The Toronto International Film Festival kicked off Thursday, with a huge set of movies charged with social and political messages.
The Festival will premiere some of the most anticipated movies of the season and officially head us into Awards season.
Toronto Film Festival kicked off
The Toronto Film Festival kicked off its 42nd edition Thursday night. It will screen over 250 films throughout the 11-day event in Canada’s largest city.
The Toronto International Film Festival comes right on the heels of the Venice and Telluride festivals, but the size and scope of Toronto have long made it the centerpiece of the fall movie season.
It’s where much of the coming awards season gets handicapped, debated and solidified. It’s also a significant market for new films, and this year several intriguing films are on the block.
But most eyes will be on the gala premieres of the fall’s biggest films, including Alexander Payne’s ‘Downsizing,” Guillermo Del Toro’s ‘The Shape of Water,’ George Clooney‘s ‘Suburbicon,’ and maybe the most explosive movie of the season, Darren Aronofsky’s mystery-shrouded allegorical thriller ‘mother!’
Among the possible awards contenders showing at TIFF are ‘First They Killed My Father’, directed by Angelina Jolie; ‘Breath’ directed by Andy Serkis; ‘Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool’ starring Annette Bening, and Roman J Israel, and ‘Esq’ starring Denzel Washington.
Also, Festival’s organizers announced that for the first time ever counts more than one-third of its directors as female.
Some of these female directors include the Telluride break out ‘Lady Bird’ by Greta Gerwig, Brie Larson’s magical realist directorial debut ‘Unicorn Store’; and ‘Battle of the Sexes,’ directed by Valerie Faris and her husband, Jonathan Dayton.
Toronto International Film Festival comes as many films shown at the festival traditionally go on to Oscars success.
Unlike many film festivals, Toronto does not appoint a jury to score the films or give prizes. Instead, it asks audience members to name a “People’s Choice” in a public ballot.
Previous winners include ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, ‘Room’, ’12 Years a Slave’, ‘The King’s Speech’, ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ and ‘La La Land’.
Opening debate
Few institutions in cinema can match the teeming, overwhelming Toronto International Film Festival as a conversation-starting force. It simply has a lot of movies worth talking about.
And this year, many of the films that will parade down Toronto red carpets will hope to shift the dialogue not just in terms of awards buzz, but in other directions, too: equality in Hollywood; politics in Washington; even about the nature of the movies, themselves.
That’s what the filmmakers behind The Battle of the Sexes,’ one of the anticipated films heading to TIFF in the coming days, are hoping for.
After the festival opens Thursday with another tennis movie, the rivalry drama ‘Borg/McEnroe,’ Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (the directing duo who helmed 2006’s ‘Little Miss Sunshine’) will premiere their drama about the 1973 showdown between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.
The movie, starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell, holds obvious parallels for a movie industry with its own issues of gender equality, in both pay disparity and directing opportunity.
For others, it will recall issues that dominated last year’s U.S. presidential campaign. But “Battle of the Sexes” may surprise moviegoers in its broad sympathies on both sides of the net.
“The one thing we didn’t want to have happened was this polarizing political document,” said Dayton.
“Right now, there’s enough of that in the world. We wanted to tell a more personal story and keep it from becoming too binary.”
The filmmakers say they are expecting “a variety of opinions in any one audience.”
“It’s really the best way to release a film, at a festival like Telluride or Toronto,” said Faris.
“A great way to get the word out about a film. It’s a great thing for the filmmakers to have what is usually a pretty film-oriented, film-loving audience. It gives you hope that they’re still out there.”
British films taking on the competition
British talent will join the festival to hone their Oscars campaign as we go down Awards season. Some 35 UK-involved productions will screen at TIFF.
‘Mary Shelley’, a biopic about the Frankenstein author, will also get its world premiere with cast members Maisie Williams, from ‘Game Of Thrones‘, and Douglas Booth attending.
Other world premieres include ‘The Mountain Between Us’, starring Idris Elba and Kate Winslet, and ‘The Current War’, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Holland, and Nicholas Hoult
‘The Thick Of It’ creator Armando Iannucci will also debut his latest satire, ‘The Death Of Stalin’.
British director Joe Wright, known for ‘Atonement’, will show political drama ‘Darkest Hour’ with Gary Oldman starring as Winston Churchill.
Judi Dench will head to the festival with ‘Victoria & Abdul’, in which she once again plays the 19th-century monarch, and Helen Mirren attends with The Leisure Seeker
Source: BBC