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Meet With...
Meet With... is a series of informal and intimate information sessions on the hottest topics in today’s film industry. Meet With... provides attendees with a unique opportunity to gain insight into the fundamentals of the business and craft of filmmaking from seasoned industry professionals. For a complete list of topics and guest speakers, please visit Match Club starting Thursday, Septe...

Meet With...
Meet With... is a series of informal and intimate information sessions on the hottest topics in today’s film industry. Meet With... provides attendees with a unique opportunity to gain insight into the fundamentals of the business and craft of filmmaking from seasoned industry professionals. For a complete list of topics and guest speakers, please visit Match Club starting Thursday, Septe...

Hollywood Reporter
Preview - Telefilm Canada's PITCH THIS! By Michelle Anne OlsenSeptember 15, 2009 Who says that film funding can't be exciting? Today six filmmaking crews who have six different movie ideas will have six minutes to pitch these ideas to a room packed with hundreds of industry professionals. One idea and one crew will be pronounced the best and will be awarded $10 000...

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Hospitality Partners
Gold Benihana, The Fairmont Royal York100 Front Street West416-860-5005 Benihana is a fabulous Japanese steakhouse experience in the heart of Toronto - enjoy the excitement of teppan cooking right at your table.Century Room580 King Street West416-477-2288 Standing out amidst the diverse mix of award winning restaurants and chic upscale lou...

Vision (Films & Schedules)
Margarethe von Trotta (Germany)
One of the major auteurs to emerge from New German Cinema and a leader in feminist filmmaking, Margarethe von Trotta returns to the Festival with Vision, a study of the remarkable Hildegard von Bingen. Composer, scientist, healer, author and visionary, this Benedictine nun has been rescued in recent years from the shadows of history. Played here with both strength and nuance by the great Barbara ...

Frederick Wiseman Presents La Danse – Le Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris (Films & Schedules)
Frederick Wiseman (France/USA)
The documentary master Frederick Wiseman makes his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but he's always had a thing for Paris. During the mid-fifties, he gave himself a film education in Parisian movie theatres while studying on the GI Bill. After returning to the United States and receiving a degree in law, he started directing documentaries. Beginning with Titicut Follies in 1967, he went on to ma...

Les Herbes folles (Films & Schedules)
Alain Resnais (France/Italy)
One of the acknowledged masters of cinema has returned in glorious form with a vibrant, life-affirming film that certainly provides its share of joyous surprises. Alain Resnais has made some of the essential works in the history of the medium, from his extraordinary collection of shorts (including the seminal Nuit et brouillard) to modernist masterpieces like Hiroshima mon amour and L'Année derni...

A History of Israeli Cinema Part 1 (Films & Schedules)
Raphaël Nadjari (Israel/France)
In recent years, Israeli cinema has risen to prominence through acclaimed films such as The Band's Visit, Jellyfish and Waltz with Bashir. The diversity of output defies generalization, but two characteristics are prevalent: a soul-searching over the country's problems and a penchant for comic relief. A History of Israeli Cinema helps us to better understand the complex background of this vital m...

Le Refuge (Films & Schedules)
François Ozon (France)
François Ozon's styles are many and his talent protean, but there is one theme that recurs: the will of a woman. From the individual protagonists of Sous le sable and Swimming Pool to the entire cast of 8 Femmes, this French filmmaker revels in the force and range of female determination, whether or not its goal is admirable.Le Refuge begins in a chic Paris apartment, where Mousse (Isabelle Carré...

Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands (Films & Schedules)
Peter Mettler (Canada)
The Alberta tar sands are easily the most controversial natural resource in the country, providing filmmaker Peter Mettler with the focus for his latest conceptual documentary. Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands is full of the stunning imagery one has come to expect from Mettler, but what is perhaps most incredible about the film is the way in which he conveys so much with s...

The Disappearance of Alice Creed (Films & Schedules)
J Blakeson (United Kingdom)
Brisk, brutal and effective – that describes the shocker opening of The Disappearance of Alice Creed. Two men fortify a nondescript British apartment so it can serve as a prison, and then kidnap a woman and tie her to a bed. Before there's even time to react, we're plunged into a very nasty situation – but not a simple one.The brilliance of J Blakeson's debut lies in how it parses out information...

The Invention of Lying (Films & Schedules)
Ricky Gervais, Matthew Robinson (USA)
Imagine going to greet your blind date at their apartment and being told immediately upon the door opening how disappointing they find you. Not even a little white lie – “nice tie” or “I like your shirt” – to defray the blunt bad news. That's because in this world, which in most other ways looks like our own, there are no lies. Lying, it seems, is an invention, like the wheel or light bulb, and i...

Carcasses (Films & Schedules)
Denis Côté (Canada)
Jean-Paul Colmor lives by himself, but he's hardly alone. Many lives are represented all around him in the old cars and piles of discarded objects that litter his land in Saint-Amable, near Montreal. Quietly, Colmor works at repairing what others have tossed aside, selling what he can in order to buy even more, adding to his collection and recycling the past to pay for the future. Into his peacef...

A Single Man (Films & Schedules)
Tom Ford (USA)
Tom Ford's historical importance (to date) rests in part on his unique collaborations with the late twentieth century's great commercial photographers: Richard Avedon, Steven Meisel, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts and so on. With them, he championed the idea that style could govern our memories, without an appeal to straightforward nostalgia. Evidence of this same balance of past and present can also ...

In a City (Films & Schedules)
Mark Lewis Mark Lewis, who was born in Hamilton and lives in London, England, often returns to Canada, where he spent much of his youth and early career. In fact, many of his films are shot in various locations in Toronto, including a new trilogy of films that premiered at the fifty-third Venice Biennale this summer and are now presented in Toronto for the first time. Exhibited together with a selection ...

Cell 211 (Films & Schedules)
Daniel Monzon (Spain/France)
Daniel Monzón's Cell 211 is a gripping, suspenseful thriller, as well as a political commentary on the situation in Spanish jails today. While the film hits several notes popular to the prison film genre, it also questions the extent to which the violence characteristically bred within these facilities is due to the “untameable” disposition of the prisoner.Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammann) wants to ma...

Passenger Side (Films & Schedules)
Matthew Bissonnette (Canada)
Matthew Bissonnette's latest film is difficult to describe. But that's a good thing, as the writer-director breathes new life into genres while gently dismantling them. It all starts when ex-junkie Tobey (Joel Bissonnette, the director's brother) asks his brother Michael (Adam Scott) to drive him about Los Angeles in search of something – though what they are seeking isn't initially clear.As they...

The Dirty Saints (Films & Schedules)
Luis Ortega (Argentina)
Strengthening his unique cinematographic vision, Luis Ortega surpasses his previous works in his third and latest feature, The Dirty Saints. His debut, Black Box, presented a fresh and tender voice, very different from those of his contemporaries in Argentina who were more focused on a socially conscious type of cinema. He followed with Monobloc, a jarring and intentionally incomprehensible view ...

Tales From The Golden Age (Films & Schedules)
Cristian Mungiu, Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Höfer, Razvan Marculescu, Constantin Popescu (Romania/France)
Rather than wasting energy bad-mouthing Romania's communist regime, Tales from the Golden Age takes an affectionate look at the absurdity it wrought. Divided into five episodes, the film adapts well-known urban legends to recreate the period of rule by Nicolae Ceausescu. Ironically referred to as the “golden age” of Romania's history, this was a time when you never really knew what you were getti...

Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (Films & Schedules)
Manoel de Oliveira (Portugal/Spain/France)
The cinema's most senior filmmaker, Manoel de Oliveira, brings us this deceptively simple, perfectly set gem. Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl is based on a short story by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz, the renowned nineteenth-century author often regarded as the Flaubert of Portugal. While on a train bound for the Algarve, a beleaguered man (de Oliveira's grandson and regular lead, Ricardo Trê...

Ajami (Films & Schedules)
Scandar Copti, Yaron Shani (Israel/Germany)
Spiralling violence slowly permeates the emotional fabric of Ajami, a fourfold Middle Eastern saga that slowly blends into one monumental story of woe. The film is jointly directed by an Israeli, Yaron Shani, and a Palestinian, Scandar Copti, who prove that though they may be unable to share a country, they are perfectly capable of sharing a movie. It's no coincidence that the film's greatest vir...

White Material (Films & Schedules)
Claire Denis (France)
With the haunting White Material, Claire Denis returns to Africa, the setting for her first, remarkable film, Chocolat. Twenty years later, the world she depicts is completely different from the one she sketched so brilliantly in her early work. The childhood memories of the young white girl in Chocolat have been replaced by the stark realities of black child soldiers. This Africa is torn by civi...

Independencia (Films & Schedules)
Raya Martin (The Philippines/France/Germany/The Netherlands)
The tumultuous colonial history of the Philippines is a subject rarely examined in Western film and literature. It is general knowledge that the Spanish Empire ruled the islands for over three centuries, but less known is how the Americans invaded after independence was declared in 1898. Raya Martin's Independencia opens with the American encroachment and follows a mother and son as they flee int...

A History of Israeli Cinema Part 2 (Films & Schedules)
Raphaël Nadjari (Israel/France)
During the period covered in part 1 of this history, Israeli filmmakers tended to focus on the dream of their country. Part 2 picks up in 1979, when they were starting to explore the gap between the dream and reality. Films like 1982's Chamsin began taking a sympathetic look at Palestinians, breaking with the conventions of Israeli cinema that treated Arabs the way American westerns treated India...

Speak City: Lisa Steele & Kim Tomczak (Films & Schedules)
Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak Speak City delivers a unique glimpse of a city that for much of the last century went unrecorded (filmmaking in Toronto only started in earnest in the sixties) or stood in for somewhere else. It's a crucial addition to the events and screenings at this year's Festival and afterwards that will celebrate Toronto's 175th anniversary, and it raises intriguing new issues about how the city has (and ha...

The Time That Remains (Films & Schedules)
Elia Suleiman (United Kingdom/Italy/Belgium/France)
Imagine a film chronicling the lives and hardships of Palestinians who were branded “Israeli-Arabs,” living as a minority in their own homeland. Now imagine it as a comedy. This contradiction, starring, written and directed by the brilliant Elia Suleiman, is a wonderful fusion of the political and personal, the historical and the hysterical.Spanning from 1948 until recent times, The Time That Rem...

Backstory/Cinema Museum (Films & Schedules)
Mark Lewis (Germany/United Kingdom/France/Canada)
These two short documentaries are much more than an amplification of Mark Lewis's lauded artwork, although they directly relate to the film installations that took this year's Venice Biennale by storm. They fuse his curiosity toward historical filmmaking techniques with a carefully aestheticized approach to cinema as both a fan-based and industrialized cultural phenomenon.Backstory introduces us ...

Together (Films & Schedules)
Matias Armand Jordal (Norway)
Together explores what happens when people are torn apart. When the glue that holds their family together – wife and mother Kristine (Evy Kasseth Røsten) – dissolves by way of a freak accident, the two disjointed members, father Roger (Fridtjov Såheim) and twelve-year-old son Pål (Odin Waage), are forced to strive for intimacy. Shocked by their lack of communication, they realize that the only th...

Picture Start (Films & Schedules)
Christopher Doyle “The picture starts . . . when the trailers are done? When the first shot is ‘in the can'? When something someone says connects an image to a thought that suggests a resolution of that theme that you never could quite find form for. . . . and you start to write, to imagine, to project? Pictures start all the time all day long in the way i live and work. They evolve in the making, they grow in une...

I, Don Giovanni (Films & Schedules)
Carlos Saura (Austria/Italy/Spain)
The world of Mozart is beautifully re-imagined in this elegant and at times rollicking retelling of the story behind the creation of one of his operatic masterpieces, Don Giovanni. Although there are songs and theatrics in the film, this is not a simple restaging of the opera. Instead, director Carlos Saura dares to probe into the creative origins of Mozart's work, and emerges with a backstage ta...

An Open Letter on City to City
August 28, 2009 An Open Letter on City to City: Tel Aviv On August 27, John Greyson withdrew his film Covered from the Toronto International Film Festival as a protest against our City to City focus on films from Tel Aviv. The next day, he and nine other Torontonians issued a petition inviting the city’s cultural communities to “protest TIFF's complicity with the Israeli propaganda mach...

Every Day is a Holiday (Films & Schedules)
Dima El-Horr (France/Germany/Lebanon)
Road movies can range from popcorn entertainment to Michelangelo Antonioni. The genre is generous, which allows Dima El-Horr to invest her excursion with political nuance, existential heft and a specifically female point of view.The film opens with an arresting sequence: a couple runs through a tunnel, backlit brightly. She calls out to him, but he keeps running. The police lead him away to priso...

Trash Humpers (Films & Schedules)
Harmony Korine (USA/United Kingdom)
Tired vocabulary like “enfant terrible” and “provocation” is a constant threat when writing about Harmony Korine and his films. Trash Humpers is no exception: creepy masks, low-grade torture, frequent public urination, senseless vandalism and the title, acted out on defenseless garbage cans, all have a confrontational panache about them to be sure. But the film is also full of poetry, dance, song...

George Ryga's HUNGRY HILLS (Films & Schedules)
Rob King (Canada)
A haunting and dark take on the western, George Ryga's HUNGRY HILLS is adapted with depth and beauty by screenwriter Gary Fisher and director Rob King from the acclaimed novel by George Ryga. Snit Mandolin (Keir Gilchrist) just wants to go home. After two years in a welfare residence for boys, where daily survival literally means a fight, he is eager to get back to the family farm in Saskatchewan...

The Ape (Films & Schedules)
Jesper Ganslandt (Sweden)
It would be criminally unfair to both the filmmakers and audiences to divulge much or any of the plot of The Ape, Jesper Ganslandt's astonishing new feature. The film rests on unexpected turns and a pervasive, relentless sense of unease. For about the first third, we do not know exactly what's going on. Even the lead actor, who is featured in every scene, didn't know what was going to happen from...

Timetrip: The Curse of the Viking Witch (Films & Schedules)
Mogens Hagedorn (Denmark)
Join siblings Valdemar and Sille on a trip through Danish history as they attempt to break an age-old curse in this exciting, action-filled time-travel adventure!Sullen ninth-grader Valdemar is not only failing physics, but has also been left by his vacationing parents to babysit his younger sister Sille. More interested in having fun than minding his bookish sister, Valdemar decides to take a jo...

Founders Trailer
This short "trailer," directed by Barry Avrich, features hilarious anecdotal reminiscences by the three founders of the Toronto International Film Festival -- Henk Van der Kolk, Dusty Cohl and Bill Marshall -- on the eve of the Festival's 25th anniversary in 2000. Screened only once on opening night, this short film is a feature exclusive to this website. Enjoy! if (AC_FL_RunContent == ...

Police, Adjective (Films & Schedules)
Corneliu Porumboiu (Romania)
Confirming that the new Romanian cinema is no flash in the pan, Corneliu Porumboiu has followed up his Caméra d'Or-winning 12:08 East of Bucharest with the magnificently conceived and executed Police, Adjective, cementing his reputation as one of Europe's most exciting new talents. Both Porumboiu and fellow Romanian director Cristian Mungiu (4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days) excel at creating ordinar...

Bena (Films & Schedules)
Niv Klainer (Israel/France)
In Bena, a simple portrait of a father, a son and a stranger reveals fascinating layers of meaning.Amos, a Tel Aviv man, is doing everything he can to keep his schizophrenic teenaged son, Yurik, out of an institution. Amos knows too well the reality of the psychiatric ward – he is an on-call caseworker, dispatched by hospitals to collect patients and drag them into care. When he crosses paths wit...

A Gun to the Head (Films & Schedules)
Blaine Thurier (Canada)
Trevor (Tygh Runyan), the hero of Blaine Thurier's A Gun to the Head, is facing one dismal evening. His wife, Grace (Marnie Robinson), is hosting a dinner party with her appallingly obnoxious boss Dwayne (Benjamin Ayres) and his daft wife, Audrey (Sarah Lind). An unexpected call from Trevor's long-lost hustler cousin Darren (Paul Anthony) brightens things up. Given an opportunity to slip out (ost...

Jean Charles (Films & Schedules)
Henrique Goldman (United Kingdom/Brazil)
On July 7, 2005, suicide bombers attacked London's public transit system, killing fifty-two people. Fear and paranoia engulfed the city in the weeks that followed, as the police and the British government struggled to cope with this unprecedented threat to safety.Henrique Goldman expertly recreates the tension of that summer in his third feature film, Jean Charles. It's a stirring glimpse into th...

Programmers Choose
Visa^† is the only credit card accepted by the Toronto International Film Festival. Visa Screening Room at the Elgin TheatreEvening Package – $350 Enjoy 8 evenings of film at the Visa Screening Room at the Elgin Theatre from September 11 to 18, 2009. 6pm or 9pm packages available.Visa Screening Room at the Elgin ...

Creation (Films & Schedules)
Jon Amiel (United Kingdom)
Featuring riveting, impassioned performances from real-life couple Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, Creation is a profoundly humanist rendering of the story of a man whose scientific ideas famously and irrevocably changed the world.It's 1858 and Charles Darwin (Bettany) has returned from his far-flung geological explorations on the HMS Beagle to settle into a quiet life in the British countrys...

Cooking with Stella (Films & Schedules)
Dilip Mehta (Canada)
Transplanting the upstairs-downstairs comedy to New Delhi, Dilip Mehta has crafted a delightful feature debut scripted in collaboration with his acclaimed sister, director Deepa Mehta. Featuring charming turns from Don McKellar and Lisa Ray and a standout performance by Seema Biswas, Cooking with Stella is great fun to watch as it offers a glimpse of how Canadians live in India's capital.As head ...

Rabia (Films & Schedules)
Sebastián Cordero (Spain/Colombia)
Filmmaker Sebastián Cordero turns his lens from his native Ecuador to the plight of Latin Americans in Spain. His third and latest film, Rabia, captures the grim reality of the Latin American immigrant experience. Cordero's social thriller is set mostly in a dilapidated mansion in Spain's Basque Country, lending it a wonderful Hitchcockian flavour, and fuses genre elements with compelling drama.J...

The Adjuster (Films & Schedules)
Atom Egoyan (Canada)
A key film in the Toronto New Wave and one of the most acclaimed works in director Atom Egoyan's career, The Adjuster was also voted one of the best Canadian films ever made in a 1993 poll conducted by the Toronto International Film Festival Group. It represents a culmination of Egoyan's early career and undoubtedly consolidated his international reputation as a major artist.We're delighted to sc...

Lebanon (Films & Schedules)
Samuel Maoz (Israel)
All art can be transformative, and its power to heal and ameliorate, both through its creation and consumption, is indisputable. Film seems to be particularly cathartic. For first-time writer-director Samuel Maoz, the making of Lebanon may have literally saved his life, while the events that inspired its premise, occurring almost twenty-five years before, almost destroyed him.It's June of 1982, a...

The Good Heart (Films & Schedules)
Dagur Kári (Iceland/France/Denmark/Germany)
Jacques (the great Brian Cox) is the crusty, misanthropic owner of a grungy dive located on an even grimier back street in New York. An epic chain smoker, he knows he has only a short time left. In the hospital after his fifth coronary, he meets the ultra-meek Lucas (Paul Dano), a homeless kid who has pretty much given up on life. Determined to keep his bar going, Jacques takes Lucas under his wi...

The Young Victoria (Films & Schedules)
Jean-Marc Vallée (United Kingdom)
Acclaimed Quebecois director Jean-Marc Vallée (whose last film, C.R.A.Z.Y., is one of the most successful Canadian films of the past decade) returns with The Young Victoria, a delicate and profoundly romantic look at England's last golden age.Starring Emily Blunt as the queen who went on to symbolize the entire British Empire, the film follows Victoria's early struggle to succeed her uncle as the...

Moloch Tropical (Films & Schedules)
Raoul Peck (France/Haiti)
In an audacious stroke, Raoul Peck claims Alexander Sokurov's Moloch as his own. Transplanting the Russian director's unsettling mountain idyll between Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun from Bavaria to the green heat of Haiti, Peck tucks a searing critique of absolute power within the most elegant chamber drama. It's a masterful move.As it happens, Haiti has a castle even more impressive than Sokurov's,...

Women Without Men (Films & Schedules)
Shirin Neshat, In collaboration with Shoja Azari (Germany/Austria/France)
Internationally acclaimed visual artist Shirin Neshat is known for her stark, potent photo and video portraits of how women in Islam experience the world. Given a canvas as vast as a feature film, she expands her vision while simultaneously bringing it home to the history that shaped her.Adapting Shahrnush Parsipur's fabulist novella, Neshat returns to the Tehran of the early fifties, a volatile ...

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (Films & Schedules)
Jan Kounen (France)
In 1920, the lives of two of the last century's greatest artists intersected. Coco Chanel, the famous designer, befriended the great, revolutionary composer Igor Stravinsky and his family, offering the penniless and homeless musician refuge in her country mansion. There have been rumours that Coco and Igor had an affair at this time. Director Jan Kounen takes this premise and spins it into an int...

