David Cronenberg, Xavier Dolan and Sturla Gunnarsson are among the directors whose movies have been tapped by the Toronto International Film Festival for its annual celebration next month of Canada's best feature films.
Maps to the Stars (Cronenberg), Monsoon (Gunnarsson) and Dolan's Mommy, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes and is Canada's foreign-language submission for next year's Academy Awards, will be presented by TIFF during its 14th-annual Canada's Top Ten Film Festival.
Other films include the love story Félix et Meira (Maxime Giroux), the FLQ drama Corbo (Mathieu Denis), Sol (Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Susan Avingaq), work by the young directors Andrew Huculiak (Violent) and Albert Shin (In Her Place), and Harold Crooks's documentary about multinational corporations tax avoidance tactics, The Price We Pay.
Story continues below advertisement
It also includes Stéphane Lafleur's sweetly humorous Tu dors Nicole, which earned a warm reception at the Cannes Film Festival's Directors Fortnight, prompting a Variety reviewer to declare the director "certainly deserves to be as well known outside Canada as his idiosyncratic compatriot auteurs Xavier Dolan and Denis Côté."
The festival also includes 10 short films, as well as an additional 10 student short films.
"Canadian movies and Canadian talent have proven themselves among the best in the world," said Cameron Bailey, TIFF's artistic director, in a statement. "Now it's our chance to get together and celebrate our best."
The Toronto festival, running Jan. 2 to 11, also includes a discussion with activist-author Naomi Klein and her husband Avi Lewis, which promises a glimpse of a work-in-progress by Lewis inspired by Klein's climate-change book This Changes Everything. The festival will conclude with an onstage chat on Jan. 11 between Bailey and actor Keanu Reeves.
Story continues below advertisement
After the festival's Toronto stint, TIFF will take the films to Vancouver (The Cinematheque, Jan. 8 to 18), Edmonton (Metro Cinema, Jan. 22 to Feb. 2), Calgary (Globe Cinema, Feb. 20 to 26), the Winnipeg Film Groups Cinematheque (March 6 to 19), and Montreal (PHI Centre; dates yet to be determined).
The Vancouver festival will conclude with an discussion between Bailey and actor Sandra Oh. They will be joined by filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming to discuss Window Horses, an animated feature she is doing with Oh which is currently in the middle of an Indiegogo fundraising campaign.
A full lineup of films and events can be found at tiff.net.