One of the country’s most acclaimed documentary filmmakers is tackling the world’s richest man, and the Toronto Film Fest will be one of the first places viewers can witness the encounter.
TIFF announced Tuesday that it will premiere Alex Gibney’s four-hour Elon Musk opus Musk, injecting a charge of current events into the gathering and even setting the stage for battles across mainstream and social media.
The film will premiere in Venice several days earlier. But the presence of the movie on these shores — with the concurrent attention and potential Musk-led backlash — promises to set in motion a real-world conversation about wealth, power and politics the film-fest universe gets only rarely.
“We’re talking about someone who has a Marvel villain-like level of power over our lives, from electric cars to space travel to AI to government to social media,” the fest’s doc chief Thom Powers told The Hollywood Reporter. “And you have Alex Gibney making the most ambitious movie of his illustrious career about him.”
Musk famously attacked the film on X earlier in its production cycle in 2023 by saying “It’s a hit piece,” with Gibney famously retorting “How would you know?” The mogul has only become a greater cultural lightning rod since then with a relentless series of social media trolls and the platforming of numerous conspiracy theories. The massive IPO for SpaceX in June that made Musk the world’s first trillionaire has only added to the stakes.
Musk is not believed to have ever cooperated with Gibney. But the Oscar winner spoke to a wide range of colleagues, employees and family members both past and present in painting a portrait of the controversial tycoon, and the finished product is sure to influence perception of Musk and tech generally, just as his past movies about powerful entities including the U.S. military, Scientology, Vladimir Putin and Enron all similarly moved the needle. The film will premiere in theaters on October 16 via Bleecker Street and later debut on HBO.
Other potentially impactful docs announced Tuesday include world premieres of Maiken Baird’s Edward Said: Between Worlds, an intellectual biography of one of the first and most prominent of Palestinian thinkers and writers, produced in part by members of the late author’s family. Gibney serves as executive producer on that film.
Lacey Schwartz Delgado, the wife of New York lieutenant governor Antonio Delgado and an acclaimed Black Jewish filmmaker, has made a movie called Re/Pair, that brings together prominent Black and Jewish figures for a series of conversations about rifts in a historic alliance, partly centered on but not limited to current events in the Middle East.
And Rebeca Huntt’s Rapinoe, about the U.S. soccer great Megan Rapinoe, follows the activist athlete as she prepares for her last major tournament at the 2023 World Cup and engages with her political stances, which could be as risky as they were bold. The movie, from the same production company as Said, will take an opening night slot at the festival.
Other titles playing at TIFF include James Marcus Hainey’s Ukrainian youth-culture story Black Sunflowers;” Afsaneh Salari ’s look at plastic surgery in Iran against the backdrop of the Women, Life Freedom movement; Barry Avrich’s profile of singer Darlene Love; a narrative-heavy drama set in the world of a scrappy alt-country band titled Bleeding Hearts; and Barbara Kopple’s much-awaited Union Town, which takes on one of the other big tech moguls of our time.
The cinema-verite trailblazer Kopple, who just turned 80, completes her trilogy about labor activism that began 50 years ago with Harlan Country, USA by looking at a trio of union-organizing drives against Jeff Bezos’ Amazon in her native New York.
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