Phobidilia (Films & Schedules)
Yoav Paz, Doron Paz (Israel)
There is something patently urban about the need to shut the world out, and Phobidilia works as a city film precisely because its protagonist, a troubled young man, won't go outside. Petrified of the city, and perhaps of the life he used to live in it, he's opted instead to hide in the apartment he sublets from an absentee landlord, and order everything he needs – food, entertainment and even sex...

Waking Sleeping Beauty (Films & Schedules)
Don Hahn (USA)
By the mid-eighties, Walt Disney's fabled animation studios had fallen on hard times. The staff was polarized between newcomers hungry to innovate and old-timers who wouldn't relinquish control. These conditions had produced a series of box office flops and led to pessimistic forecasts. Maybe the best days of animation were over. Maybe the public didn't care. If you expected the situation to impr...

Ong Bak 2: The Beginning (Films & Schedules)
Tony Jaa, Panna Rittikrai (Thailand)
Whack! Crack! Thump! Six years ago, the legendary Midnight Madness screening of Ong Bak Muay Thai Warrior launched Tony Jaa as an action superstar and the first internationally recognized Thai cinema celeb. Now Jaa and his action supervisor Panna Rittikrai team up again to direct Ong Bak 2: The Beginning, a film connected to the original only by Jaa's presence and the number of body whacks and sk...

Life During Wartime (Films & Schedules)
Todd Solondz (USA)
It's hard to believe that it's been over a decade since Todd Solondz won the International Critics' prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his wry, provocative Happiness. Even then, that uneasy examination of sexual desire in American suburbia showed a great progression from his promising Welcome to the Dollhouse days. And though Solondz returned to the festival circuit with Storytelling and Palin...

Help
General Info What are the hours of operation for the Festival Box Office at Nathan Phillips Square? What are the hours for the Festival Box Office at Roy Thomson Hall? What are the hours of operation for Venue Box Offices? Where can I buy Programme Books and merchandise? What payment methods do you accept? Please define ‘Pr...

The Wind Journeys (Films & Schedules)
Ciro Guerra (Colombia/The Netherlands/Argentina/Germany)
Colombia's diverse and magnificent landscapes play a central role in Ciro Guerra's second feature film, The Wind Journeys. The film tells the story of an accordion player, Ignacio Carrillo (Marciano Martínez), who has just experienced the sudden and traumatic death of his wife. Deeply depressed, he embarks on a quest through Colombia's northern terrain to return his accordion to its rightful owne...

Micmacs (Films & Schedules)
Jean-Pierre Jeunet (France)
Jean-Pierre Jeunet's gorgeously romantic Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain is unquestionably one of the most beloved and popular films of the last decade. Jeunet's amazing visual vocabulary and hyperactive imagination provide the foundation for all his cinematic creations, and this ability to be both playful and serious is used to devastating effect in his latest piece of movie magic, Micmacs à...

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Films & Schedules)
Terry Gilliam (Canada/United Kingdom)
Terry Gilliam and his boundless imagination return to the Festival with a film already enshrined in cinema history as the final work of Heath Ledger. When Gilliam made the inspired decision to bring in Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell to amplify Ledger's unfinished role, a work of fantastical storytelling unexpectedly evolved into a glorious tribute to the terrific young actor. If there's ...

The Art of the Steal (Films & Schedules)
Don Argott (USA)
The Art of the Steal plays like a thrilling whodunit as it seeks to solve what happened to the world-renowned Barnes art collection, valued in the “billions and billions.” The collection's unrivalled holdings of post-impressionist and early modernist art are staggering in quantity: 181 paintings by Renoir, 69 by Cézanne, 59 by Matisse and 46 by Picasso, including many masterpieces. Dr. Albert Bar...

Jaffa (Films & Schedules)
Keren Yedaya (Israel/France/Germany)
Lying immediately to Tel Aviv's south, the ancient port city of Jaffa is home to a heterogeneous Muslim, Jewish and Christian population, but recent waves of gentrification have been squeezing out Jaffa's traditional communities. The political tensions from which Tel Aviv is sometimes thought to be separated pulse in the plaster and pavement of Jaffa, hashed out in the debates over so-called beau...

The Vintner's Luck (Films & Schedules)
Niki Caro (New Zealand/France)
Niki Caro's audacious and visually luscious new film will both delight and surprise audiences familiar with her previous work. Delving deeper into her past themes of love and identity, she explores ideas and emotions even more visceral in nature. While the film takes place in an earlier era, the complex spiritual struggles of the central character give the story a strong contemporary allure.The n...

At the End of Daybreak (Films & Schedules)
Ho Yuhang (Malaysia/Hong Kong, China/South Korea)
Based on a true story ripped from the headlines, At the End of Daybreak is a slow-burning crime drama in which no one is innocent. Ho Yuhang, one of Malaysia's leading independent filmmakers, returns with a sharply critical take on his society. Class divisions, a rigid educational system, parental control and youthful ennui ultimately lead to shocking results.The film begins with a graphic scene ...

Leaves of Grass (Films & Schedules)
Tim Blake Nelson (USA)
Edward Norton assumes the roles of identical twins Bill and Brady Kincaid in this darkly comic tale of contrast and balance. Bill is an Ivy League classics professor who prides himself on having shed both his southern accent and his southern working-class family. An inspiration to his students, he espouses vital philosophical thought while constructing a deliberate life of self-control. Over a th...

Same Same but Different (Films & Schedules)
Detlev Buck (Germany)
Kate Winslet bared all in The Reader, but it was the young German actor David Kross who surprised audiences as her lover. Conveying an almost alarming sensitivity onscreen, Kross is able to play both innocence and the cruelty that sometimes lies beneath it. In Same Same but Different, he explores new levels of moral complexity in a story that feels both thoroughly contemporary and desperately rom...

Window (Films & Schedules)
Buddhadeb Dasgupta (India)
Buddhadeb Dasgupta's tales of Bengali life are both searing social comment and pure poetry. It's a delicate balance, and in The Window he once again transforms the complexities of today's India into a song of many harmonies.Bimal and Meera are a young Kolkata couple, very much in love and on the verge of being married. But Bimal has an idealistic streak. On a visit to his old school, he sees how ...

Whip It (Films & Schedules)
Drew Barrymore (USA)
Despite their differences in age, nationality and lineage, Drew Barrymore and Ellen Page feel cut from similar cloth. Independent of mind and spirit, they embody a new kind of female cinema icon. They also both seem drawn to the funkier side of popular culture. Who but Barrymore, in her role as producer, could have taken the campy television show Charlie's Angels and turned it into a contemporary...

Road, Movie (Films & Schedules)
Dev Benegal (India/USA)
Sweeping across India's vast landscapes with projectors in tow, Road, Movie embraces two of cinema's greatest pleasures – the open road and the love of movies for their own glorious sake. Powered by the same desire to venture into unknown territory that inspires so many road stories, Dev Benegal's new feature has the distinct advantage of terrain and characters too rarely seen onscreen.Young and ...

Help Gone Mad (Films & Schedules)
Boris Khlebnikov (Russia)
Let's pretend you don't know you're watching a Boris Khlebnikov picture. Ten minutes in, those wildly gesticulating figures, staring perplexedly into space halfway between hilarity and despair, will definitely start looking familiar. Khlebnikov's signature visual style, complemented by dialogue but not dependent on it, could well be considered a natural (and extremely Russian) evolution of Buster...

Castaway on the Moon (Films & Schedules)
Lee Hey-jun (South Korea)
Accomplished and original, Castaway on the Moon is a fascinating love story by one of South Korea's most promising young filmmakers. Lee Hey-jun made his debut in 2006 as co-director of the hit comedy Like a Virgin,and he now reconfirms his witty talent and strong directorial skill.Kim Seong-geun (Jung Jae-young) has never learned to swim. When his girlfriend leaves him and debts feel insurmounta...

Registration
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Accreditation
The Toronto International Film Festival grants media accreditation to a limited number of journalists. To request accreditation, please follow the applicable instructions below.New Accreditation Requests for Journalists and PhotographersDue to limited theatre capacity and the need to maintain high service levels, the Toronto International Film Festival's Communications Department can accommodate ...

Kelin (Films & Schedules)
Ermek Tursunov (Kazakhstan)
Unlike the modest Kazakhstani productions doing festival rounds in the past few years (such as Renaissance Island, Ulzhanand Tulpan), Kelindoesn't just fall back on tradition – it exploits it to maximum rock-star effect.Looking like a cross between a goth goddess and a fairy-tale queen, Kelin (Gulsharat Zhubayeva) is about to be married. High in the Altai Mountains, her father bargains with two s...

Cleanflix (Films & Schedules)
Andrew James, Joshua Ligairi (USA)
Mormons can be movie lovers too. The problem is that their religious leaders strongly discourage R-rated content. As one Mormon prophet explained, “The mind through which this filth passes is never the same afterwards.” In order to better serve their Mormon clientele, enterprising video stores in Utah started to offer “clean” versions of popular titles like The Matrix and Titanic. Using digital e...

Videocracy (Films & Schedules)
Erik Gandini (Sweden)
How can you explain what's happened to Italy in the age of its current prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi? As the owner of the country's television empire, he wields a powerful tool for shaping public opinion to his benefit. His force of will is reflected by the TV commercial in which throngs of Italians sing, “Thank God Silvio exists.” To an outsider, it may seem bizarre. Videocracy tries to show...

Crab Trap (Films & Schedules)
Oscar Ruiz Navia (Colombia/France)
Oscar Ruiz Navia's debut feature captures a part of Colombia rarely seen on film, the black communities of its Pacific coast.Cerebro (or “Brain,” played by Arnobio Salazar Rivas), the leader of the Afro-Colombian community that inhabits the isolated village of La Barra on Colombia's Pacific coast, is trying to adjust to the advent of modernity represented by El Paisa (the White Man), a landowner ...

An Education (Films & Schedules)
Lone Scherfig (United Kingdom)
It's 1961 in the London suburb of Twickenham, and bright sixteen-year-old Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is on the cusp of womanhood, fantasizing about a more sophisticated, refined life while smoking Gauloises cigarettes. Though she feels smothered by her own adolescence, Jenny is an assiduous, cello-playing schoolgirl with a real chance of landing a spot at Oxford University. Her path takes a turn, how...

La Donation (Films & Schedules)
Bernard Émond (Canada)
Dr. Yves Rainville (Jacques Godin) has been serving the community of Normétal in the Abitibi region of Quebec for forty years, and has seen it go from a thriving mining town to a nearly empty dot on the map. Increasingly ill himself, Yves advertises for a temporary replacement, hoping to find his successor. Dr. Jeanne Dion (Élise Guilbault) answers his ad and makes the trip from the city to the c...

The Front Line (Films & Schedules)
Renato De Maria (Italy)
The Front Line is a remarkable film about an extreme left-wing terrorist group, infamous for its violent exploits, and the scourge of the authorities and civilized society for most of a decade. Renato De Maria fictionalizes the story of two of the group's leaders, Sergio Segio (Riccardo Scamarcio) and Susanna Ronconi (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), who were colleagues and lovers, a modern-day Marxist Bon...

A Shine of Rainbows (Films & Schedules)
Vic Sarin (Canada/Ireland)
Set in a small village on wind-swept Corrie Island, just off the coast of Ireland, A Shine of Rainbows is a heartwarming film that follows an orphan's struggle to find acceptance and belonging in his new home.Shy and picked on by the other boys in the orphanage, eight-year-old Tomás (John Bell) can't believe that of all the children, the warm and beautiful Maire O'Donnell (Connie Neilsen) has cho...

Slovenian Girl (Films & Schedules)
Damjan Kozole (Croatia/Germany/Slovenia/Serbia)
Newcomer Nina Ivanišin is probably the closest any actress will ever get to embodying an angel from hell, at least without the stagy makeup. She plays an unlikely prostitute determined to conquer the world, one client at a time. Harbouring an internal darkness she can't altogether control, her eyelids heavy with sin, Ivanišin's protagonist looks as though she has been around without ever budging ...

If I Knew What You Said (Films & Schedules)
Mike Escareal Sandejas (The Philippines)
When we consider independent Filipino cinema, we tend to think of hand-held cameras rattling through the slums. That's why Mike Escareal Sandejas's If I Knew What You Said is such a breath of fresh air. Fun, energetic and sensitive, this indie teen romance succeeds precisely because it is not afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve.Nina (Zoe Sandejas) is a rebellious teen who sings in a rock band....

Services
Hotel Bookings Exclusive availability at The Hyatt Regency Hotel, through the Sales & Industry Office. The Sales & Industry Office offers Special Festival Rates to all Registered Delegates in the following Hotels, according to availability:  Fairmont Royal York The Hilton Delta Chelsea Four Seasons  Hotel Le Germain The Intercontinental on Front Marriott...

Services
Hotel Bookings Exclusive availability at The Sutton Place Hotel, through the Sales and Industry Office. The Sales & Industry Office offers Special Festival Rates to all Registered Delegates in the following Hotels, according to availability:  Fairmont Royal York The Hilton Holiday Inn (on King Street West) Hotel Le Germain ...

Contact Us
Please Send Us Your Feedback! The Toronto International Film Festival Group is committed to creating experiences that go beyond our audiences' expectations and your feedback is important to us. Please take a moment to share your experiences with us. If you have specific questions and are unable to find the answers on our website, please contact one of the following departmen...

Statement by The Toronto International Film Festival
TORONTO – Piers Handling, Director and CEO of TIFF and Cameron Bailey, Co-Director of the Toronto International Film Festival issued the following statement regarding City to City programme."The Toronto International Film Festival stands by our choice of Tel Aviv as the inaugural focus for the City to City programme and we welcome the discussion that is being prompted by our series.  We progr...

Big Eyes (Films & Schedules)
Uri Zohar (Israel)
Ask Tel Avivians about artists who have defined their city's cinema and they will mention Uri Zohar without fail. Zohar was one of Israel's most influential filmmakers. Starting as an actor and comedian in the fifties, he headed up an ad hoc troupe of performers and rock-'n'-roll-styled pacifists. In addition to establishing a celebrity image on both radio and television, he directed his own feat...

Last Ride (Films & Schedules)
Glendyn Ivin (Australia)
Every few years a film comes along wherein every element works, leading to a completely realized piece of cinema – Last Ride is one of those films.Kev (Hugo Weaving) and his ten-year-old son, Chook (Tom Russell), are on the run, and at first we don't know why – and neither does Chook. Travelling further and further into the Australian outback, they dump their car and buy tickets for the bus, and ...

The Double Hour (Films & Schedules)
Giuseppe Capotondi (Italy)
This labyrinthine, mind-bending psychological thriller could just as well be called “The Girl from Ljubljana,” as it follows the unsettling adventures of a Slovenian girl who works as a chambermaid in a posh Italian hotel. Having recently arrived in Italy, Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport) decides to join a speed-dating club, and meets a handsome young security guard. Guido (Filippo Timi) works at a remot...

Cracks (Films & Schedules)
Jordan Scott (United Kingdom/Ireland)
“The most important thing in life,” Miss G tells her students at an elite British boarding school in 1934, “is desire.” She needn't have spelled it out. As played by the spectacularly cool Eva Green, Miss G is the walking embodiment of desire. She smokes, flouts the headmistress's rules and hints at dark European adventures in her past. She even wears trousers. Determined to awaken in her girls a...

To the Sea (Films & Schedules)
Pedro González-Rubio (Mexico)
Jorge (Jorge Machado) and Roberta (Roberta Palombini) have been separated for several years. They simply come from opposite worlds: he likes an uncomplicated life in the jungle while she prefers a more urban existence. He is Mexican and she is Italian, and she has decided to return to Rome with their five-year-old son, Natan (Natan Machado Palombini). But before they leave, Jorge wishes to take y...

Phantom Pain (Films & Schedules)
Matthias Emcke (Germany)
A potent star vehicle for a European actor now gaining recognition in North America, Phantom Pain shows Til Schweiger at the top of his game – virile, passionate and nuanced in his portrayal of a man fighting back from disaster.Schweiger is hands-down Germany's biggest movie star. In both presence and power, he is the Teutonic Brad Pitt, so much so that it was a natural for Quentin Tarantino to c...

Contests & Promotions
Bell Mobility Win a pair of movie tickets to the Toronto International Film Festival, exclusive to Bell Mobility clients. Win one of 225 prizes of tickets for two to a film at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Just send a free text from your Bell Mobility phone to 43376 with the keyword FILM. Le...

Mall Girls (Films & Schedules)
Katarzyna Roslaniec (Poland)
This tough, uncompromising and gritty slice of realism cuts to the core of the socialization of an adolescent who finds herself caught up with a gang of teenaged girls determined to make their way in the world. At times startlingly aggressive, at others softly romantic, Katarzyna Roslaniec's film unflinchingly slashes its way through contemporary Polish society. Roslaniec exposes the confusions o...

Bassidji (Films & Schedules)
Mehran Tamadon (Iran/France/Switzerland)
This year, millions of Iranians poured into the streets to support reforming their government, and their protests elicited a violent response from a militia group known as the Bassidj. Director Mehran Tamadon had the prescience to explore the world of the Bassidj in 2007, before they recently made headlines. As an Iranian citizen who now lives abroad, Tamadon cultivated access to Bassidj members ...

High Life (Films & Schedules)
Gary Yates (Canada)
Anyone under the impression that crime pays should watch Gary Yates's latest feature, High Life. Timothy Olyphant plays Dick, a down-on-his-luck morphine addict and hospital orderly whose job gives him convenient access to his poison. Early in the film, he's reunited with his old buddy Bug (Stephen Eric McIntyre), who's fresh out of a stint in prison. After Bug helps to get Dick fired, the two ha...

Other Services
Promotional Opportunities A variety of exclusive promotional opportunities are available to Producers and Sales Agents.  Our opportunities include: the printing and placement of retractable banners and posters, video installation of trailers and mailbox stuffing services.  All advertising spaces are located within the Sutton Place Hotel, where they will be exposed to over 3,200 Sales and I...

Getting Around
Around TorontoIf you can, avoid driving yourself around, as traffic restrictions near Festival venues will only slow you down. Festival venues are all easily accessible without having to drive. The following are all great alternatives to driving: TaxiExpect to pay about $15 to get across town, or more with traffic. Fares are reasonable and taxis are generally easy to flag down, thou...

Getting Around
Around TorontoIf you can, avoid driving yourself around, as traffic restrictions near Festival venues will only slow you down. Festival venues are all easily accessible without having to drive. The following are all great alternatives to driving: TaxiExpect to pay about $15 to get across town, or more with traffic. Fares are reasonable and taxis are generally easy to flag down, thou...

Other Services
Promotional Opportunities A variety of exclusive promotional opportunities are available to Producers and Sales Agents.  Our opportunities include: the printing and placement of retractable banners and posters, video installation of trailers and mailbox stuffing services.  All advertising spaces are located within the Sutton Place Hotel, where they will be exposed to over 3,200 Sales and I...

George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead (Films & Schedules)
George A. Romero (Canada)
In a world where the dead rise to menace the living, rogue soldier Crocket (Alan Van Sprang) leads a band of military dropouts to refuge from the endless chaos. As they search for a place “where the shit won't get you,” they meet banished patriarch Patrick O'Flynn (played with zeal by Kenneth Welsh), who promises a new Eden on the fishing and ranching outpost Plum Island. The men arrive, only to ...

Samson & Delilah (Films & Schedules)
Warwick Thornton (Australia)
In a remote Aboriginal community in Central Australia – with miles of hot, dusty red earth stretching as far as the eye can see – we meet fifteen-year-old Samson (Rowan McNamara), a handsome, impish petrol sniffer. His neighbour Delilah (Marissa Gibson), sixteen, is quiet yet determined, spending most of her time caring for her artist grandmother (Mitjili Gibson). Even within their small communit...

Vengeance (Films & Schedules)
Johnnie To (Hong Kong, China/France)
While the once-great Hong Kong film industry struggles to find its place in the world, Hong Kong master Johnnie To continues to direct and produce with vigour and energy. To's prolific body of work proves he is much more than just an action director, and Vengeance provides a perfect entry point for anyone curious to experience To's unique visual aesthetic for the first time. As a choreographer of...

The Man Beyond the Bridge (Films & Schedules)
Laxmikant Shetgaonkar (India)
Drawing together a keen environmental sensitivity with a nuanced view of village dynamics, The Man Beyond the Bridge is a rare find from rural India. Unfolding in Konkani – a language with no unique script that almost never appears in films – this is a gentle romance set against the lovely forest setting of Goa's Western Ghats.Vinayak is a forest ranger. His wife has died, leaving him lonely as h...

Cole (Films & Schedules)
Carl Bessai (Canada)
Cole Chambers (Richard de Klerk) is an aspiring writer living in the small British Columbia town of Lytton. While the community of 350 may lack the speed of the big city, it nonetheless provides intriguing source material for the stories that fill Cole's notebook. Hoping to gain experience, he enrols in a writing course at a university in the city, a three-hour drive each way. In class he meets S...

Suck (Films & Schedules)
Rob Stefaniuk (Canada)
Joey (Rob Stefaniuk) is the ostensible leader of the Winners, a bar band going exactly nowhere. They're broke and feuding with one another, and the crappy gigs they've managed to cobble together and call a tour are being cancelled. Even their lame manager Jeff (played with scuzzy relish by Dave Foley) doesn't want anything to do with them. Things aren't much better on the home front. Joey's perma...

