After Cannes was dominated by international auteurs amid Hollywood’s retreat from the Croissette, the Toronto Film Festival will also foreground artist-driven films in its upcoming Wavelength section unveiled on Tuesday.
“When we look at the newspaper, and it’s filled with bad news and cruelty, a lot of these filmmakers are looking inwards. There’s a lot of introspection and personal investment in the films,” Andréa Picard, curator of Wavelengths, TIFF’s avant-garde film showcase, told The Hollywood Reporter. Auteurs moving onwards and inwards include Beatrice Gibson with her debut feature, At Night, shot in 16mm for BBC Films. The director plays a filmmaker struggling to make sense of the film she’s making as six women in Paris meet up and discuss the anxiety and psychic exhaustion of the iconic French city after dark.
At Night will have a North American premiere in Toronto after bowing in Locarno. There’s also inward-looking discovery with Biografía de Jorge Luis Borges (Life of Jorge Luis Borges), a five-and-a-half-hour documentary by Argentinian director Mariano Llinas headed to Toronto after a world premiere in Venice.
The film, while about the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges and drawing on his papers, books he read and global cities he visited, also has director Llinas wrestling over how to capture a literary great known for endless reinvention. “It’s about the making of that film, and Mariano is in the film and he’s often called a Borgesian filmmaker himself, and so it’s almost a self-portrait as much as it’s a portrait of Borges,” Picard argues.
Fellow Argentine auteur Lisandro Alonso is bringing La Libertad Doble (Double Freedom) to Toronto for a North American showing after a Cannes world premiere. The movie shot in 35mm film revisits the main character and setting of the director’s minimalist first feature, Freedom, that 25 years earlier chronicled a few days in the life of a solitary woodcutter in the remote Pampas mountains. The loosely-inspired sequel has echoes of Argentina’s ongoing economic crisis today.
“The original film was very much isolated in the sort of very rural part of La Pampa in Argentina, and this one still is, but we feel these reverberations in very explicit ways – how the government austerity policies are impacting the lives of people even as far away from the metropole as this character in La Pampa,” Jesse Cumming, associate curator for the Wavelengths program, adds.
The TIFF section has also booked North American premieres for three Berlin titles: Sebastian Brameshuber’s London; Nicolas Pereda’s comedic film Lo demás es ruido (Everything Else is Noise), set around a musician friend’s TV interview in an apartment in Mexico City; and German auteur Angela Schanelec’s Meine Frau Weint (My Wife Cries), an austere romantic tragedy.
There’s also a North American bow for prolific Romanian auteur Radu Jude’s Cannes entry, Le Journal d’Une Femme de Chambre (The Diary of a Chambermaid), a French-language and highly political film that adapts the classic 19th-century book by Octave Mirbeau.
And TIFF has a Canadian premiere for William and David Greaves’ posthumous historical documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem, which captures a 1972 gathering of surviving notables from the original Harlem Renaissance. Williams Greaves died in 2014, so the film was finished by son David and granddaughter Liani.
The Wavelengths section has two world premieres, one for Toronto-based artist and filmmaker Yuula Benivolski’s The Black Box is Orange, a first feature, and another for John Torres’ The Remotes, a film comprising behind-the-scenes footage of films shot in the Philippines and artfully combined to resemble a fictional story.
This year’s Wavelengths short and mid-lengths lineup includes Kamal Aljafari with Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo, a portrait of the legendary Japanese iconoclast; Maryam Tafakory’s Ghazal-e Sorkh, an essay film that recounts the 1976 boycott of the Shiraz Art Festival; and Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s nocturnal Fire Flies, where a filmmaker is led on a flashlight-illuminated stroll through the mountains.
There’s also world premieres for Parastoo Anoushahpour’s Peacocks Come with the Clouds; Rita Ferrando’s After Image, which traces the director’s family history of migration from Argentina to Canada; Mustafa Uzuner’s The Address Book, shot in 16mm; Ben Russell’s La Prospettiva (1653); Jiaqi Yu’s Moon Palace; and Simon Liu’s ghost tale Splits in Two.
The Toronto Film Festival is set to run from Sept. 10 to 20. Additional film lineup announcements will be made in the coming weeks.
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