist.”
Handling and Bailey also announced the return of the festival’s Talent Lab and Pitch This! programs, and revealed Evelyne Brochu, Cara Gee, Megan Park and Johnathan Sousa as TIFF 2013’s Rising Stars.
The 38th Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 5 to 15, 2013. Full details are available at the festival website.