Air Doll (Films & Schedules)
Hirokazu Kore-eda (Japan)
Beloved veteran filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda triumphantly returns to the Festival with his first work of fantasy. The director, who usually explores subjects ripped from the headlines, now makes a bold move into the world of the surreal. Air Doll was adapted from Gouda's Philosophical Discourse, the Pneumatic Figure of a Girl, a twenty-page graphic novel drawn by Gouda Yoshiee, but the film still ...

Kirot (Films & Schedules)
Danny Lerner (Israel/France/USA)
Danny Lerner's acclaimed 2005 film, Frozen Days, saw a lonely woman's blind date derailed by a suicide bombing. With his most recent film, Kirot, the director again brings psychological complexity and socio-political commentary to essential elements of a thriller plot. This time, he takes on two tried-and-true archetypes: the assassin with one last job to complete, and the prostitute with the hea...

Box Office
Visa^† is the only credit card accepted by the Toronto International Film Festival. Box 48 was selected in the lottery draw as the first box to be processed for the public Advance Order Procedure. There were 54 boxes in the draw. Advance Orders will be ready for pickup beginning September 3, 2009 at 7am, at the Festi...

Box Office
Visa^† is the only credit card accepted by the Toronto International Film Festival. Box 48 was selected in the lottery draw as the first box to be processed for the public Advance Order Procedure. There were 54 boxes in the draw. Advance Orders will be ready for pickup beginning September 3, 2009 at 7am, at the Festi...

Explore Toronto
NeighbourhoodsToronto is a city of great neighbourhoods, each with its own unique character. From trendy hotspots and shopping in Yorkville, to rich heritage in the Historic Distillery District, to the colourful flavours of Little India, to the busy, narrow streets of Kensington Market, Toronto is one of the most diverse cities in the world! We encourage you to visit Tourism Toronto’s Neigh...

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (Films & Schedules)
Rebecca Miller (USA)
Does anyone really know Pippa Lee? Ostensibly a well-off model wife, mother and friend, Pippa wears each of her masks just a little loosely. Played to perfection by Robin Wright Penn, Pippa is a woman for our times. In this smart study of life at the top of the social food chain, writer-director Rebecca Miller adapts her own novel in a wrenching yet often hilarious look at one enigmatic woman.Pip...

Backstory (Films & Schedules)
Mark Lewis (Germany/United Kingdom/France/Canada)
In conjunction with Mark Lewis: In a City, special screenings of Lewis’s Backstory (2009) and Cinema Museum (2008) will take place during the Festival. These two documentaries explore the history and culture of cinema, fusing Lewis’s curiosity about historical filmmaking techniques with a carefully aestheticized approach to cinema as both a fan-based and industrialized cultural phenomenon. Bac...

The Day God Walked Away (Films & Schedules)
Philippe van Leeuw (France)
It's a tragic fact that cinema understands genocide. The Holocaust came to be widely understood largely through film, from horrific newsreel footage to Nuit et brouillard to Schindler's List and beyond. Even the far less explored Cambodian genocide has been powerfully illuminated by documentaries like S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and fiction films like The Killing Fields. Cinema's capacit...

Peter Berg Presents Kings Ransom (Films & Schedules)
(USA)
Peter Berg has a flare for finding the human drama in sports, as he proved co-directing the film Friday Night Lights and creating the popular television series that followed. He's further demonstrated himself a hitmaker as the director of The Kingdom and Hancock. In this Mavericks session, Berg presents the world premiere of Kings Ransom, produced for ESPN's 30 for 30 project (see previous page)....

V.O.S. (Films & Schedules)
Cesc Gay (Spain)
Cesc Gay remains a unique voice within the Spanish film industry. His cinema is diverse in its forms and themes, and rare in its sincere authenticity. His 2000 film Nico and Dani was a fresh coming-of-age story about two boys navigating new sexual experiences. He then made the much more brooding In the City(03), about a group of thirtysomethings and their hidden desires and confusions. This was f...

Wheat (Films & Schedules)
He Ping (China)
Following the success of his last film, Warriors of Heaven and Earth, director He Ping returns to the genre of historical drama, this time less concerned with viewing violence on an epic scope of heroes and villains, and more so with the people caught in the middle. Set during the Warring States Period in China, a time when war seemed the only possible form of existence, the film tells of the man...

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (Films & Schedules)
Don Roos (USA)
Watching Natalie Portman mature over the years has been a fascinating thing. From her indelible first roles in The Professional and Beautiful Girls through her blockbuster turns in the Star Wars films, she has maintained a graceful intelligence in everything she does. With Don Roos's Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, Portman takes on her first leading role as a fully grown woman, navigating the...

Cinema Museum (Films & Schedules)
Mark Lewis In conjunction with Mark Lewis: In a City, special screenings of Lewis’s Backstory (2009) and Cinema Museum (2008) will take place during the Festival. These two documentaries explore the history and culture of cinema, fusing Lewis’s curiosity about historical filmmaking techniques with a carefully aestheticized approach to cinema as both a fan-based and industrialized cultural phenomenon. Bac...

The Road (Films & Schedules)
John Hillcoat (USA)
Along a dusty grey horizon, a father and son slowly plod. They push a shopping cart filled with their scant, grime-covered possessions – all that they have are a few tattered rags, a gun with two bullets and an unflagging love for one another.Director John Hillcoat offers a corrosive adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by American master Cormac McCarthy, and like the novel, The Road is ...

Bitch Slap (Films & Schedules)
Rick Jacobson (USA)
Mix three bad girls, one desert, a ruthless crime lord, 1,473 exotic weapons, $206 million in stolen diamonds and more cleavage than you can shake a stick at, and you'll get Bitch Slap – a rip-roaring, sexy mashup of the audacious sexploitation films of the sixties and seventies. Like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! injected with a lethal cocktail of estrogen, pheromones and steroids, Bitch Slap hi...

The Loved Ones (Films & Schedules)
Sean Byrne (Australia)
Last year's rocking doc Not Quite Hollywood proved that Australian genre films love to break the rules. In director and screenwriter Sean Byrne's first feature, The Loved Ones, he smashes them to a bloody pulp with a hammer.In order to avoid a ghostly figure in the road, high-school senior Brent Mitchell (Xavier Samuel) wraps his car around a tree, killing his father. Constantly confronted by his...

Soul Kitchen (Films & Schedules)
Fatih Akin (Germany)
Until now, German director Fatih Akin has been known for hard-hitting, streetwise movies that only occasionally take a moment to swoon into lyricism. Mostly, films like Head-On and The Edge of Heaven are bracing and resolutely real. Well, Akin's mood must have brightened this year, because while Soul Kitchen is directed with as much strength and confidence as ever, it's a loose-limbed, house part...

Bare Essence of Life (Films & Schedules)
Satoko Yokohama (Japan)
The darling of new Japanese cinema, Satoko Yokohama confirms her talent and brilliant originality with Bare Essence of Life, a satisfying tale of rural eccentricity that combines black humour and fantasy with romanticism and drama. Scripted and directed by Yokohama with self-assured grace, the film strays from both the commercial mainstream and the independent art-house cinema to find its own pat...

Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story (Films & Schedules)
Yousry Nasrallah (Egypt)
Fluid, handsome and gorgeous to behold, Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story is a polished piece of Egyptian storytelling – polished to an edge. Having helped lead a new wave of serious cinema coming from the Arab world, Yousry Nasrallah now directs his considerable skills toward a sharper and sharper observation of his own society. His new film interlocks three stories of women constrained by long-stan...

Partir (Films & Schedules)
Catherine Corsini (France)
Fresh from her remarkable, award-winning role in last year's Il y a longtemps que je t'aime, Kristin Scott Thomas returns to the Festival opposite the smouldering Catalan actor Sergi Lopez in Catherine Corsini's gripping tale of a mid-life affair in southern France.A gunshot erupts in the night, puncturing the quiet of a slumbering house. From this ominous opening, Partir jumps back in time sever...

My Dog Tulip (Films & Schedules)
Paul Fierlinger, Sandra Fierlinger (USA)
My Dog Tulip is a profound and beautiful love story that just happens to involve a man and his dog. The film is based on the celebrated 1956 novel by J.R. Ackerley, whose other book about the relationship between a dog and its owner, We Think the World of You, was adapted into the 1988 film starring Alan Bates and Gary Oldman. My Dog Tulip is a vivid animated feature that never fails to stimulate...

You Choose
Visa^† is the only credit card accepted by the Toronto International Film Festival. 10 Ticket Package* $159.14 This is the most flexible way to attend the Festival! Can be used for any regular public screening of your choice and can be shared with friends and family. Purchase multiple package...

Huacho (Films & Schedules)
Alejandro Fernández Almendras (Chile/France/Germany)
Rural traditions and modern life clash in Alejandro Fernández Almendras's engaging feature debut, Huacho. Chronicling the life of a hard-working peasant family – grandparents Clemira (Clemira Aguayo) and Cornelio (Cornelio Villagrán), their daughter Alejandra (Alejandra Yáñez) and her pre-teen son, Manuel (Manuel Hernández) – Almendras paints an evocative picture of the many hardships experienced...

Shirley Adams (Films & Schedules)
Oliver Hermanus (South Africa/USA)
Only fifteen years into its democracy, South Africa remains a fascinating study in contrasts. This may be why the South African cinema that best succeeds internationally confronts racial dynamics past and present. Shirley Adams is that rare exception. Here is a film that offers an intimate and restrained portrait of Cape Town today by keeping its focus on one family, and more specifically one wom...

The Waiting City (Films & Schedules)
Claire McCarthy (Australia)
To adopt a child is to wait, and to wait in a city far from home can be an exciting thing – or a test of all one's resources. In the case of Claire McCarthy's epic, glistening new feature, those on hold are a young Australian couple, Fiona (Radha Mitchell) and Ben (Joel Edgerton), who arrive in Kolkata to claim their adopted child.Outwardly happy and connected, Ben and Fiona are nonplussed when t...

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Films & Schedules)
Werner Herzog (USA/Germany)
Werner Herzog's second fiction feature of 2009 works as a fascinating counterpart to Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, also screening at the Festival. While that film is a savagely ironic and witty portrait of a bad cop, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done flips this premise on its head and looks at a lily-white good cop – albeit one caught in a very strange situation.My Son, My Son is base...

Talent Lab
Talent Lab is a four-day intensive programme that offers artistic-development opportunities to emerging Canadian filmmakers. The programme provides participant filmmakers the opportunity to build networks in a creative environment and to learn from some of the most esteemed filmmakers and artists in the world. 2008 Talent Lab Governors included Don McKellar, Olivier Assayas, Stephen Wo...

Talent Lab
Talent Lab is a four-day intensive programme that offers artistic-development opportunities to emerging Canadian filmmakers. The programme provides participant filmmakers the opportunity to build networks in a creative environment and to learn from some of the most esteemed filmmakers and artists in the world. 2008 Talent Lab Governors included Don McKellar, Olivier Assayas, Stephen Wo...

Online Registration Now Closed
Online registration is now closed. To register on-site, please visit, The Sutton Place Hotel Royal Sutton Ballroom - Salon A 955 Bay Street Toronto, ON M5S 2A2 The Sales and Industry Registration Office is open for the following hours: Tuesday, September 8: 12:00am - 7:00pm Wednesday, September 9 - Sunday, September 13: 9:00am - 7:00pm ...

A Brand New Life (Films & Schedules)
Ounie Lecomte (South Korea/France)
Striking a perfect balance between the vague, distant memories of childhood and the accuracy of a rigorous script, Ounie Lecomte makes her directorial debut with A Brand New Life, a remarkable film that has the pace and the humility of a precocious masterpiece. Lecomte's warm approach to directing envelops this bare, ascetic story of an abandoned youth with a sincerity that is as genuine as it is...

Northless (Films & Schedules)
Rigoberto Perezcano (Mexico/Spain)
Mexican border towns have long provided an intriguing setting for movies. Anthony Mann's 1949 film Border Incident brilliantly depicts the trafficking of illegal Mexican workers into the United States, while Orson Welles's thrilling noir Touch of Evil highlights some of the prejudices that exist on both sides of the border. More recently, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel and Cary Fukunaga's Si...

Tamalpais (Films & Schedules)
Chris Kennedy (Canada)
Chris Kennedy’s serene and painterly Tamalpais (Canada) was filmed while perched high above San Francisco. The majesty of the landscape materializes in relation to an easel-mounted grid that not only recalls the tradition of plein air perspective painting but also reverses

Excited (Films & Schedules)
Bruce Sweeney (Canada)
After eight years without a date, golf course owner Kevin (Cam Cronin) just wants to meet the right woman. He drops “subtle” hints, like leaving neatly wrapped luxury watches on their desks after knowing them only briefly, but that just seems to scare them away. Because he's already been divorced once, Kevin's overly concerned mother (Gabrielle Rose) is worried that her chances of being a grandmo...

In Comparison (Films & Schedules)
Harun Farocki (Germany/Austria)
Observation is also the main modus of Harun Farocki’s latest film, In Comparison (Austria/Germany), which revisits issues explored in the director’s 2007 two-channel installation Comparison Via a Third. This handsome 16mm colour film, which will have its North American premiere in Toronto, is a deceptively contemplative documentary about contemporary brick production. Spanning continents and cult...

Canadian Music Café
The Canadian Music Café showcases some of Canada’s hottest artists for delegates of the Toronto International Film Festival. In September, the Canadian Music Café will usher filmmakers and music supervisors from around the world into a downtown Toronto venue, turn down the lights, raise the curtain and turn up the volume for some of Canada’s finest up-and-comin...

Canadian Music Café
The Canadian Music Café showcases some of Canada’s hottest artists for delegates of the Toronto International Film Festival. In September, the Canadian Music Café will usher filmmakers and music supervisors from around the world into a downtown Toronto venue, turn down the lights, raise the curtain and turn up the volume for some of Canada’s finest up-and-comin...

Scheduling Update
Yonge-Dundas Square programming lineup TORONTO – The Toronto International Film Festival is thrilled to announce the programming lineup for the evening of Monday September 14th, 2009. Join filmmaker Jonathon Demme as he takes the stage at YDS and introduces his documentary “The Neil Young Trunk Show”. Monday September 14, 2009 at 8PM. Following the free screening of the film, THE CA...

Cairo Time (Films & Schedules)
Ruba Nadda (Canada)
With her latest feature, Ruba Nadda delves into the emotionally fraught territory of the fleeting affair. In a tremendous performance, Patricia Clarkson plays Juliette, a magazine editor. Vaguely dissatisfied with her job, Juliette follows her Canadian diplomat husband, Mark (Tom McCamus), to Cairo. When she arrives, however, she learns that he's been held up in the Palestinian territories due to...

Heiran (Films & Schedules)
Shalizeh Arefpour (Iran)
Teen lust takes on a wholly different meaning when it surfaces in the wrong country. In Iran, high-school student Mahi (Baran Kosari) and illegal Afghan worker Heiran (Mehrdad Sedighian) risk Romeo and Juliet status when her horrified family refuses to bless their spontaneous union. Supported by an affectionate grandfather (theatre veteran Khosro Shakibaei, in a memorable last performance) who sp...

Smoke (Films & Schedules)
Nikos Theodosakis, Linda (Canada)
Thrown into an ice-fishing tradition of beer and cigarettes, Michael finds himself caught in the crossfire of his father’s wrath when he doesn’t quite fit into the ritual shared by the men in his family. Smoke is a beautifully rendered story of a young boy and the love-hate relationship he has to leave behind in the face of his father’s imminent death. KM Nikos and Linda Theodosak...

Industry
The 35th Toronto International Film Festival will be held September 9-18, 2010.  The Sales & Industry Office and the Industry Programming Team are already working hard to provide you with world class programming and festival services. The Sales and Industry Office is pleased to announce that the Hyatt Regency on King will be the host hotel for The Toronto International Film Festiva...

Contact Us
If you have specific questions and are unable to find the answers on our website, please contact one of the following departments: The Toronto International Film Festival Group Box Office handles all public inquiries. Please contact Customer Relations at Customer Relations, 416-968-FILM or toll-free at 1-877-968-FILM. Film Handling is responsibl...

Match Club
Match Club is a meeting space and lounge, the hub for all Sales & Industry and Guest Relations Office delegates, and the nexus for the international and Canadian film industries. International consultants are available onsite to help set up meetings and offer advice. Consultants are experts from the fields of world sales, festivals and production. Date: Thursday, September 10...

Contact Us
The Sales & Industry Office is committed to facilitating relationships between accredited buyers, sales agents and filmmakers with films in the Festival. Off-SeasonOctober 1, 2009 - May 1, 2010 Email: sales@tiff.net Phone: 416-934-3254 Registration Email: registration@tiff.net Phone: 416-934-5834 Fax: 416-967-7860 ...

Industry
The 35th Toronto International Film Festival will be held September 9-18, 2010.  The Sales & Industry Office and the Industry Programming Team are already working hard to provide you with world class programming and festival services. The Sales and Industry Office is pleased to announce that the Hyatt Regency on King will be the host hotel for The Toronto International Film Festiva...

Contact Us
The Sales & Industry Office is committed to facilitating relationships between accredited buyers, sales agents and filmmakers with films in the Festival. Off-SeasonOctober 1, 2009 - May 1, 2010 Email: sales@tiff.net Phone: 416-934-3254 Registration Email: registration@tiff.net Phone: 416-934-5834 Fax: 416-967-7860 ...

Match Club
Match Club is a meeting space and lounge, the hub for all Sales & Industry and Guest Relations Office delegates, and the nexus for the international and Canadian film industries. International consultants are available onsite to help set up meetings and offer advice. Consultants are experts from the fields of world sales, festivals and production. Date: Thursday, September 10...

Where to Stay
Stay At The Sutton Place Hotel While At The Festival The Toronto International Film Festival’s host hotel is offering our out-of-town attendees two special packages. Call us at 416 968 FILM or 1 877 968 FILM now to book your stay at the Sutton Place Hotel: Sutton 3 Day Package - $999Valid from September 17, 18, and 193-night stay at the Sutton Plac...

25 Carat (Films & Schedules)
Patxi Amezcua (Spain)
Shot on the streets of Barcelona, 25 Carat probes the ugly side of a city known the world over for its beauty. Using stripped-down hand-held camera work, the debut feature by Patxi Amezcua pushes deep into a harsh environment of thieves, hustlers and hitmen, combining action with strong, engaging characters to keep viewers at the edge of their seats.Abel (Francesc Garrido) works as an “unofficial...

Naissances (Films & Schedules)
Anne Emond (Canada)
Naissances examines an ephemeral connection between strangers and the false hope borne of living in a moment that both does and does not belong to you. Young Camille has just had an abortion and is hitchhiking home when she meets Pierre, an older man who refurbishes furniture. During their journey, both tell lies about their personal lives that are disquieting, but which build a certai...

The Island (Films & Schedules)
Trevor Anderson (Canada)
Watch this short online now! Where should all the gays go? To an island, says a homophobic piece of “fan mail” written to Trevor Anderson, an independent gay filmmaker living in Alberta. Trudging through the snow, Anderson ironically muses that perhaps a “fantasy island” for gay people isn’t such a bad idea. Through colourful animations, he imagines a world free from discrimination. KM ...

Homeland Security (Films & Schedules)
Isaac Cravit (Canada)
Concerned about the fidelity of his wife, customs agent Phil takes out his frustration on a group of young ladies heading south of the border for a bachelorette party. This dark comedy reveals the ills of paranoia in an age when everything can seem suspect. AR Isaac Cravit wrote the plays Our Wedding Table and Pull-out , which were both performed at the Toronto Fringe Festi...

The Joneses (Films & Schedules)
Derrick Borte (USA)
If ever there was a film perfectly attuned to the currentzeitgeist, it would be The Joneses. First-time writer-director Derrick Borte imbues a serious core theme – the wobbly undercurrents of a frenetic consumer culture – with humour, warmth and shots of clever, zesty fun.Borte begins the film by showing us ourselves – or at least who we often aspire to be. We meet Steve Jones (David Duchovny), h...

BAND (Films & Schedules)
Adam Pendleton Part performance, rock show, installation and film screening, BAND refashions the form and content of Jean-Luc Godard's film Sympathy for the Devil. A multi-staged art work, BAND will begin at this year's Festival with a concert that includes music, live narration and projected footage. Using a documentary and essayistic approach, artist Adam Pendleton will continue to unfold BAND in stages, oper...

Doc Conference
Doc Conference is a day-long series of panels and discussions devoted to the new challenges and opportunities for documentary financing, distribution and impact. Date: Sunday, September 13, 2009Time: 10:00am to 5:00pmLocation: University of Toronto’s Victoria College (93 Charles Street West, behind the Isabel Bader Theatre), Room 323*Doc Conference is open to all Guest Relations, Sales & ...

How to Festival
Visa^† is the only credit card accepted by the Toronto International Film Festival. Not sure where to start… or even how?Not to worry: the very nature of a festival experience means there will be some changes along the way, and we want you to know as soon as we do. Everything you n...

Masterclass with Atom Egoyan (Films & Schedules)
This Master Class is an intimate discussion with one of the industry’s most widely respected filmmakers. Auteur Atom Egoyan occupies a distinct position within Canadian filmmaking – his unequivocal authorial vision and inimitable style are sustained throughout a body of work that includes Next of Kin (1984), Family Viewing (1987), Speaking Parts (1989), The Adjuster (1991), Calendar (1993), Exo...

The Happiest Girl in the World (Films & Schedules)
Radu Jude (The Netherlands/Romania)
Could family ties be the ultimate blackmailing tool? Imagine you come from a small provincial town and you're still a year away from graduating high school. Your family is short of money, so you build castles in the sky and hope they don't come crashing down. And one day, your prayers are heard: you win a car in a contest and all you have to do in return is act happy in a juice commercial. Easy, ...

fish in barrel (Films & Schedules)
Randall Okita (Canada)
Following the intricate and ethereal dream landscape he created in Machine with Wishbone, Randall Okita continues to demonstrate a keen ability to craft sculptural cinema that absorbs the viewer into a diaphanous world. In a film overflowing with symbolic imagery, dark undertones of a young man’s self-destruction are made beautiful through Okita’s water compositions. AR Randall Ok...

Unlocked (Films & Schedules)
Mio Adilman (Canada)
Anger-management issues and a domineering mother fill B’s life with constant frustration. Add to this the inconvenience he endures when his bike is repeatedly double-locked by careless cyclists, and one gets the feeling that B is reaching a breaking point. Mio Adilman creatively constructs an entertaining and revealing character study, highlighting the ills and joys of urban life on tw...

My Queen Karo (Films & Schedules)
Dorothée van den Berghe (Belgium)
Amsterdam's squatter culture is as famous a utopian experiment as American communes, but seen far less often in films. Dorothée van den Berghe draws from her own experiences growing up in Amsterdam's bohemian environment in My Queen Karo, her spirited second feature. If property is evil, what can be said about the possessiveness that comes with love and family?It begins as the most incredible adv...

My Tehran for Sale (Films & Schedules)
Granaz Moussavi (Australia/Iran)
When it comes to our impressions of world events, few of us have the opportunity or, frankly, the inclination to dig beyond mass media. In My Tehran for Sale, first-time Australian-Iranian filmmaker Granaz Moussavimakes a highly personal attempt to show the world a side of Iranian youth never portrayed in the media. Filmed at great risk to all involved, My Tehran for Sale reveals the complex doub...

Programmes
For a full list of films and details by programme, choose from the following: Canada First! Canadian Open Vault ...

How to Buy
Visa^† is the only credit card accepted by the Toronto International Film Festival. Tickets can be purchased by any of the following options; In person Festival Box Office at Nathan Phillips Square100 Queen Street West (located in the white tent, west of the square) June 1 to Septe...

Programmes
For a full list of films and details by programme, choose from the following: Canada First! Canadian Open Vault ...

How to Buy
Visa^† is the only credit card accepted by the Toronto International Film Festival. Tickets can be purchased by any of the following options; In person Festival Box Office at Nathan Phillips Square100 Queen Street West (located in the white tent, west of the square) June 1 to Septe...

Master Class
In this Master Class, film critic Tom McSorley interviews Atom Egoyan live on stage. The Master Class will be followed by a cocktail to celebrate the launch of Tom McSorley’s latest book Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster. Master Class Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2009Time: 3:00pm to 4:30pmLocation: Varsity 6 CocktailDate: Tuesday, September 15, 2009Time: 4:30pm to 6:00pmLocation: Panorama, M...

The Topp Twins (Films & Schedules)
Leanne Pooley (New Zealand)
The story of one of New Zealand's most cherished and charmingly irrepressible performing duos finally reaches the big screen in Leanne Pooley's latest feature, The Topp Twins.Through a compilation of interviews, performance footage, home videos and newsreel archives, Pooley's documentary introduces audiences to Jools and Lynda Topp, the world's only yodelling, lesbian, country-and-western-singing...

Telefilm Canada PITCH THIS! (Films & Schedules)
Telefilm Canada PITCH THIS! returns to the Toronto International Film Festival for its tenth consecutive year! In a live pitch environment, six participant teams have six minutes to pitch their feature-film to an audience of over 250 industry professionals. The winner will be selected by a jury of international industry experts. The prize is $10,000 from Telefilm Canada to assist with costs relat...

Leslie, My Name Is Evil (Films & Schedules)
Reginald Harkema (Canada)
Reginald Harkema's incendiary new film Leslie, My Name Is Evil (the follow-up to his celebrated 2006 feature Monkey Warfare) focuses on the trial of Charles Manson and his followers, but it's far from a conventional re-hash of the grisly details. Leslie is a charged, intensely stylized postmodern analysis of one of the key battles in the culture wars that consumed America for much of the sixties....

My Heart Goes Hadippa (Films & Schedules)
Anurag Singh (India)
Fans know that Rani Mukherjee is one of the most beautiful, dynamic women ever to grace a movie screen. Cinephiles know her acting skills are unmatched in Indian cinema. Opportunities rarely come along to see her in a film that draws equally on her dramatic talents and her glam appeal, but My Heart Goes Hadippa is just the ticket. Featuring sparkling comic performances from both Mukherjee and her...

My Year Without Sex (Films & Schedules)
Sarah Watt (Australia)
It's August in Melbourne. As Natalie (Sacha Horler) and her husband, Ross (Matt Day), celebrate his birthday, she collapses. When she wakes up, she's in the hospital after emergency surgery for an aneurysm.My Year Without Sex is for anyone who has suffered life's daily little challenges, only to get sideswiped by a massive one. This is what happens to Natalie, and her subsequent year-long trial e...

Programmes
Industry Programming produces a selection of events and programmes that address issues vital to the international and domestic film community. Festival delegates are granted exceptional access to key figures in the business and legendary artists through programmes such as:Telefilm Canada PITCH THIS!A live pitch competition with a $10,000.00 prize.Talent LabAn intensive four-day workshop l...

Programmes
Industry Programmes offer a selection of invaluable networking and career development opportunities to filmmakers and producers attending the Toronto International Film Festival. Industry produces a selection of events and programmes that address issues vital to the international and domestic film community. Festival delegates are granted exceptional access to key figures in the business a...

Visiting Toronto
New to the Festival?Unfamiliar with Festival programmes? Then you need to see this and learn more about Festival programming. Getting AroundOur Festival map will help navigate all the Festival locations, including: Theatres & Venues Box Offices Hospitality Partners Hotels Art Installations Free Programming. Read more on traveling to Toronto and how to get around ...

What to See
The Festival showcases more than 300 films from across the globe, with a diverse selection of titles for you to explore. Festival programming is divided into programmes to help guide your choices. Canada First! A showcase of the next wave of Canadian filmmaking talent. Canadian Open Vault Special presentations of a recently resto...

Film for Invisible Ink, Case No. 142: Abbreviation for Dead Winter (Diminished by 1,794) (Films & Schedules)
David Gatten (USA)
David Gatten’s Abbreviation for Dead Winter (USA) from his Invisible Ink series, captures passages from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species as they are lifted from the page, resulting in residual ink spots and fibres that evoke metaphors of migration and distances.

Blessed (Films & Schedules)
Ana Kokkinos (Australia)
Filmmaker Ana Kokkinos last appeared at the Festival with The Book of Revelation, her third feature after Head On and Only the Brave. Fans of these powerful and provocative films will be enthralled with Blessed,for it shows us an evolving artist in full command of her craft as she tackles the subject of mothers and children.Set in a working-class suburb of Melbourne over the course of one day and...

Léger Problème (Films & Schedules)
Hélène Florent (Canada)
Generally, it’s nice to be light in one’s step. In this visually inventive short, however, it’s causing great existential issues for a man attempting to remain within the laws of gravity. With a flourish for visual storytelling, Hélène Florent crafts moments of levity in this depiction of a character’s struggle to stay grounded. AR Hélène Florent has acted in several television pr...

Volta (Films & Schedules)
Ryan Mullins (Canada)
In an era of generic multiplexes, it’s difficult to imagine a place where theatres have disappeared altogether. Guided by the former projectionist, Ryan Mullins explores a derelict theatre in rural Ghana that retains shadows of its former purpose while serving as a makeshift school. This exquisitely photographed documentary reveals the importance of local cinemas as gathering places th...

General policies
On this page: BOX OFFICE & THEATRES POLICIES SECURITY PRIVACY POLICY Box Office & Theatre Policies NO EXCHANGES OR REFUNDS. ALL SALES ARE FINAL. QUANTITIES ARE LIMITED AND MAY SELL OUT AT ANY TIME.   ...

Tungijuq (Films & Schedules)
Felix Lajeunesse, Paul Raphael (Canada)
Watch this short online now! The cycle of life is revealed in a pulsing rhythm as Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq turns from animal to human to seal and then back again. Tungijuq, which co-stars Zacharias Kunuk, is a charged meditation on the Inuit seal hunt and the claim for sovereignty over traditional practices. KM Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël have been collaborating on music ...

Melody for a Street Organ (Films & Schedules)
Kira Muratova (Ukraine)
Two strangely clad children walk the city streets on Christmas Eve as falling snow gently envelops everything in a powdery layer of magic. The pale-skinned youths look like a cross between dethroned royalty and homeless bums: the boy wears a luxuriously patterned coat and the girl a delicate muff, while both sport striking dark circles under their eyes.It is a deep, dark night and Alena (Lena Kos...

Life Begins (Films & Schedules)
Émile Proulx-Cloutier (Canada)
Joseph is entering adolescence. Mathieu, his older brother, stagnates in a menial job. They rarely interact. One night, their home is broken into and their father’s gun stolen, setting off a sequence of actions that test the family’s fabric. A story of the profound bond between brothers, this affecting drama unfolds with subtle and confident precision. ASD Émile Proulx-Cloutier is...

Man v. Minivan (Films & Schedules)
Spencer Maybee (Canada)
Shane’s future brother-in-law thinks a visit to a strip club is the best way for Shane to start his wedding day. Upon receiving the pre-nuptial gift of a minivan from his in-laws and a series of questions from an unlikely source, the groom is led to a comedic case of cold feet. Great performances and sharp writing deliver new life to a familiar formula in this wedding farce. AR Sp...

Nora (Films & Schedules)
Alla Kovgan, David Hinton (USA/United Kingdom/Mozambique)
We were fortunate to find a perfect companion piece for Saint Louis Blues in Nora, which also draws on music. Here, directors Alla Kovgan and David Hinton craft a portrait of Zimbabwe-born dancer Nora Chipaumire. Using contemporary African-influenced choreography, Chipaumire tells her own story through the medium of her body. Filled with vibrant colour and stirring rhythms, Nora is, for Chipaumir...

Tickets
Tickets to all Festival screenings go on sale September 4, 2009 at 7am. Regular Public Screenings - $19.76 Student/Senior - $17.14 (in person only, same-day sales only) Premium Public Screenings - $38.33Student/Senior - $19.05 (in person only, same-day sales only) Children’s Tickets for Sprockets Family Zone programming onlyChild (12 and under) - $12.86 Single Ticket Details ...

Tickets
Tickets to all Festival screenings go on sale September 4, 2009 at 7am. Regular Public Screenings - $19.76 Student/Senior - $17.14 (in person only, same-day sales only) Premium Public Screenings - $38.33Student/Senior - $19.05 (in person only, same-day sales only) Children’s Tickets for Sprockets Family Zone programming onlyChild (12 and under) - $12.86 Single Ticket Details ...

Where to Eat & Drink
The Festival is located in the heart of downtown Toronto, steps away from a number of restaurants and bars in the downtown core that offer a diverse and delicious range of dining options. With over 7,000 restaurants and a vibrant night life, Toronto has something to offer for every taste and budget. For a list of restaurants, catering and some of Toronto's hottest clubs and event spac...

75 El Camino (Films & Schedules)
Sami Khan (Canada)
In Sarnia’s Chemical Valley, a red-hot Chevy El Camino is the last treasured possession that Travis and Marianne have hung on to after losing everything, including their house. Should they sell this reminder of more prosperous days or take off on the open road, a dream they’ve been chasing all their lives? As this close-knit couple tries to decide, life offers some unexpected twists. KM ...

Out in that Deep Blue Sea (Films & Schedules)
Kazik Radwanski (Canada)
Kazik Radwanski and Daniel Montgomery, the director-producer team behind last year’s award-winning Princess Margaret Blvd., bring you the final film of their trilogy. Presented as the middle section of a three-part storyline, the film focuses on a disillusioned middle-aged man who goes door to door, drumming up business for his real estate agency. As he attempts to balance his work wit...

Pointless Film (Films & Schedules)
Peter Wellington (Canada)
Watch this short online now! Canadians’ awkward inability to haggle is humorously played out in this comedic short film. Through give-and-take dialogue, Oliver Dennis and Noam Jenkins sell their performances as relentless negotiators. In the end, one questions if anyone really wins when it comes to the purchase of a used futon. AR Peter Wellington has worked as a director on numerous ...

S/T (Films & Schedules)
Lisandro Alonso (Argentina)
Lisandro Alonso (Liverpool, Los Muertos) creates a face-to-face encounter with the wild in the beguiling and enigmatic S/T (Argentina), a moment observed in a seemingly floating abyss.

De Mouvement (Films & Schedules)
Richard Kerr (Canada)
As an extension of his INDUSTRIE/INDUSTRY project, Richard Kerr furthers his appropriation of feature film trailers, formally reconstructing their cinematic language. Monochromatic French film trailers from a bygone era provide the source material, and here the actions of the actors are secondary to the physical movement of celluloid. A brilliant formalist montage of wipes creates an awareness ...

Doc Roundtables
Now in its fourth year, Doc Roundtables create a rare chance for filmmakers to meet with industry leaders for an informal networking session. This year, industry participants include representatives from Sony Pictures Classics, HBO, Films Transit, Submarine Entertainment, SnagFilms, Zeitgeist Films, IFC Films, Emerging Pictures, Oscilloscope Laboratories, Lorber Media, and more. ...

Doc Corner
Now in its fourth year, Doc Roundtables create a rare chance for filmmakers to meet with industry leaders for an informal networking session. This year, industry participants include representatives from Sony Pictures Classics, HBO, Films Transit, Submarine Entertainment, SnagFilms, Zeitgeist Films, IFC Films, Emerging Pictures, Oscilloscope Laboratories, Lorber Media, and more. ...

My Toxic Baby (Films & Schedules)
Min Sook Lee (Canada)
BPA. Lead. Melamine. Documentary filmmaker Min Sook Lee brings us this intimate and alarming look at the numerous toxins found in a baby’s products and environment. As a new mom, Lee shares her anxieties as she struggles to protect her young daughter, Song Ji, from our chemical world. Urgent, emotional and highly personal, Lee’s documentary is essential viewing for new and expecting pa...

Year of the Carnivore (Films & Schedules)
Sook-Yin Lee (Canada)
Sammy Smalls (Cristin Milioti) has spent the last little while working as store security in a supermarket, mostly busting seniors who try to smuggle out slabs of meat. She takes her job seriously, but it's really just a convenient place to hide while she tries to decide what to do with her life, simultaneously battling her neuroses (she has serious body-image issues) and her meddling parents. But...

Free Antichrist Video Conference with Lars von Trier (Films & Schedules)


A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (Films & Schedules)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand/United Kingdom/Germany)
The North American premiere of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s equally masterful A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (Thailand/UK) is a segment from his multi-platform project Primitive (see also his single-channel installation Phantoms of Nabua, presented as part of Future Projections). Filming in Nabua in northeastern Thailand, site of a bloody 1965 battle between communist farmers and the totalitarian gover...

Vs. (Films & Schedules)
Ben Bruhmuller (Canada)
In this elaborate stop-motion animated film, Ben Bruhmuller deftly evokes the sweep of a man’s life through the rounds of a boxing match. Through a striking layering process complemented by exquisitely sculpted figures, family and personal moments are pulled into focus then disappear as the boxer advances from a young man to a lonely elder. ASD Ben Bruhmuller is a Toronto-based fi...

Big Head (Films & Schedules)
Dylan Akio Smith (Canada)
Ten-year-old Billy is mercilessly teased at school because he has a large cranium. He learns that one of his classmates has found a way to get a new nose, so he decides to do everything he can to modify his own perceived flaw. This dark comedy rings true for every kid who was bullied for something that was not wrong with them. KM Dylan Akio Smith was born in Vancouver. His short films incl...

Two Projects by Frederick Kiesler (Films & Schedules)
Heinz Emigholz (Austria/Germany)
Heinz Emigholz’s Two Projects by Frederick Kiesler (Austria/Germany) is the latest instalment of his internationally lauded Photography and Beyond series. The film renders homage to this visionary Viennese architect whose wild and wonderful genius was little understood during his lifetime.

Danse Macabre (Films & Schedules)
Pedro Pires (Canada)
Based on a concept by Robert Lepage, Pedro Pires’s exquisitely photographed morbid ballet pushes the traditional dance film to new cinematic heights. In haunting deserted spaces, the choreographed erratic motions of a corpse evoke the final spasms of life and a last struggle with the emotional turns of the past. ASD Pedro Pires is an award-winning visual-effects artist whose credits include the ...

Opening Night Concert: Champion & His G-Strings (Films & Schedules)
(Canada)
FREE EVENTS IN THE HEART OF THE CITY

Une Catastrophe (Films & Schedules)
Jean-Luc Godard (Austria)
While the world eagerly awaits his new feature, Jean-Luc Godard’s Une Catastrophe (Switzerland/Italy) has its Canadian premiere in Toronto. Returning to the essayistic style that has come to define his extensive post-Nouvelle Vague body of work, the film brings a flash of the director’s prosody, complete with the grunting sounds of a tennis match, a dash of German melodrama and his signature epig...

Swimming Lesson (Films & Schedules)
Caitriona Cantillon (Canada)
Tensions build on a sunny afternoon as Kate, her sister Nicola and their mother go swimming. Kate swims circles around her mother, who is just learning to swim, taunting her and blaming her for everything wrong in her own life. Peace comes in a surprising form when the birthday girl, Nicola, delivers some unexpected news. KM Caitriona Cantillon is a Toronto-based filmmaker whose s...

Deadman (Films & Schedules)
Chelsea McMullan (Canada)
In the desert landscape of Deadman Creek, British Columbia, modern cowboy Matt Sandvoss is determined to resurrect the wild west by constructing a “ghost town.” Meanwhile, a First Nations resident, Gerald Carter, is equally committed to another vision of the west based on long-held Native traditions. Keenly observed and suffused with irony, this elegant documentary surveys a profound confrontat...

Madonna: Truth or Dare (Films & Schedules)
Alek Keshishian, Mark Aldo Miceli (USA)
FREE EVENTS IN THE HEART OF THE CITY

Steamboat Bill Jr. (Films & Schedules)
Charles Reisner (USA)
FREE EVENTS IN THE HEART OF THE CITY TIFF Shhh! Silent Film Series: Steamboat Bill Jr.

Telefilm Canada PITCH THIS!
Telefilm Canada PITCH THIS! returned to the Toronto International Film Festival for its tenth consecutive year! In a live pitch environment, six participant teams had six minutes to pitch their feature-film idea to an audience of over 250 industry professionals. The winner was selected by a jury of international industry experts. The prize was $10,000 from Telefilm Canada to assist with costs r...

Telefilm Canada PITCH THIS!
Telefilm Canada PITCH THIS! returned to the Toronto International Film Festival for its tenth consecutive year! In a live pitch environment, six participant teams had six minutes to pitch their feature-film idea to an audience of over 250 industry professionals. The winner was selected by a jury of international industry experts. The prize was $10,000 from Telefilm Canada to assist with costs r...

Ondine (Films & Schedules)
Neil Jordan (Ireland/USA)
One day a simple fisherman, trawling off the Irish coast where he makes his living, catches a beautiful and mysterious woman in his nets. She appears to be dead but, miraculously, comes back to life before his eyes. So begins Neil Jordan's deeply enchanting fairy tale of a movie. Ondine effortlessly mixes myth and fantasy with the life of a fishing community on the jagged seascapes of the wild so...

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Films & Schedules)
Werner Herzog (USA)
There has been tremendous speculation ever since news broke that the incomparable Werner Herzog was mounting a remake of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. But the furor has proved unfounded, as Herzog's film comes from a new script. The only resemblance to the original is that it portrays a cop whose moral compass is spinning from excessive drug use.After severely injuring his back while saving a pr...

Broken Embraces (Films & Schedules)
Pedro Almodóvar (Spain)
As Almodóvar settles into the midpoint of an already illustrious career, his work has achieved a happy balance between the whiz-kid pyrotechnics of his early days as a filmmaker and the more mature, measured style of his recent films. Broken Embraces sits somewhere between the two. In addition to a dense, labyrinthine narrative that jumps across time periods, it also features some fiercely contes...

Colony (Films & Schedules)
Carter Gunn, Ross McDonnell (Ireland)
We admire some documentaries for their artistry and others for their urgency. Rarely do we see a film that combines both of these qualities as impressively as this debut by directors Carter Gunn and Ross McDonnell. Their unlikely topic is the world of beekeepers during the recent (and ongoing) crisis known as colony collapse disorder.Beautifully photographed by McDonnell and skilfully edited by G...

Eyes Wide Open (Films & Schedules)
Haim Tabakman (Israel)
Living in one of Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox quarters, Aaron (veteran stage actor Zohar Strauss) runs a kosher butcher shop and is the father of four young sons. His quiet life is disrupted when the arrival of the lost soul Ezri (Israeli heartthrob Ran Danker) awakens dormant feelings. Hidden under layers of piety, unknown desires suddenly rise in Aaron like an all-enveloping tide. While the devou...

Agora (Films & Schedules)
Alejandro Amenábar (Spain)
From the director of the Academy Award-winning biopic The Sea Inside comes a rousing historical epic recreating the early religious conflicts of fourth-century Alexandria, Egypt. The film boasts a smouldering turn by Rachel Weisz, who has evinced greater and greater depth with each new role. Playing the legendary philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, she delivers a commanding performance of inte...

The Day Will Come (Films & Schedules)
Susanne Schneider (Germany/France)
The legacy of terrorism is on the minds of a number of filmmakers this year, and with The Day Will Come, Susanne Schneider does a superb job of detailing the impact that youthful decisions can have on people's lives decades later. In her intimate, powerfully acted and extremely well-written film, Schneider focuses her narrative on two women from different generations whose lives are inextricably ...

Hotel Bookings
The Sales & Industry Office offers exclusive availability at the Sutton Place Hotel.Special Festival Rates to all Registered Delegates also available with our partner hotels. For further information or to book, contact us at: hotels@tiff.net   Phone: 416-934-3226 Fax: 416-967-7860 Partner Hotels The Sutton Plac...

Awards 2008
2008 Award Winners Film Title Director Country Award Slumdog Millionaire Danny Boyle United Kingdom Cadillac People's Choice Award ...

Plan Your Stay
We want you to make the most of the Toronto International Film Festival and the City of Toronto. During the Festival, we are pleased to work with the following partners who will help make your stay memorable. HospitalityFor information on restaurants, catering and some of Toronto's hottest clubs and event spaces please visit us here for a list of all of our official partners. HotelsP...

Festival info
This is a great starting point for planning your TIFF experience!Never been to the Festival or simply need the basics? The following should get you started. Get Involved You can also find out how to volunteer with this year's Festival. Contact us Need help or have a general inquiry? Important Dates Be informed and subscribe to TIFFG Alerts or g...

Hotel Bookings
The Sales & Industry Office offers exclusive availability at the Sutton Place Hotel.Special Festival Rates to all Registered Delegates also available with our partner hotels. For further information or to book, contact us at: hotels@tiff.net   Phone: 416-934-3226 Fax: 416-967-7860 Partner Hotels The Sutton Plac...

Flash Camera Movie (Films & Schedules)
Sebastjan Henrickson (Canada)
After working on many Wavelengths films over the years at Niagara Custom Lab in Toronto, Sebastjan Henrickson presents Flash Camera Movie (Canada). For one year (2002–03), Henrickson stole moments from his hectic days to ritualistically record his surroundings with disposable flash cameras one frame at a time. Allowing for repose and reflection, the resulting imagery reveals the paradoxical preci...

Puccini Conservato (Films & Schedules)
Michael Snow (Italy/Canada)
Puccini Conservato (Canada/Italy) by Michael Snow, to whom Wavelengths is dedicated, was commissioned by the Lucca Film Festival for the 150th anniversary of the famous Italian composer’s birth. In this delightful video, the Canadian master offers a witty visual and sonic commentary to Puccini’s La Bohème.

Record (Films & Schedules)
Dylan Reibling (Canada)
On an idyllic Saturday afternoon, a sidewalk record sale becomes the unexpected site of an emotional reckoning when three fellow countrymen are confronted by their past in an unusual way. Capturing this moment on a city street corner in vibrant detail, Reibling creates a clever and charming portrait of the power of music. ASD Dylan Reibling was raised in Baden, Ontario and current...

Snow Hides the Shade of Fig Trees (Films & Schedules)
Samer Najari (Canada)
Salim, a recent immigrant to Canada, recounts this contemplative story about six men piled in the back of a van delivering flyers in Montreal on the day they are joined by a curious newcomer from Russia, Sacha. Though the men hail from different parts of the world, they all share a sense of nostalgia for their homelands. Melding poetic and magic realism, this lyrically melancholic dram...

A Hindu's Indictment of Heaven (Films & Schedules)
DEV KHANNA (Canada)
Ever wondered what the afterlife is like? Dev Khanna provides us with a cynical take on romanticized visions of eternal happiness in this charming tongue-in-cheek drama about a woman who waits at the gates of heaven for her soulmate to arrive. When things don’t work out quite as planned, Saint Peter offers an unexpected alternative. ASD Dev Khanna was born in Toronto. He has worke...

On a Lonely Drive (Films & Schedules)
Igor Drljaca (Canada)
A young boy’s psyche is put to the test as he waits outside for his parents to stop arguing. Shutting out the world on a hot sunny day, he finds himself caught on a long drive with possibly tragic consequences. Drljaca deftly directs this stark story, offering reflection on a family’s troubles. KM Igor Drljaca studied film at York University. He has written and directed the shorts...

The Translator (Films & Schedules)
Sonya Di Rienzo (Canada)
Watch this short online now! Is it “je t’aime” or “I don’t love you”? A translator of French films finds that her work has become her life. While on the subway with her boyfriend, she looks around and imagines the inner thoughts of the people surrounding her as she makes up her mind about her own feelings. KM Sonya Di Rienzo is a Toronto-based filmmaker and independent producer. She p...

Found (Films & Schedules)
Paramita Nath (Canada)
In 1978, Toronto poet Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in a Lao refugee camp in Thailand. Based on her book of poems inspired by her father’s discarded scrapbook, Found documents the fragile beginnings of her life. Interweaving photos, home video and animation with Thammavongsa’s compelling poetry, Found is a thoughtful meditation on connecting with one’s past and measuring its worth. ...

In Conversation With... Michael Caine (Films & Schedules)
Sir Michael Caine has described himself as an Everyman. But not every man can match his achievements. In this Mavericks conversation, we'll get a generous helping of the raconteur's talents. The discussion will range freely around his distinguished career, including his latest film, Harry Brown, which premieres at the Festival separate from this event. How do you summarize Caine's body of work? H...

Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags (Films & Schedules)
Marc Levin (USA)
New York City's garment district has been a microcosm of the American economy for the past century. It was the place for new immigrants to start climbing the ladder. During the early twentieth century, the industry absorbed Italians and Eastern European Jews who called it the schmatta business (Yiddish for “rags”). Later, Latinos and other ethnicities flowed in. For a period, the clothing industr...

Civilization/The Shape of Things/This Transition Will Never End #6 (Films & Schedules)
Marco Brambilla, Oliver Pietsch, Jeremy Shaw These three feverish, urgent films find a new twist on the history and culture of cinema. In turns surreal, menacing and hilarious, they delight in the inexhaustible treasure trove of discoveries to be found in the medium's past. For this group, moviedom is a vast dreamscape, an over-packed cortex of memory with seemingly random bits of the twentieth century's subconscious spilling out in sometim...

The Men Who Stare At Goats (Films & Schedules)
Grant Heslov (USA)
Like a twenty-first-century Dr. Strangelove, The Men Who Stare at Goats takes war to its illogical conclusion, with hilarious results. George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges are in top form in this uproarious tale about a top-secret brigade of psychic soldiers trained in New Age warfare. Amazingly, it's based on a true story.The source is Guardian columnist Jon Ronson's surr...

Phantoms of Nabua (Films & Schedules)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand/United Kingdom/Germany)
Soon after nightfall when the crepuscular violets concede to blackness, the wind's rustling intensifies and the boys come out to play. Such is the elemental setting of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Phantoms of Nabua, the Thai filmmaker and artist's wraithlike and mysterious portrait of the town of Nabua in northeastern Thailand. As a tall fluorescent lamppost stands upright, canted at an angle with...

The Warrior and the Wolf (Films & Schedules)
Tian Zhuang Zhuang (China)
A father figure in contemporary Chinese cinema, controversial avant-garde auteur Tian Zhuang Zhuang is back with a rewarding work of fearless art. A departure from his free-spirited early works and the cautious intimacy of his later films, The Warrior and the Wolf is the captivating adaptation of a short story by the prolific Japanese writer Yasushi Inoue.In the Era of the Warring States, before ...

Wavelengths 5: Une Catastrophe (Films & Schedules)
With indelible affirmation, personal expressions of historical and collective memory confront spectres from the past. Marina Gioti delves into one of the most contentious nationalist debates in Greece: the existence of illegal “secret schools” allegedly operating under the auspices of the Greek Orthodox Church during...

Sook-Yin Lee introduces Sweetie (Films & Schedules)
Jane Campion (Australia)
“Jane Campion's films are a big inspiration to me. I especially love her early movies, her art-school shorts, An Angel at My Table, and my favourite of all, Sweetie. When I first saw Sweetie, it blew my mind with its odd-pop art direction and camera, music juxtapositions and tender-audacious comic touch. It's personal and compelling moviemaking that takes the audience on surprising and challengin...

The Angel (Films & Schedules)
Margreth Olin (Norway/Sweden/Finland)
Norwegian director Margreth Olin makes her fiction-feature debut with The Angel, a searing, atmospheric study of abuse and addiction that began as a documentary project based on the life of the film's protagonist, Lea. It opens with the death of Lea's father, whose passing disrupts her idyllic rural existence as a young girl. (In the early scenes, the flowers and woods surrounding their cabin are...

Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound (Films & Schedules)
Mary Wharton (USA)
FREE EVENTS IN THE HEART OF THE CITY TIFF In Concert Film Series: American Masters Joan Baez – Sing Me Home. Featuring a short concert by Baez. THIRTEEN’s American Masters explores fifty years of folk legend and human rights activist Joan Baez in Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound, airing October 14 on PBS Features rare performance footage and candid interviews with David Crosby, Bob Dylan, ex-hu...

General Policies
Box Office and Theatre Policies Customers must present a valid ticket to gain admittance to a screening. Seating is guaranteed until 15 minutes before the screening. Latecomers will be seated at the discretion of theatre staff. There will be no further admittance 10 minutes after the start of a programme. No latecomers will be admitted to programmes of short f...

Registration
Online registration is now open for all professional delegates attending TIFF08. Returning delegates have received a registration code and a personal login via e-mail to process their registration. If you are a new delegate, please complete our registration form. If you are a returning delegate and have not received a registration code or for any other questions, please contact us ...

Maps & Locations
Alliance Atlantis Cumberland Cinemas 159 Cumberland Avenue AMC Yonge-Dundas 24 10 Dundas Street East, Fourth Floor Canadian Music Café Club 279 – Hard Rock Café, 279 Yonge Street Cineplex Odeon Varsity Cinemas Manulife Centre, 55 Bloor Street West, 2nd Floor Isabel Bader Theatre Victoria College, 93 Charles Street West ...

International Financing Forum
The Ontario Media Development Corporation's International Financing Forum (IFF) is a feature film co-financing event at the Toronto International Film Festival that brings together selected international and Canadian producers developing English language projects to do business in a relaxed atmosphere of brokered meetings and networking opportunities with international sales agents, distributors,...

Hotel Packages
Stay At The Sutton Place Hotel While At The Festival The Toronto International Film Festival’s host hotel is offering our out-of-town attendees two special packages: Sutton 3 Day Package - $999Valid for the final Thursday, Friday and Saturday of the Festival (September 17, 18, and 19)3-night stay at the Sutton Place Hotel (best available room, no e...

TIFF Brand
As we prepare to move into our new home, we have been giving a great deal of thought to how we can most effectively tie together our year-round activities. After careful research and consideration, we have decided to create a master brand for our organization. TIFF is our new identity. TIFF now means more than just the Toronto International Film Festival. TIFF will serve ...

International Financing Forum
The Ontario Media Development Corporation's International Financing Forum (IFF) is a feature film co-financing event at the Toronto International Film Festival that brings together selected international and Canadian producers developing English language projects to do business in a relaxed atmosphere of brokered meetings and networking opportunities with international sales agents, distributors,...

Hotel Packages
Stay At The Sutton Place Hotel While At The Festival The Toronto International Film Festival’s host hotel is offering our out-of-town attendees two special packages: Sutton 3 Day Package - $999Valid for the final Thursday, Friday and Saturday of the Festival (September 17, 18, and 19)3-night stay at the Sutton Place Hotel (best available room, no e...

Maps & Locations
Alliance Atlantis Cumberland Cinemas 159 Cumberland Avenue AMC Yonge-Dundas 24 10 Dundas Street East, Fourth Floor Canadian Music Café Club 279 – Hard Rock Café, 279 Yonge Street Cineplex Odeon Varsity Cinemas Manulife Centre, 55 Bloor Street West, 2nd Floor Isabel Bader Theatre Victoria College, 93 Charles Street West ...

TIFF Mobile
Interact on-the-go! Access the Festival site from your mobile, simply type the address tiff.net/mobile into your phone's browser. Also be sure to check out  the exclusive Bell twitter feed and Blackberry® tiff.app.  TwitterFrom September 10 to 19, 2009, official Festival information will be exclusively available at twitter.com/infotiffbell. Join the INFOTIFFBELL Twitter group to get information...

Vive la Rose (Films & Schedules)
Bruce Alcock (Canada)
Bruce Alcock’s animated depiction of a tragic Newfoundland love song (performed by Émile Benoit) illustrates the tune’s folk roots through its imaginative use of a rustic, abandoned fisherman’s cabin. Using an antique writing desk as his tableau, Alcock brings this Acadian tale to life by integrating stop-motion animation of found maritime objects with complementary oil paintings. AR...

Soap (Films & Schedules)
Dusty Mancinelli (Canada)
Eileen is an unhappily married stay-at-home mom with a muscled lover on the side. After a surprise twist ruins an afternoon tryst, her simple solution for the predicament hits a few snags. With a nod to the Coen brothers, and nostalgically set in the eighties, Soap uses dark humour to relay its tale of a woman forced to take control of her life. ASD Dusty Mancinelli completed a B.F...

Green Days (Films & Schedules)
Hana Makhmalbaf (Iran)
An Iranian playwright suffers a creative crisis as her country convulses on the eve of this year's election. Features never before seen footage shot on the streets of Tehran.

M (Films & Schedules)
Felix Dufour-Laperriere (Canada)
Following last year’s beautiful collage anim- ation Rosa Rosa, Félix Dufour-Laperrière returns to the Festival with M, a striking and abstract animated film. Delicately hand-drawn black-and-white architectural constructions expand and transform, evoking precariously balanced technological masses, while a cavernous soundscape punctuates this hypnotic visual play with structural complexi...

Polterabend (Films & Schedules)
Friedl vom Gröller (Kubelka) (Austria)
Polterabend (Austria) is an atypical portrait of female aging, made just prior to the artist’s wedding. Six older women of various ages are filmed, first in static tableau, then in a panning camera individualizing each face in a series of uncontrolled and disarming reciprocal gazes.

The Secret School (Films & Schedules)
Marina Gioti (Greece)
With The Secret School (Greece), Marina Gioti delves into one of the most contentious nationalist debates in Greece: the existence of illegal “secret schools” allegedly operating under the auspices of the Greek Orthodox Church during the Turkish Ottoman rule.

Doc Conference (Films & Schedules)
Doc Conference is a day-long series of panels and discussions dedicated to the art and industry of the documentary. Doc Conference takes place on Sunday, September 13, from 10:00am to 5:00pm in Room 323 at Victoria College, 93 Charles Street West (behind the Isabel Bader Theatre).

Awards Archive
TIFF Award Winners Year Film Title Director Country Award 2003 ZATOICHI Takeshi Kitano Japan People's Choice Award 2003 LOVE, SEX AND EATING THE BONES Sudz Sutherland   CityTV Award for Best Canadian First Feature Film 2003 LES INVASIONS BARBARES Denys Arcand   Toronto-City Award for Best Canadian Feature Film 2003 ASPIRATION Constant...

Sawasdee Bangkok (Films & Schedules)
Wisit Sasanatieng, Aditya Assarat | Kongdej Jaturanrasmee | Pen-ek Ratanaruang (Thailand)
In Thai, sawasdee is a customary greeting that could mean either hello or goodbye. The country's capital, Bangkok, is famous for its hospitality while also notorious for its nightlife and recent political turmoil. It is the dichotomies of these two words that, when combined, make the title of this omnibus film, Sawasdee Bangkok, so fitting.Unlike the recent Paris, je t'aime and New York, I Love Y...

Shameless (Films & Schedules)
Jan Hrebejk (Czech Republic)
What happens when a man falls out of love with his wife? In Oskar's case, he turns on the bedside lamp and suddenly realizes how big her nose looks against the bedroom wall! In this single shot, a masterly stroke so simple and yet so scaldingly ironic, Czech director Jan Hrebejk accomplishes the impossible. He tells the story of an unhappy marriage, complete with imminent demise, in one image: th...

The Spine (Films & Schedules)
Chris Landreth (Canada)
Academy Award-winner Chris Landreth em- ploys his signature style for his latest animation, creating a wholly original account of a co-dependent couples’ support group. Dan and Mary are facing very real issues. Their marriage having broken into tiny fragments, they must dig deep to tell their real story and rediscover the ties that brought them together in the first place. KM Chri...

Honeymoons (Films & Schedules)
Goran Paskaljevic (Serbia/Albania/Italy)
Since Europe has become the new promised land, its international border crossings have become as mythic as New York's Ellis Island. Such is the nature of the immi-grant honeymoon, as older generations of Europeans will readily tell you of their one-time descent upon the Big Apple. Now the European Union, riding a currency high, is doing the same thing to new groups: Arabs, Turks, Africans, South ...

The Informant! (Films & Schedules)
Steven Soderbergh (USA)
Zipping nimbly between megastar blockbusters and experimental narratives, Steven Soderbergh has established himself as the most agile filmmaker in America. He pulls off another neat trick in The Informant! For the first time, the director of Ocean's Eleven and The Girlfriend Experience brings the two halves of his formidable brain together.Structured as a whistleblower drama but styled as somethi...

L' Affaire Farewell (Films & Schedules)
Christian Carion (France)
The Cold War can seem a lifetime ago, but L'Affaire Farewell brings a critical episode from that time humming back to life. Director Christian Carion follows his Academy Award-nominated hit Joyeux Noël with another tale that chronicles sweeping conflicts between nations in humanizing detail.It's Moscow, 1981. KGB spy Sergei Grigoriev (played in a brooding, layered performance by filmmaker Emir Ku...

Google Baby (Films & Schedules)
Zippi Brand Frank (Israel)
Necessity may be the mother of invention. But who is the parent of a child when the sperm comes from Israel, the egg comes from the United States and the surrogate pregnancy takes place in Gujarat, India? Welcome to the brave new world of outsourcing birth. The system is driven by law and economics. In Israel, the practice of using surrogate mothers is marred by legal roadblocks. In the United St...

Wavelengths 3: Let Each One Go Where He May (Films & Schedules)
Ben Russell (USA)
Chicago-based filmmaker Ben Russell has gone international with Trypps – a series of short, mesmerizing films loosely interpreting the notion of “trip,” from literal, geographic journeys to ecstatic music-induced highs, variations of trance and spasmodic filmic episodes. Along with Tjüba Tën/The Wet Season (co-directed by Brigid McCaffrey), his medium-length experimental documentary shot in Surin...

The Damned United (Films & Schedules)
Tom Hooper (United Kingdom)
Tom Hooper's rollicking, rough-and-tumble The Damned United follows the early rise to fame, and infamy, of one of England's great football (soccer) managers, Brian Clough. Don't worry – you don't have to be a sports fan or know anything about football to enjoy this immensely entertaining, at times outrageously funny story of a cocky and fearless young man whose arrogance is both his greatest stre...

Glorious 39 (Films & Schedules)
Stephen Poliakoff (United Kingdom)
England, 1939. Beautiful summer days. Country mansions. Elegant picnics. Banter. But this is also a year when storm clouds are gathering on the horizon: war is imminent. Director Stephen Poliakoff creates a highly unusual and exceptionally intelligent portrait of what was going on in England during those fateful days, glimpsed and digested through the lens of a prominent family at the centre of e...

Good Hair (Films & Schedules)
Jeff Stilson (USA)
What more can be said about black people and their hair? Everything.The subject has inspired countless song lyrics, books, films and kitchen-counter arguments. The politics, the economics and even the physics of black hair can sometimes trigger obsession. Now everyone can find out what all the fuss is about, with Chris Rock as a guide.Acting as African America's Michael Moore, Rock goes front and...

What's Your Raashee? (Films & Schedules)
Ashutosh Gowariker (India)
With Jodhaa Akbar and the Academy Award-nominated Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India under his belt, Ashutosh Gowariker is justly celebrated for his lush period epics. Even his contemporary film Swades: We, the People had a soaring, serious dramatic bent. Who knew he'd been waiting for the right moment to leap into romantic comedy?And who knew he'd do it so beautifully? Light, sparkling and someti...

Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel (Films & Schedules)
Brigitte Berman (Canada)
Undoubtedly one of the most influential media figures of the twentieth century, Hugh Hefner is most famous as the pipe-smoking mogul who promoted a sexual lifestyle while creating a publishing empire. In Academy Award-winner Brigitte Berman's expansive documentary, we gain valuable insight into Hefner's amazing work and storied personal life.Equally as impressive as Playboy magazine's ultimate su...

Harry Brown (Films & Schedules)
Daniel Barber (United Kingdom)
Michael Caine is Harry Brown. If that sentence carries a hint of action-movie menace, it's not entirely misplaced. Caine's Harry is eventually roused to awesome and satisfying vengeance, but this film begins in more troubling, nuanced territory.Harry Brown lives alone, shut away in one of Britain's bleak public-housing apartment blocks. As his wife lives out her last days in the hospital, Harry r...

Green Porno: Bon Appétit (Films & Schedules)
Isabella Rossellini, Jody Shapiro (USA)
Rossellini is also presenting three new world premiere sea-based Green Porno short films, as well as a longer-form documentary concerning the mating habits of elephant seals in their currently threatened environment. Taking place in one of our Festival cinemas the presentation, Green Porno: Bon Appétit, will include an extensive on-stage discussion between Rossellini and marine biologist and cons...

Valhalla Rising (Films & Schedules)
Nicolas Winding Refn (Denmark/United Kingdom)
One of the most daring and audacious directors in Europe, Nicolas Winding Refn is probably best known for the epochal Pusher trilogy, which transplanted the gangster film to Copenhagen and gave it a tragic import and epic scale. (It may be the only gangster series that evokes not only Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma but also Shakespeare's Henry IV plays.) His most recent effort, Valhalla Risin...

L' Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot (Films & Schedules)
Serge Bromberg, Ruxandra Medrea (France)
The French director Henri-Georges Clouzot is renowned for suspenseful classics such as Le Salaire de la peur (in English, The Wages of Fear) and Diabolique. Now this incredible documentary gives us new appreciation for his creativity by bringing to light footage from his unfinished film L'Enfer. In 1964, Clouzot set out to direct the story of a husband, played by Serge Reggiani, who suffers bouts...

Gaia (Films & Schedules)
Jason Lehel (USA)
The opening shots of Gaia show us a cold, dark desert night. Along a flat horizon, we see the faintly perceptible shadows of cacti and a mysterious form, barely moving. Soon that form becomes larger and upright, and a young woman emerges like a creature from the sea, heading unsteadily toward the dawn.She doesn't make it very far. In the full light of morning, the young woman, Em, is found by a g...

Five Hours from Paris (Films & Schedules)
Leon Prudovsky (Israel)
These days, the world could use more sweet, mature, thoughtful romance, and Five Hours from Paris delivers it in spades.Yigal (Dror Keren, of Adam Resurrected and Aviva, My Love) is, at first glance, a mild-mannered Everyman who maintains a close relationship with his ex-wife and her new husband because of his devotion to his son. Yigal drives a taxi for a living, and while he is a master of grou...

Ted Kotcheff introduces Wake in Fright (Outback) (Films & Schedules)
Ted Kotcheff (Australia)
“For years, the negative of Wake in Fright (a.k.a. Outback) was thought to be lost forever. The search for it was like a film – it went on for two years all over the world, and its final discovery in a Pittsburgh warehouse in boxes marked “For Destruction” one week before its incineration sounds like dubious film writing. Its loss would have been a knife in my heart, for Wake in Fright and TheApp...

Mother (Films & Schedules)
Bong Joon-ho (South Korea)
Following the smash success of his 2006 film The Host, Korean sensation Bong Joon-ho returns with a stylish thriller that is both detective story and psychological horror Pushing past the bounds of conventional film noir, Mother shows Bong refining his talent for popular entertainment even as he crafts a new grammar of imagery to depict his disturbing yet always thought-provoking ideas.Kim Hye-ja...

Backyard (Films & Schedules)
Carlos Carrera (Mexico)
Sometime in 1996, a terrifying phenomenon surfaced in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In this now-infamous city, young women are regularly murdered. Most often, no arrests are made or charges laid for the killings. This ongoing tragedy is a painful stain on Mexican history and has been the subject of numerous films, articles and books. In 2001, the Festival showcased Lourdes Portillo's Missing Young Woman...

Ahead of Time (Films & Schedules)
Bob Richman (USA)
History has many unsung chroniclers, but perhaps none has been eyewitness to as many of the modern world's pivotal events as Ruth Gruber. Now ninety-seven, Gruber has been unswerving in her drive to capture her experiences in print and photos so that the public might grasp the meaning and repercussions of actions far from home. In Ahead of Time by renowned cinematographer-turned-director Bob Rich...

Hotel Atlantico (Films & Schedules)
Suzana Amaral (Brazil)
Suzana Amaral's films linger long after the closing credits. They haunt you: characters who seem merely ordinary people become embedded in your mind. Amaral's feature debut, The Hour of the Star, was released when she was fifty-three and became a unique and surprising hit. In it, Amaral created a poignant portrait of a seemingly dull character, Macabea, an incompetent secretary, that resonated in...

Mao's Last Dancer (Films & Schedules)
Bruce Beresford (Australia)
Brought to the screen by Bruce Beresford, director of such celebrated works as Driving Miss Daisy and Black Robe, the inspiring true story of Li Cunxin speaks to personal and cultural freedom, passion and determination.Born in 1961, Li lived with his six brothers and impoverished parents in China's Shandong Province. His family was destined to be labourers, but when recruiters from Madame Mao's b...

The Sunshine Boy (Films & Schedules)
Fridrik Thor Fridriksson (Iceland)
Fridrik Thor Fridriksson returns to the Festival with The Sunshine Boy, his first documentary since his debut Rock in Reykjavik. Though documentary is not a genre normally associated with Fridriksson, The Sunshine Boy is unmistakably his work, sharing themes with numerous of his other efforts. Like Angels of the Universe or Children of Nature (or Movie Days or Niceland), Fridriksson's latest focu...

Once Upon a Time Proletarian (Films & Schedules)
Guo Xiaolu (China)
Much like the written ideograms in Chinese languages, the twelve chapters forming Guo Xiaolu's latest documentary, Once Upon a Time Proletarian: 12 Tales of a Country, transcend conventional narrative and float into a poetic world of images that succeed in rendering a sharp portrait of post-Maoist China. These twelve lyrical and politically insightful visual essays unveil the social landscape of ...

Wavelengths 4: In Comparison (Films & Schedules)
Setting up an intense reciprocal gaze, Lisandro Alonso – whose work consistently explores the personal quests of men navigating natural settings – creates a face-to-face encounter with the wild in the beguiling and enigmatic S/T, a moment observed in a seemingly floating abyss. Observation is similarly the main modus of Harun Farocki’s latest film, In Comparison, which revisits issues explored ...

Nymph (Films & Schedules)
Pen-ek Ratanaruang (Thailand)
Belief in the supernatural has always been integral to Thai culture. Relationships between ghosts and the living have been chronicled and retold for generations. Chilling tales involving nature are especially numerous, with many concerning female tree spirits who appear in human form. Legend has it that anyone who dares disturb these nymphs will forfeit his or her life. In acclaimed Thai director...

Triage (Films & Schedules)
Danis Tanovic (Ireland/Spain/France)
“It is only the dead who have seen the end of war.” This quote from Plato shadows the story of Triage, Danis Tanovic's latest exploration of how battle alters the human heart. But unlike his Academy Award-winning No Man's Land, this new drama follows not the soldier but the chronicler.Colin Farrell plays Mark Walsh, a war photographer in the late eighties. Home in Dublin between assignments, he s...

Bright Star (Films & Schedules)
Jane Campion (United Kingdom/Australia)
Jane Campion has returned with a haunting film that some will compare with The Piano, but which is very much a work of its own: a bold retelling of the love affair between the poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his neighbour Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Campion's singular achievement in Bright Star is how she manages to inhabit the two quite different worlds of her protagonists. As their relation...

Green Porno: Scandalous Sea (Films & Schedules)
Isabella Rossellini, Jody Shapiro, Rick Gilbert, Andy Byers, Claudio Campagna The incomparable Isabella Rossellini officially became a filmmaker a few years ago with My Father Is 100 Years Old, a surreal and spectacular collaboration with Guy Maddin. Many of us imagined that she would continue to explore her filmmaking after a career as a celebrated actress and model, and as the child of cinema titans. But no one could have imagined this most extraordinary project. By turn...

Daybreakers (Films & Schedules)
Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig (Australia/USA)
The twin-brother team of Michael and Peter Spierig had the privilege of directing the last film to flicker on the grand screen of Toronto's late, lamented Uptown Theatre. Their debut film, Undead, was a hit when it played that solemn occasion for Midnight Madness 2003 (what more fitting way to say goodbye than with rampaging zombies from down under?), and we are honoured to have them back with th...

The Secret in Their Eyes (Films & Schedules)
Juan José Campanella (Argentina/Spain)
Academy Award-nominated director Juan José Campanella returns to filmmaking with his first feature since 2004, having spent the last few years directing episodes for such acclaimed television series as Law & Order, 30 Rock and House. Set in his native Argentina, The Secret in Their Eyes is a suspenseful crime drama with a love story at its core.Newly retired from his career in Argentina's cri...

Copyright Criminals: This is a Sampling Sport (Films & Schedules)
Benjamin Franzen, Kembrew McLeod (USA)
FREE EVENTS IN THE HEART OF THE CITY TIFF In Concert Film Series: The world premiere of Copyright Criminals Computers, software, and even mobile phones have radically altered our relationship to mass culture and technology—providing consumers with the tools to become producers (or “remixers”) of their media environments. Long before everyday people began posting their video mash-ups on the Web...

Toad's Oil (Films & Schedules)
Koji Yakusho (Japan)
The magnetic, versatile and award-winning actor Koji Yakusho has worked with some of Japan's most celebrated directors. Well-known both at home and abroad, he has lent his charismatic persona to many unforgettable roles, such as the salary man in Masayuki Suo's Shall We Dance?; the betrayed husband and ex-convict in Shohei Imamura's The Eel;and the father of a hearing-impaired teenager in Alejand...

The Search (Films & Schedules)
Pema Tseden (Wan Ma Cai Dan) (China)
Far removed from the Western imagery of a dreamlike Shangri-La mythologized by years of political seclusion, The Search takes the viewer straight into the heart of new Tibet. This charming second feature by Pema Tseden (Wan Ma Cai Dan) is the first ever to be shot entirely in Tibet and in the Tibetan language by a local crew. It is a road movie and an expedition in search of a disappearing cultur...

A Serious Man (Films & Schedules)
Joel Coen, Ethan Coen (USA)
Joel and Ethan Coen are at the top of their game, equally at home in serious drama and madcap comedy, working with the biggest stars in the world or unfamiliar talent. Hot on the heels of No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading, they've switched gears again to deliver a pitch-perfect comic drama that takes them back to their roots in Minnesota – a place they haven't shot in since 1996's Far...

Stolen (Films & Schedules)
Violeta Ayala, Dan Fallshaw (Australia)
Australian-based filmmakers Violeta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw originally set out to make a documentary about an under-reported land dispute in Northern Africa. Once they started shooting, however, they gradually stumbled on a story about modern slavery that has become hugely controversial.In 2007, Ayala and Fallshaw were drawn to the cause of the Polisario Liberation Front, which represents the Sahr...

Presumed Guilty (Films & Schedules)
Roberto Hernández, Geoffrey Smith (Mexico)
In the Mexican penal system, one is guilty until proven innocent. This leads to a very uncomfortable reality: prisons full of people serving time for crimes they didn't commit. Presumed Guilty narrates the story of José Antonio Zúñiga Rodriguez, nicknamed Toño, who was mistakenly accused of murder and condemned to twenty years in jail for being poor and in the wrong place at the wrong time. His c...

Wavelengths 1: Titans (Films & Schedules)
The insuperable spirit of George Méliès hovers over this programme, with its impossible voyages, eccentric human endeavour, authorial transparency, tricksterism and concurrent conceptual and aesthetic vigour; in other words, fun. In Titan, Klaus Lutz’s adorably artisanal space odyssey, the filmmaker doubles as an intrepid astronaut simultaneously creating and voyaging through space with various p...

[REC] 2 (Films & Schedules)
Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza (Spain)
Warning! If you haven't seen the original [REC], run out and watch it now or suffer the spoilers that follow!In 2007, directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza teamed up to unleash the genuinely harrowing [REC], a film that simply set out to scare the crap out of the audience, without any pretensions. The fan favourite quickly spawned the U.S. remake Quarantine, which only proved how innovative th...

Les Derniers jours du monde (Films & Schedules)
Arnaud Larrieu, Jean-Marie Larrieu (France/Spain/Taiwan)
The beginning of Les Derniers Jours du monde only hints at the strange voyage that is to come. We are introduced to a man attaching a prosthetic device to the stump of one of his arms. Robinson (Mathieu Amalric), appropriately named as we will soon discover, is on vacation in Biarritz with his wife. What follows is the story behind the loss of his arm, a story that becomes increasingly bizarre an...

A Town Called Panic (Films & Schedules)
Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar (Belgium/France/Luxembourg)
“Oh non! Mon Dieu!” The feature version of A Town Called Panic (Panique au village), the demented Belgian television animation sensation of the same name, has arrived! The first stop-motion animated feature selected to Cannes, A Town Called Panic brings to life a topsy-turvy world populated by cheap plastic figurines of cowboys, Indians, farmers, police officers, horses, cows and pigs.When an att...

Antichrist (Films & Schedules)
Lars von Trier (Denmark/Germany/France/Sweden/Italy/Poland)
Ever since his first feature, The Element of Crime, played at Cannes in 1984, Lars von Trier has remained one of the most controversial figures in international cinema. That said, nothing he has done could possibly prepare people for the profoundly disturbing Antichrist.The film follows an unnamed couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, both of whom deliver extraordinary performances) as t...

Awards 2006
2006 Award Winners Film Title Director Country Award BELLA Alejandro Gomez Monteverde USA People's Choice Award SUR LA TRACE D'IGOR RIZZI Nöel Mitrani Canada CityTV Award for Best Canadian First Feature Film MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES Jennifer Baichwal Canada Toronto-City Award for Best Canadian Feature Film LES JOURS Maxime Giroux Canada Award for Bes...

Awards 2005
2005 Award Winners Film Title Director Country Award TSOTSI Gavin Hood UK/South Africa People's Choice Award THE LIFE AND HARD TIMES OF GUY TERRIFICO Louise Archambault and Michael Mabbott   CityTV Award for Best Canadian First Feature Film C.R.A.Z.Y Jean-Marc Vallée   Toronto-City Award for Best Canadian Feature Film BIG GIRL<...

Awards 2004
2004 Award Winners Film Title Director Country Award HOTEL RWANDA Terry George United Kingdom/South Africa/Italy People's Choice Award LA PEAU BLANCHE Daniel Roby   CityTV Award for Best Canadian First Feature Film IT’S ALL GONE PETE TONG Michael Dowse   Toronto-City Award for Best Canadian Feature Film MAN FEEL PAIN ...

Sponsorship
We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of our industry major sponsors and our major government industry supporters   We would like to thank the following sponsors for th...

Short Cuts Canada Roundtables
An informal networking opportunity for directors and producers with a film in the 2009 Short Cuts Canada programme. The event celebrates and acknowledges these filmmakers and introduces them to key industry delegates including short film distributors, broadcasters, festival programmers and funders, via rotating roundtable discussions. Date: Thursday, September 17, 2009Time: 1:00pm to...

Additional Documents
Choose from the following documents to download in PDF format. The official Rights List of the Sales & Industry Office contains information about the territory availability for the films in the Festival

Snowing Chestnut Blossoms (Films & Schedules)
Ute Aurand (Germany)
Ute Aurand’s Snowing Chestnut Blossoms (Germany) is a gentle, generous and unsparing portrait of the filmmaker’s parents, whose passing is marked by remembrance and the loving recording of them.

Meet with... (Films & Schedules)
Meet With... is a series of informal and intimate information sessions on the hottest topics in today's film industry. meet With... provides attendees with a unique opportunity to gain insight into the fundamentals of the business and craft of filmmaking from seasoned industry professionals. Sessions are held daily from 11:00am to 12:00pm from Friday September 11, to Thursday, September 17, at...

Titan (Films & Schedules)
Klaus Lutz (Switzerland)
George Méliès’ playful and eccentric spirit hovers throughout Wavelengths’s opening programme. Klaus Lutz’s Titan (Switzerland), is a charming, artisanal space odyssey during which the filmmaker doubles as an intrepid astronaut simultaneously creating and voyaging through space.

FM/TRCS (Films & Schedules)
Coleen Fitzgibbon (USA)
Coleen Fitzgibbon’s 1974 FM/TRCS (USA), recently preserved by filmmaker Sandra Gibson, is a masterful work of abstraction that explores the textures of the medium and dissolution of imagery to a woman’s undressing.

Waterfront Follies (Films & Schedules)
Ernie Gehr (USA)
American avant-garde master Ernie Gehr’s stunning Waterfront Follies (USA) is a work of sublime extended landscape that presents a view of the Brooklyn harbour as it is continuously interrupted by the flow of human interaction. The film’s structure and soundtrack work as a reminder of the constant intersections between life’s impulsiveness and beauty.

La Chute (Films & Schedules)
Ivan Grbovic (Canada)
Marie, an elementary school teacher, suspects a student has been abused at home. Her judgment clouded by tensions in her marriage and her own desire to be a mother, Marie makes decisions that are more personal than professional. In this vivid performance, actress Marie-Ève Bertrand capitalizes on every moment onscreen, creating empathy for a woman whose needs are unfulfilled and whose lonelines...

Free Screening: Cadillac People's Choice Award (Films & Schedules)
Here are the winners of the Cadillac People's Choice Awards: Overall PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL PUSH BY SAPPHIRE Lee Daniels (Free Screening) Runners-up: MAO'S LAST DANCER Bruce Beresford MICMACS (Micmacs à tire-larigot) Jean-Pierre Jeunet Documentary: THE TOPP TWINS Leanne Pooley Runner up: CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY Michael...

IKWÉ (Films & Schedules)
Caroline Monnet (Canada)
IKWÉ (meaning “woman” in Algonquin) is a visually fluid experimental film centred on the internal dialogue between a young woman and the teachings of her grandmother, the moon. Referencing ancestral traditions of oral storytelling, the narrative unfolds in both French and Cree as two generations form a bridge between the natural and modern worlds. AR Caroline Monnet grew up in Q...

Le Streghe, femmes entre elles (Films & Schedules)
Jean-Marie Straub (France/Italy)
The international premiere of Le Streghe, femmes entre elles (France/Italy), like last year’s heart-rending Le Genou d’Artemide, is based on Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò. Nature’s splendour, as Straub has always filmed it, pulses with everlasting energy throughout this delicately profound chimerical intersection of im/mortality.

CFTPA Producer's Award
Held on opening day of the Festival, the Canadian Film and Television Production Association (CFTPA) Producer's Award acknowledges the vision and entrepreneurship of an independent Canadian producer with a Canadian feature at the Festival. The award comes with a cash prize of $10,000.The Award furthers the interests of producers by celebrating their outstanding accomplishments as well ...

About the Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival ranks among the most prestigious international film festivals in the world. For ten days, film lovers, filmmakers, industry professionals and media watch the best in new cinema from established masters and new talent. The Toronto International Film Festival... Presents one of the world's largest annual showcases of Canadian film with the Canada...

Awards 2007
2007 Award Winners Film Title Director Country Award EASTERN PROMISES David Cronenberg Canada/United Kingdom Cadillac People's Choi...

CFTPA Producer's Award
Held on opening day of the Festival, the Canadian Film and Television Production Association (CFTPA) Producer's Award acknowledges the vision and entrepreneurship of an independent Canadian producer with a Canadian feature at the Festival. The award comes with a cash prize of $10,000.The Award furthers the interests of producers by celebrating their outstanding accomplishments as well ...

Prince of Tears (Films & Schedules)
Yonfan (Taiwan/Hong Kong)
Throughout the fifties, Taiwan was subject to a sweeping anti-communist campaign known as the White Terror. During this period, political dissidents and suspected sympathizers who spoke out against the Chinese Kuomintang government were imprisoned or executed. A collective paranoia thrived on the island as many simply disappeared without a trace. Prince of Tears returns to that dangerous time wit...

Karaoke (Films & Schedules)
Chris Chong Chan Fui (Malaysia)
In his poetic and intelligent feature directorial debut, Chris Chong Chan Fui improbably elevates karaoke videos into the realm of allegory. But the film is far from a treatise on the art of music videos. Instead, it concerns a young man named Betik (Zahiril Adzim) and his illusions regarding what it means to come home.Indeed, homecoming is the major theme. Though the film is not autobiographical...

Carmel (Films & Schedules)
Amos Gitaï (Israel/France/Italy)
Amos Gitaï's new film is made much in the mode of last year's extraordinary Plus tard, tu comprendras. It is carefully composed and orchestrated, highly self-aware and sculpted from both collective and personal memories. In addition to being completely heartfelt and honest, it comes from the mind of a man who is not afraid to be critical. It hews to no positions and has no agenda, encapsulating t...

How to Fold a Flag (Films & Schedules)
Michael Tucker, Petra Epperlein (USA)
A cage fighter in Texas. A congressional candidate in Buffalo. A heavy-metal rocker in Colorado. A hog butcher in North Carolina. Their common thread is that they went through combat together in Iraq in the U.S. Army's 2/3 Field Artillery unit, known as the Gunners. Now they're dispersed back to their hometowns, trying to resume normal lives. In this extraordinary documentary, filmmakers Michael ...

Neil Young Trunk Show (Films & Schedules)
Jonathan Demme (USA)
FREE EVENTS IN THE HEART OF THE CITY TIFF In Concert Film Series: The Neil Young Trunk Show with host, director Jonathan Demme The words Trunk Show conjure visions of unique and precious goods, displayed from old chunky leather-strapped luggage. The images recall a time of purposeful travel, when people moved across the country with deliberate speed. Neil Young’s Trunk show uses the traveling e...

The Last Days of Emma Blank (Films & Schedules)
Alex van Warmerdam (The Netherlands)
Behold The Last Days of Emma Blank: a dark comedy so cynical it's bound to make your head spin. The director even casts himself as a dog. Alex van Warmerdam pushes his way forward with a brilliant adaptation of a near-impossible screenplay. Originally written for the stage, Ms. Blank's antics emigrate gracefully to the big screen while she most definitely does not. She's not meant to.A raging lun...

Solitary Man (Films & Schedules)
Brian Koppelman, David Levien (USA)
Drawing together the Michael Douglas mystique from both Wall Street and Fatal Attraction, Solitary Man casts Douglas as a predatory lion in winter, an alpha male led astray by his greed and his zipper.Ben (Douglas) once ruled a car-dealership empire vast enough to fuel a glossy Manhattan lifestyle and endow a library at an East Coast university. But by the time he arrives at the college with his ...

The Boys Are Back (Films & Schedules)
Scott Hicks (Australia/United Kingdom)
Director Scott Hicks returns to the Festival with a poignant story of a struggling single father living in the heart of Australia. Clive Owen stars as Joe Warr, a habitually roguish sports writer who must cope with the devastating loss of his vivacious wife. Reeling from grief, he has to learn to raise his young son, Artie (Nicholas McAnulty), who cannot accept his mother's passing. On top of thi...

Joe Dante introduces It's a Gift (Films & Schedules)
Norman McLeod (USA)
“When I was in college, the great W.C. Fields was venerated as a comedian equal to the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy. His puncturing of pomposity and love of intoxicants endeared him to the anti-establishment youth culture. In the intervening years, like all early twentieth-century celebrities, Fields has fallen into not so much disrepute as irrelevance. Nonetheless, many of his early talkie...

Beyond the Circle (Films & Schedules)
Golam Rabbany Biplob (Bangladesh)
Two years ago, Festival audiences discovered a lovely surprise in On the Wings of Dreams. In this gentle, humane fable, director Golam Rabbany Biplob showed the richness of village life in Bangladesh, even as he explored the modern tensions that threaten it. In his follow-up feature Beyond the Circle, Biplob finds a moral tale in the pressing and inevitable shift now facing his society: the move ...

Spring Fever (Films & Schedules)
Lou Ye (Hong Kong/France)
With the freedom lent him by a non-intrusive digital camera, controversial filmmaker Lou Ye casts a clandestine look on the yearning beauty of forbidden love in Spring Fever, his latest and most lyrical work to date.In making this film, Lou defies the five-year ban on his work imposed by Chinese authorities in response to his 2006 feature, Summer Palace. He also breaks the taboo of showing explic...

Neil Jordan introduces: Lo sceicco bianco (Films & Schedules)
Federico Fellini (Italy)
“I would love to see a festival dedicated to first films. Sometimes they have nothing to do with the work that develops later, and sometimes the work never gets better. But sometimes you can see the hints of what would come later bursting through like an eruption from another film entirely. Another universe, almost. Which is why, the first time I saw The White Sheik, I kind of fell in love with i...

An Afternoon with Chris Rock (Films & Schedules)
Chris Rock brings his comic insights to this Mavericks conversation, highlighting his new documentary, Good Hair, and branching out in spontaneous directions. Rock is never short on opinions, delivered in his unmistakable rasp. In Good Hair (playing separately at the Festival), he focuses on the commerce and creativity behind African American hairstyles, unpacking a lot of cultural baggage that a...

Wavelengths 2: Pro Agri (Films & Schedules)
In a time of tampered food and farming, recession scheming and unfathomable technological speeds, appreciation for nature and its untold mysteries is as strong as ever. Tomonari Nishikawa adopts a Buddhist credo in Lumphini 2552, an exhilarating montage of still photographs taken in Bangkok’s inner-city oasis, Lumphi...

Down for Life (Films & Schedules)
Alan Jacobs (USA)
There have been a select number of films over the past few decades that have explored the world of girl gangs, most notably Allison Anders's 1993 feature My Crazy Life. But few films, if any, have centred on the story of a young woman trying to leave a gang, which is the core narrative of Down for Life. Riveting, painful and disconcerting in its jagged reality, Down for Life is based on a true st...

Perrier's Bounty (Films & Schedules)
Ian FitzGibbon (Ireland/United Kingdom)
Guy Ritchie may have popularized crime capers from the British Isles with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, but it is with Perrier's Bounty that director Ian FitzGibbon – who returns to the Festival after the success of last year's A Film with Me in It – manages to imbue the genre with the perfect degree of irony and charm, even throwing in a dash of romance.A tongue-in-cheek narrat...

Barry Levinson Presents The Band That Wouldn't Die (Films & Schedules)
(USA)
Barry Levinson has covered a lot of ground in his film career – from Southeast Asia in Good Morning, Vietnam to Las Vegas in Rain Man – but he always comes back to Baltimore, from Diner to Tin Men to Avalon and more. In this Mavericks session, Levinson will present the world premiere of his latest work set in Baltimore, The Band That Wouldn't Die, an hour-long documentary about a marching band th...

Between Two Worlds (Films & Schedules)
Vimukthi Jayasundara (Sri Lanka)
Sri Lanka's civil conflict raged so furiously for twenty-six long years that when it was declared over, one of the main reactions was numb disbelief. Director Vimukthi Jayasundara last explored the hollow absurdities of his homeland's war in The Forsaken Land. Four years later, the fighting has stopped but the stark symbols of war are not so easily erased. Because Jayasundara is at heart a symbol...

Under the Mountain (Films & Schedules)
Jonathan King (New Zealand)
Based on Maurice Gee's best-selling novel, Under the Mountain is an exciting and suspenseful fantasy adventure set amid Auckland's breathtaking natural landscape. In this thrilling adaptation by Jonathan King, teenaged twins with a special talent face off against an ancient evil that lurks beneath the city's ring of dormant volcanoes.Rachel and Theo are no ordinary twins: they have the ability to...

Life According to Agfa (Films & Schedules)
Assi Dayan (Israel)
At a bar named Barbie's in Tel Aviv, all the city's loose ends gather. A young woman is suicidal as she clings to her boorish police officer lover. A waitress is desperate to flee Tel Aviv for America. The piano player serenades everyone with songs of melancholy. The group of young soldiers drinking there don't appreciate his radical words. Presiding over it all is the owner, played by the lumino...

Collapse (Films & Schedules)
Chris Smith (USA)
Americans generally like to hear good news. They like to believe that a new president will right old wrongs, that clean energy will replace dirty oil and that fresh thinking will set the economy straight. American pundits tend to restrain their pessimism and hope for the best. But is anyone prepared for the worst?Meet Michael Ruppert, a different kind of American. A former Los Angeles police offi...

Jennifer's Body (Films & Schedules)
Karyn Kusama (USA)
According to Jennifer's Body, high school isn't the best time of one's life. It's actually hell on earth, awash with teenaged angst, hormones and fountains of blood. Penned by Juno scribe Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama (responsible for the acclaimed Girlfight), Jennifer's Body is the shocking flipside to Cody's slacker teen romance.BFFs since the sandbox but complete opposites, Jennifer...

Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (Films & Schedules)
Michèle Hozer, Peter Raymont (Canada)
Glenn Gould is arguably the most documented classical musician of the last century. In addition to numerous films about him (including François Girard's seminal Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould and two fine portraits by Roman Kroitor), Gould appeared in countless radio and television programmes, culminating with John McGreevy's legendary Glenn Gould's Toronto.Still, few of these pieces ha...

London River (Films & Schedules)
Rachid Bouchareb (United Kingdom/France/Algeria)
Cities push strangers together, at times tragically, as in the London bombings of July 7, 2005. As hundreds went missing in the confusion of the aftermath, family and friends posted flyers all over the city with pictures of the loved ones they sought. London River moves surely toward that heartbreaking moment, but it begins on the peaceful isle of Guernsey.Brenda Blethyn plays Mrs. Sommers, a far...

Eamon (Films & Schedules)
Margaret Corkery (Ireland)
Made for less than five hundred thousand dollars, Eamon plays like the most expensive low-budget film you've ever seen. The result is a fabulously fresh and highly entertaining first feature.Selfish, bratty little Eamon (Robert Don-nelly) shoos his father aside for a privileged place in his mother's heart. King of her bed and dictator of all things quotidian, he leaves no space in her affections ...

Symbol (Films & Schedules)
Hitoshi Matsumoto (Japan)
A Midnight Madness favourite in 2007, Hitoshi Matsumoto's outrageous superhero-versus-giant-monsters comedy DAINIPPONJIN was a true big-screen freak show. His second feature, Symbol, is a mind-melting journey into the deepest realm of his imagination. To say that Symbol is difficult to describe is an understatement of epic proportions.In the central tale, a Japanese man (Matsumoto) wakes up alone...

Get Low (Films & Schedules)
Aaron Schneider (USA)
Taking a leading role for the first time in several years, American legend Robert Duvall gives a performance of wisdom and nuance in Get Low. Complemented by a first-rate cast that includes Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek and Lucas Black, this classic story from a bygone era unfolds with quiet majesty.For the past forty years, Felix Bush (Duvall) has lived as a hermit deep in the Tennessee woods. His c...

Enter the Void (Films & Schedules)
Gaspar Noé (France)
Enter the Void has been described as a psychedelic melodrama by director Gaspar Noé, which effectively sums up this provocative yet contemplative exploration of life, death and sexuality. Though shifting gears slightly from his previous cinematic assaults, Noé is undeniably taking creative risks as extreme as any he's taken before. This is an avant-garde journey into the mind of his protagonist, ...

Reel Injun (Films & Schedules)
Neil Diamond, Catherine Bainbridge | Jeremiah Hayes (Canada)
For decades, Aboriginal people were frequently represented in Hollywood films, but these depictions were almost always deeply negative and wildly inaccurate. Worse still, as the feature documentary Reel Injun carefully observes, this screen presence had a very real impact on Aboriginal people and on non-Aboriginal people's ideas of who they were.Director Neil Diamond takes us on a highly entertai...

Men on the Bridge (Films & Schedules)
Asli Özge (Germany/Turkey/The Netherlands)
What if you lived in the most colourful city in the world and never managed to tap into that bustling charm, which is obvious to everyone else yet somehow unattainable to you? Blending glimmering sunsets with urban decay, Istanbul can be an especially heartbreaking place to live when happiness constantly seems out of reach.Faced with such crushing contradictions, Asli Özge originally intended to ...

The Misfortunates (Films & Schedules)
Felix van Groeningen (Belgium)
Gunther Strobbe (Kenneth Vanbaeden) is a thirteen-year-old boy growing up in the eighties. He lives in his grandmother's ramshackle house in a small Belgian town with his alcoholic father (a postman with more bars on his route than any of his colleagues) and three alcoholic uncles. Life in the household is clearly dysfunctional, yet it's hard to condemn the Strobbe men for their sins. Their heart...

Hipsters (Films & Schedules)
Valery Todorovsky (Russia)
A vibrant musical might not be what you'd expect from contemporary Russian cinema, but Valery Todorovsky's Hipsters is an Iron Curtain version of Swing Kids meets Hairspray, bursting with razzle, dazzle and, of course, rhythm.Christened with a name that stands for Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, Communist youth Mels (Anton Shagin) is obviously primed to rebel. When he first lays eyes on Polly (Oksana A...

Lumphini 2552 (Films & Schedules)
Tomonari Nishikawa (Thailand)
In a time of tampered food and farming, an appreciation for nature and its untold mysteries is as strong as ever. Tomonari Nishikawa’s Lumphini 2552 (Thailand) is an exhilarating chiaroscuro montage of still photographs taken in Bangkok’s inner-city oasis, Lumphini Park.

She, a Chinese (Films & Schedules)
Guo Xiaolu (United Kingdom/France/Germany)
She, a Chinese is arock 'n' roll odyssey that follows a young woman on a soul-searching journey. The film stands in stark contrast with its title, which would seem to define the cultural and ethnic origins of its protagonist. But this is a truly nationless movie, addressing contemporary issues that trespass borders and blur socio-political lines into a globalized world of shared values and collec...

Irène (Films & Schedules)
Alain Cavalier (France)
Irène is a film made literally by one person – a video diary shot and recorded by the filmmaker – using little more than his imagination and the happenstance and flow of the everyday, finally layering in a lifetime of memories. In this case, the filmmaker is Alain Cavalier, best known for the exquisite Thérèse (86). Here, as in his last film, Le Filmeur (05), he distils cinema to one man shooting...

City of Life and Death (Films & Schedules)
Lu Chuan (China)
Undeniably one of the most compelling films of the year, City of Life and Death shines a floodlight on the Rape of Nanking. The massacre depicted in the film took place over several long weeks as part of the Japanese invasion of China in December 1937. Guided by the privileged eye of acclaimed director Lu Chuan, who studied in Nanjing and spent almost four years researching the script, the film a...

Saint Louis Blues (Films & Schedules)
Dyana Gaye (France/Senegal)
Just when despair began to set in about the decline in cinema production from sub-Saharan Africa, here comes the irrepressible Dyana Gaye to turn things around. Her new film, Saint Louis Blues, is a musical that takes place on a road trip in Senegal, and the result is every bit as unlikely as it sounds.At a taxi stop in the capital, Dakar, people gather and wait for the battered old Peugeot stati...

Dorian Gray (Films & Schedules)
Oliver Parker (United Kingdom)
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic novel, but true to Wilde it combines both high-minded literature and the juicier pleasures of entertainment. Colin Firth and Ben Barnes rise to that standard in this truly compelling adaptation, offering first Wilde's sparkling wit, then a plunge into gothic horror.When the handsome and naive Dorian (Barnes) arrives in Victorian London, he bef...

Youth in Revolt (Films & Schedules)
Miguel Arteta (USA)
A hysterically twisted coming-of-age tale chronicling the awkward tribulations of a Camus-spouting, Godard-loving teenaged boy who is cursed with trailer-trash parents and a terminal case of virginity, Youth in Revolt is a wickedly ironic treat. The fact that it stars comedic royalty Michael Cera, Zach Galifianakis, Jean Smart and Steve Buscemi under the direction of the man responsible for some ...

Bran Nue Dae (Films & Schedules)
Rachel Perkins (Australia)
One of Australia's most anticipated films of the year, the musical Bran Nue Dae arrives with all the energy, fun and downright sass of the original stage version. Featuring a cast that includes both acclaimed and emerging Australian actors and musicians, the story of one young Aboriginal man's search for love and his true identity can finally reach audiences all over the world.It's the summer of ...

Kamui (Films & Schedules)
Yoichi Sai (Japan)
Like a modern bard devoted to preserving his country's collective imagination, versatile director Yoichi Sai brings his sharp, elegant vision to Kamui, the big-screen adaptation of the celebrated seventies manga Kamui Gaiden.Sai is a graceful keeper of the mysteries radiating from legend, a faithful interpreter of social criticism and an adroit choreographer of action and martial arts. With Kamui...

To Die Like a Man (Films & Schedules)
João Pedro Rodrigues (Portugal/France)
Tonia is a transsexual star of the Lisbon club world. She contends with a needy junkie boyfriend, competition from a new black drag sensation, her psychopathic soldier son and, worst of all, the physical and emotional ravages of age. Her body has come to reject the various surgical and hormonal transformations that made her famous, a fact brutally represented by the silicone literally seeping fro...

The Wild Hunt (Films & Schedules)
Alexandre Franchi (Canada)
In a dark forest, an ancient European ritual is about to take place. A battle is brewing between the power-hungry Celts, the rampaging Vikings, the secretive wood elves and the mysterious shaman Murtagh (Trevor Hayes). The night has finally come for Murtagh to unleash his latest fiendish scheme. But in the heat of battle, the worst happens: one of his men is hit five times and the referee rules h...

A Prophet (Films & Schedules)
Jacques Audiard (France)
Of all their many renowned filmmakers, the French hold a special place in their hearts for Jacques Audiard. A critical darling revered at home, he remains almost entirely unknown in North America. But that is all about to change with A Prophet, a magnificent film of uncompromising power and intelligence. Audiard created his reputation with Sur mes lèvres and the multi-award-winning De battre mon ...

The Hole (Films & Schedules)
Joe Dante (USA)
When their single mother (Teri Polo) uproots seventeen-year-old Dane (Chris Massoglia) and his ten-year-old brother Lucas (Nathan Gamble) from New York City to the sleepy town of Bensonville, the boys' summer fun grinds to a halt. With their mother always at work, the brothers spend their days bored and unattended. But the drudgery is disrupted when they find a seemingly bottomless hole under a l...

The House of Branching Love (Films & Schedules)
Mika Kaurismäki (Finland)
A sort of “Divorce Finnish Style,” Mika Kaurismäki's rambunctious new comedy, The House of Branching Love, recounts the breakup of a thirtysomething professional couple. Juhani is a family therapist, and his wife, Tuula, a successful business trainer. They're determined to keep things amicable until they sell their house, but when Juhani brings home a girl he picks up in a club, Tuula flips. The ...

Lourdes (Films & Schedules)
Jessica Hausner (Austria/France/Germany)
“Lourdes, France, 1858 . . . the healing waters flow from the grotto, carrying a message, and a promise.” Or so the Internet informs potential visitors to Lourdes, a hot spot for Christian travel. Following a pack of religious believers on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, Jessica Hausner's third feature explores this major Christian shrine and source of allegedly miraculous cures. A city of a mere fiftee...

The Origins of Factum (Films & Schedules)
Candice Breitz Candice Breitz: Same Same, an extensive and ambitious solo exhibition at The Power Plant and the artist's first major North American survey, will begin during this year's Festival. A few days before the opening, Future Projections presents a unique onstage conversation with Breitz to discuss the impact of cinema on her work and preview her latest commission.Breitz's art typically employs multiple...

Fish Tank (Films & Schedules)
Andrea Arnold (United Kingdom)
Andrea Arnold's pure, potent Fish Tank is many things: a taboo-breaking love story, a searing portrait of working-class Britain today, a film Ken Loach could have made had he been born a woman. But above all, her film is a girl's own fantasy. Arnold began exploring the precise perspective of a woman's desire in her terrific debut, Red Road. With Fish Tank, the view is broader and the focus even s...

Capitalism: A Love Story (Films & Schedules)
Michael Moore (USA)
Michael Moore has a gift for maintaining two things that people easily lose in times of crisis: perspective and a sense of humour. In 1989, American workers were reeling from Reagan-era policies that favoured the wealthy, undermined the middle class and had outright contempt for the poor. That was when Moore arrived at the Festival with his directorial debut Roger & Me, which deployed humour ...

Giulia Doesn't Date at Night (Films & Schedules)
Giuseppe Piccioni (Italy)
Two worlds collide in Giuseppe Piccioni's heart-rending love story. At first glance this appears to be a commonplace romance between a mismatched couple, one a married novelist, the other an enigmatic swimming instructor. But Piccioni does some very magical things in Giulia Doesn't Date at Night. Centred around two very fine performances, the film turns the ordinary upside down, and tears at our ...

Wavelengths 6: Flash Point Camera (Films & Schedules)
Wavelengths concludes on a ruminative note, with art partaking in time’s inevitable passage, solicitously illuminating the path along the way. Ute Aurand’s Snowing Chestnut Blossoms is reminiscent of her 2006 film The Butterfly in Winter (co-directed with Maria Lang) in its gentle, yet unsparing observations on aging and mortality. This time, Aurand turns the camera on her own parents, lovingly r...

Chloe (Films & Schedules)
Atom Egoyan (France/Canada)
Turning to a sharply crafted script by Erin Cressida Wilson for inspiration, Atom Egoyan enters the world of a well-heeled Toronto couple in his elegant new film. Chloe is his most emotionally direct and accessible work since the Academy Award®-nominated The Sweet Hereafter. Veteran actors Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson give standout performances, but it is the sultry youngster, Amanda Seyfried, ...

I Am Love (Films & Schedules)
Luca Guadagnino (Italy)
This dreamy, languorous film has a Viscontian sense of aristocratic values to it. Exquisitely shot, beautifully paced and conceived, I Am Love moves through the cultivated world of a wealthy and distinguished industrial family. It is a film of ritual and order, centred on a massive Milanese mansion whose airy rooms convey the power and stature of the Recchi family. Servants glide up elegant stair...

Night Mayor (Films & Schedules)
Guy Maddin (Canada)
The filmmaker whose cinematic style inspired the term “Maddinesque” delivers a fantastical film about the night mayor of Winnipeg, an inventor of Bosnian descent who harnesses the power of the aurora borealis to transmit distinctly Canadian images across the Great White North. Guy Maddin’s imaginative allegory for our cinematic history blends his signature humour with subversive social...

Balibo (Films & Schedules)
Robert Connolly (Australia)
Recreating true-life events, Balibo tells the story of five Australian-based journalists who bore witness to the atrocities wrought by Indonesian forces during the invasion of tiny, unprotected East Timor. Interspersing actual documentary footage from these newsmen into his feature, director Robert Connolly re-examines the case of the “Balibo Five,” which remained inconclusive for over thirty yea...

Accident (Films & Schedules)
Soi Cheang (Hong Kong, China)
It is no hyperbole to say that Accident is one of the finest Hong Kong crime dramas since Infernal Affairs. Director Soi Cheang, known more for his gritty and violent cult films such as Dog Bite Dog and Shamo, has graduated to the master class with this gripping, smartly constructed and psychologically fascinating thriller.In a brilliantly executed early sequence, a seemingly mundane traffic jam ...

Sixty Seconds of Regret (Films & Schedules)
Ed Gass-Donnelly (Canada)
In the time it takes to steam water for a cup of tea, an elderly man has a moment of austere personal reflection. With an economy of narrative, Ed Gass-Donnelly creates a fully realized character whose life was shaped by a pivotal youthful decision and who must continue to live with the burden of his choice. AR Ed Gass-Donnelly was born in Toronto. He made his feature directorial...

Face (Films & Schedules)
Tsai Ming-liang (France/Taiwan/Belgium/The Netherlands)
Face contains some familiar Tsai Ming-Liang elements: the cities of Taipei and Paris, a joke about malfunctioning plumbing equipment, song and dance, endless running water and the actor Lee Kang-sheng. But above all, the Taiwanese filmmaker's most stylistically inventive work to date is actually about how images can function as both facades and works of art.The story borders on the surreal: a Tai...

Mother and Child (Films & Schedules)
Rodrigo García (USA)
Playing its theme of parenthood in different keys like a graceful chorale, Mother and Child features a stellar cast interpreting a story by one of America's finest contemporary dramatists.Annette Bening shines as Karen, a woman grown bitter by habit since she gave up her daughter for adoption years ago. Naomi Watts is her daughter Elizabeth, now a sleek lawyer with a lust for power games. She tal...

The Essential 100 (Films & Schedules)
Eclectic Method The Toronto International Film Festival loves a party and loves film. So what better way to start the celebrations for our new home at Bell Lightbox than to invite the smartest cats of the video remix world to reinterpret the history of cinema as decided by . . . us. The Essential 100 is a list of cinema's greatest as chosen by our own mashup of TIFF expert opinion and a survey filled out by you,...

The Unloved (Films & Schedules)
Samantha Morton (United Kingdom)
As an actor, Samantha Morton once said she had only one thing to give to directors: “Honesty. Massive honesty and truth.” Directing her own film for the first time, she draws that same truth from her cast and her story.The Unloved is inspired by Morton's own life as a girl in the British Midlands. Lucy (Molly Windsor) lives with an unstable, sometimes violent father, played by Robert Carlyle. Whe...

Machotaildrop (Films & Schedules)
Corey Adams, Alex Craig (USA/Canada)
Meet teenaged layabout Walter Rhum, who wants nothing more than to become a skateboarding star like his idol, Blair Stanley. His plan? Submit a video of his bag of tricks to legendary conglomerate Machotaildrop, then kick back and coast. When his presence is requested at the company's remote, mysterious fortress, he thinks he's got it made, but Walter is about to find out that fame, fortune and e...

The Trotsky (Films & Schedules)
Jacob Tierney (Canada)
Jacob Tierney's hilarious The Trotsky follows Leon Bronstein (the phenomenal Jay Baruchel, in a star-making performance), a precocious Montreal teen who fervently believes himself to be the reincarnation of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. He's determined to duplicate every aspect of Trotsky's life, including being exiled, at least twice, and ultimately assassinated. His most pressing issues r...

Solomon Kane (Films & Schedules)
Michael J. Bassett (France/Czech Republic/United Kingdom)
Spend your life cutting men down with your blade and robbing them of their wealth, and word of your exploits is sure to reach the devil, who is always on the lookout for new souls. Meet Solomon Kane, the invention of Robert E. Howard, the legendary creator of Conan the Barbarian. Howard published his sword-and-sorcery stories in the Depression-era pulp magazine Weird Tales, and his influence on t...

I Am Not Your Friend (Films & Schedules)
György Pálfi (Hungary)
Whatever happened to butterflies in the stomach, fluttering eyelids and quivering lips? Truth be told, you'd be hard-pressed to find old-school romance in any of György Pálfi's films, but his latest offering goes above and beyond in terms of his unwavering commitment to innovation.Throwing nine attractive bodies together for the space of twenty long days, Pálfi let them ad lib with abandon for th...

Runaway (Films & Schedules)
Cordell Barker (Canada)
Award-winning animator Cordell Barker brings us this zany and sumptuously animated tale about a reckless train ride. Gleeful passengers cavort to the jaunty jazz score of Benoît Charest, oblivious to trouble ahead. But when the driver disappears and a madcap scramble for fuel ensues, this careless ride turns darkly funny, becoming a cynical, and prescient, metaphor for our modern world....

Snowblind (Films & Schedules)
Vikram Jayanti (USA)
The Iditarod dogsled race is one of the most gruelling endurance tests in the world. The course stretches 1,850 kilometres through Alaska's rugged terrain, spanning treacherous mountain ranges, frozen rivers, dense forest and desolate tundra. Temperatures plunge as low as negative fifty-one degrees Celsius and winds upward of eighty kilometres can cause complete loss of visibility. More people ha...

Baaria (Films & Schedules)
Giuseppe Tornatore (Italy)
Baaria is Giuseppe Tornatore's lush and romantic reimagining of the path of one person, a Sicilian who grows, marries, has children, matures and ages, compiling a rich breadth of experiences along the way. It is also the tale of a typical village and the entertaining dynamics of small-town life where everyone knows everyone else's business. Tornatore is a master at recreating memories and the sen...

The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights (Films & Schedules)
Emmett Malloy (USA)
Are the White Stripes still the coolest band on the planet? Nothing gets a hipster fight started faster than ranking bands, but the Stripes permanently established their cool cred with their unprecedented 2007 tour across Canada. Hitting every province and territory, Jack and Meg White took their crunching art-blues-rock to Iqaluit and Charlottetown, Edmonton and Toronto. As documented in this ou...

Turtle: The Incredible Journey (Films & Schedules)
Nick Stringer (United Kingdom/Austria/Germany)
Digging its way out of the sand on a Florida beach, a newly hatched loggerhead turtle has only one goal: to make it to the ocean. So begins one of the most fascinating and extraordinary migration stories in the animal kingdom, strikingly captured in Turtle: The Incredible Journey.Although the distance from the beach to the ocean isn't far, the trip isn't easy for a three-day-old loggerhead turtle...

Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire (Films & Schedules)
Lee Daniels (USA)
Raw, vibrant and resoundingly hopeful, Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire will stand in years to come as one of the strongest American films of 2009. Although the details of its plot may shock, it is at heart the story of a young woman determined to better herself despite overwhelming obstacles set against her.Harlem, 1987: Claireece “Precious” Jones is a teenager in a living hell. S...

The White Ribbon (Films & Schedules)
Michael Haneke (Germany/Austria/France/Italy)
“I was interested in presenting a group of children who are taught absolutist values, and the way they internalize this absolutism. My point was to show the consequences – that is, all sorts of terrorism.”– Michael HanekeThe White Ribbon marks the high point of a journey that Haneke began over twenty years ago with his remarkable first feature film, The Seventh Continent. This latest work, set in...

Beautiful Kate (Films & Schedules)
Rachel Ward (Australia)
One of the many remarkable aspects of Beautiful Kate is that the film asks – insists, really – that you become emotionally engaged with its characters almost immediately, yet it also challenges you to postpone your judgment of their actions until the story has neared its end. Accomplishing this requires disciplined and concise filmmaking, which is exactly what characterizes Rachel Ward's debut.Ba...

The Armoire (Films & Schedules)
Jamie Travis (Canada)
A young boy goes missing in a seemingly “perfect” suburban neighbourhood. His best friend has no idea what happened, and slowly begins to descend into an abyss of grief, tormented by the mystery surrounding the disappearance. Soon the depressed lad begins sleeping in his armoire, haunted by the silence it holds. Through magnificent art direction, Jamie Travis brings us another sad children’s ta...

Imaginary Lovers (Films & Schedules)
Don McKellar Immersive and intimate, this debut installation by Don McKellar places his much-praised recent experiments with new moving-image media into a uniquely sophisticated and poignant context.In the last few years, McKellar has been sent all over the globe to promote his work. The pathos and loneliness inherent in these celebrity road trips prompted him to devise a serialized conceptual work using his ...

Defendor (Films & Schedules)
Peter Stebbings (Canada)
When night falls and danger emerges from the shadows of Hammer Town's alleyways, Defendor is the only man who stands between us and the drug-ravaged streets. He is the last bastion of decency, the last honourable man: he is Defendor! But he is also Arthur Poppington (Woody Harrelson), a simple man who lives in the workshop of the construction company that employs him to hold traffic signs. Arthur...

All Fall Down (Films & Schedules)
Philip Hoffman (Canada)
Piecing together the various narratives of Philip Hoffman's brilliant All Fall Down, his first feature-length work after innumerable magnificent shorts, is one of the most invigorating and rewarding pleasures you're likely to have in a cinema this year. Merging a personal essay with a regional history, All Fall Down is constructed from artifacts, beginning obliquely with scratched, black-and-whit...

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (Films & Schedules)
Judith Ehrlich, Rick Goldsmith (USA)
Today the name Daniel Ellsberg might draw a blank from younger people, but in the early seventies, he was all over the news for leaking the Pentagon Papers. This resulted in his being hunted by the FBI and dubbed “the most dangerous man in America.” President Nixon developed a personal obsession with the idea of destroying Ellsberg, which led to the recklessness of the Watergate scandal.No one co...

Applause (Films & Schedules)
Martin Pieter Zandvliet (Denmark)
Most actors probably feel they're living outside their own lives, but it is unlikely that many have felt it to the same heartbreaking degree as Thea (Paprika Steen), the heroine of Martin Pieter Zandvliet's solo directorial debut, Applause.A celebrated actress, Thea has been battling alcoholism for years. Her addiction led to her divorce eighteen months ago – and the loss of custody of her two so...

Adrift (Films & Schedules)
Bui Thac Chuyen (Vietnam)
Set in modern Hanoi, Adrift is a sensual, intimate and atmospheric drama about a newlywed couple that explores sexual awakening, lesbian desire and marital infidelity. These topics are still largely taboo in conservative Vietnam, but due to the country's transition from communism to a form of capitalism, the rapidly changing economic reality means a shift in social mores. Nevertheless, age-old tr...

Tanner Hall (Films & Schedules)
Francesca Gregorini, Tatiana von Furstenberg (USA)
Possibly influenced by the nuanced societies of Jane Austen and the estrogen-infused work of Lillian Hellman, co-writers and co-directors Tatiana von Furstenberg and Francesca Gregorini explore the emotionally complex world of young women in their thoughtful coming-of-age drama Tanner Hall.Everything about Tanner Hall is somewhat timeless: the slightly crumbling ivy-clad exterior, white porcelain...

Dogtooth (Films & Schedules)
Yorgos Lanthimos (Greece)
Delivering on the promise he showed with his 2005 feature Kinetta, Yorgos Lanthimos deals a masterful blow below the belt. In his latest triumph, sex is everywhere, tucked away in the David Hockneyesque set pieces, sabotaging the actors' speech patterns and hiding behind the director's undisclosed intentions.Dogtooth focuses on three teenagers confined to an isolated country estate that could ver...

Ticketing Info
Over the course of 10 days, the Toronto International Film Festival will feature more than 300 films.Be prepared when tickets go on sale and check out the ticket package options for this year's festival. For additional information contact us: In Person, Festival Box Office at Nathan Phillips Square
Public Supporters
The Toronto International Film Festival gratefully acknowledges the continuing support of the public sector, whose contributions allow us to stimulate a more successful Canadian film culture and industry and to promote the widest possible enjoyment of Canadian cinema throughout Canada and the world. Federal The Government of Canada is supporting TIFF09 t...

Sponsorship
The Toronto International Film Festival approaches sponsorships as true partnerships, designed to meet both the needs of the client and the needs of the Festival and its attendees. Your association with the Festival will provide your company with access to a very valuable public and/or industry audience. Reach over 470,000 Festival attendees through a customized sponsorship of the ...

La Soga (Films & Schedules)
Josh Crook (Dominican Republic/USA)
La Soga is a film of such raw energy and ragged beauty that these elements alone would justify its viewing. Beyond this, though, it contains a story both timely and timeless, brutal and elegant, for what is at stake is the redemption of a man's soul.In a poor neighbourhood in Santiago, Dominican Republic, where the streets are run by “boomerang” drug dealers (thugs who have been deported from the...

Hadewijch (Films & Schedules)
Bruno Dumont (France)
Bruno Dumont has never been afraid to explore the extremes of behaviour, whether through the analytical study of a homicide in L'Humanité or the dark side of sexual passion in Twentynine Palms. His timely and magnificent new film Hadewijch initially appears to be a portrait of a deeply religious young girl, intensely devoted to Christ and Christian values. But in Dumont's hands, this complete com...

Bunny & the Bull (Films & Schedules)
Paul King (United Kingdom)
Road movies are one of cinema's finest traditions, and the genre is about to receive a boost with the addition of Bunny & the Bull, a road movie that takes place in a flat. More specifically, this trip occurs within one man's mind inside that flat — and an intense, emotional, freewheeling booze-, sexand seafood-fuelled journey it is.Stephen Turnbull (Edward Hogg) hasn't left the house in mont...

Up in the Air (Films & Schedules)
Jason Reitman (USA)
Fans of Jason Reitman's previous two features, Thank You for Smoking and Juno, will be both surprised and reassured by Up in the Air. When the film begins, it seems as if Reitman has merged the business world of Smoking with some of the warmer values in Juno, but within moments it becomes clear that he has sharpened his pen and delved into even more complex and timely psycho-social territory, bou...

The Bubble (Films & Schedules)
Eytan Fox (Israel)
Noam, Lulu and Yali share a flat near Tel Aviv's popular Sheinkin Street district, a bastion of café society, consumer goods and the city's good-looking, liberal-minded twentysomethings. The roomies are open in their discussions of relationships and sex, but their perpetual stream of chatter seems to circumvent meatier concerns, like the regional conflict that is constantly pounding on the city's...

La Pivellina (Films & Schedules)
Tizza Covi, Rainer Frimmel (Austria)
In an impoverished trailer park on the outskirts of Rome, a small band of social outcasts eke out an existence in the dreary Italian winter. Circus performers Patty (Patrizia Gerardi) and Walter (Walter Saabel) wait patiently for the summer to come, until one day Patty finds a small two-year-old girl standing alone in the rain in a suburban park. Kindly Patty brings little Asia (Asia Crippa) home...

Vincere (Films & Schedules)
Marco Bellocchio (Italy)
Mussolini's early life provides the grist for a major examination of the dictator in Marco Bellocchio's tough-edged but brilliantly directed film. With decades of cinematic experience behind him, as well as a filmography that includes some of the most important post-war Italian films ever made, Bellocchio is well prepared for this challenge. Vincere stands as a model for anyone setting out to cap...

Gigante (Films & Schedules)
Adrián Biniez (Uruguay/Argentina/Germany/Spain)
When Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll unveiled their first feature, 25 Watts, in 2001, critics and audiences began to take notice of Uruguay's small film industry. That interest heightened in 2004 with their groundbreakingWhisky. Since then, a stream of new voices has emerged, many of them having worked on Rebella and Stoll's two features. On both the cast and crew lists of 25 Wattsand Whiskyar...

Passage Briare (Films & Schedules)
Friedl vom Gröller (Kubelka) (Austria)
Passage Briare (Austria) is a tiny picaresque set in Paris chronicling Kubelka’s coy encounter with an unnamed man.

Max Manus (Films & Schedules)
Espen Sandberg, Joachim Roenning (Norway/Denmark/Germany)
An epic race through a chapter of the Second World War that remains largely unknown in North America, Max Manus recounts the life of one of Europe's most celebrated resistance fighters.The film introduces its eponymous hero as he volunteers to fight alongside the Finnish forces in their battle against Russia, which is attempting to turn Finland into a protectorate. Shortly afterwards, his beloved...

Crackie (Films & Schedules)
Sherry White (Canada)
Life on the Rock never seemed easy, but for Mitsy (Meghan Greeley) it is especially rough. The teenager has been abandoned by her mother, a particularly unfit parent prone to both the bottle and the sex trade. She is left to be brought up by her mercurial grandmother Bride (Mary Walsh), who is well-meaning but oppressively suffocating.Mitsy's dreams for the future hinge on her desire to be a hair...

Should I Really Do It? (Films & Schedules)
Ismail Necmi (Turkey)
Truth might well be stranger than fiction, but who would have thought it could be so hallucinogenic?The film follows the surreal story of Petra (Petra Woschniak), a mesmerizing figure who scours the streets of Istanbul. We are introduced to her twilight universe via daily sessions with her very unusual therapist Herold (Herold). This masked conversationalist is a wine-sipping, coke-sniffing man o...

A Vicious Undertow (Films & Schedules)
Jesper Just Danish installation artist Jesper Just, a former participant in Future Projections and jury member for our 2006 Visions prize, returns with a new signature work. He has long been interested in the mechanics of film drama and the emotions it produces in its audience: melancholy, longing, solitude and especially male vulnerability. He strips down cinema to its essential parts to explore how these e...

Sparrows (Films & Schedules)
William Beaudine (USA)
This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of silent-film actress Mary Pickford's screen debut. Pickford, the world's first great movie star, had a profound impact on the film industry. Born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto, Pickford was part of a family of touring actors, before being signed by silent-film pioneer D.W. Griffith. A creative leader, she was one of the first to break from stage te...

Deliver Us from Evil (Films & Schedules)
Ole Bornedal (Denmark/Sweden/Norway)
Ole Bornedal's smart, propulsive thriller Deliver Us from Evil opens on a deserted coastal road as the film's narrator, a garishly dressed young woman, quickly introduces us to the film's principal characters. They include Anna, the angelic wife of the town's unofficial mayor, Ingvar, a veteran of the Second World War; Johannes and Pernille, an upscale couple who recently relocated to the country...

5 Dysfunctional People in a Car (Films & Schedules)
Pat Mills (Canada)
Watch this short online now! Five family members crowd into a car to take grandma to a nursing home against her will. An omniscient narrator reveals each person’s predicament, divulging their caustic thoughts about each other and the transpiring events. Even the dog has come along for the drive and in the end, gets the last bark. KM Pat Mills has co-written and directed the fe...

Mr. Nobody (Films & Schedules)
Jaco Van Dormael (France/Germany/Canada/Belgium)
Jared Leto, Sarah Polley, Diane Kruger and Linh-Dan Pham – one man recalls three love stories and inhabits three possible worlds in this spectacular fantasy from the fertile mind of Jaco Van Dormael.It has been thirteen years since Van Dormael, one of the bright talents of cinema, has made a film. He burst onto the scene in the early nineties, and after two spectacular successes withdrew from fil...

Hiroshima (Films & Schedules)
Pablo Stoll (Uruguay/Colombia/Argentina/Spain)
Hiroshima is Uruguayan director Pablo Stoll's first solo feature. Critically acclaimed for his debut film, 25 Watts, which he followed with the sublime hit Whisky (both co-directed with the late Juan Pablo Rebella), Stoll now returns to filmmaking with a completely different piece: a (mostly) silent musical.Hiroshima is a very intimate film. The director follows his brother Juan as he goes about ...

Big Dig (Films & Schedules)
Ephraim Kishon (Israel/USA/West Germany)
Released just two years after Jacques Tati's folly-filled depiction of Paris in Play Time, Ephraim Kishon's farce takes a similar – though vastly more talkative – approach to depicting the many manias of urban life.Blaumilch, an enterprising madman, escapes a mental asylum. He comes across an unattended jackhammer, as though it had been waiting for him all his life. Lugging the tool into downtown...

Press
The Communications Department is responsible for the Toronto International Film Festival's internal and external communications, which includes media relations for all its year-round programming. The Communications Department produces press releases and backgrounders for the media on all Group initiatives and responds to all media inquiries. For media inquiries contact the Communications ...

Location & Hours
The Sales & Industry Office will be located at the Sutton Place Hotel (955 Bay Street). Check back soon for information on: Registration Centre National Promotional Agency Stands Sales & Industry and Press Lounge

Awards
Canadian films and directors listed below that have entries in the Canadian Film Encyclopedia link directly to their respective entries. TIFF AWARDS 2009 Award Winners 2008 Award Winners 2007 Award Winners 2006 Award Winners 2005 Award Winners 2004 Award W...

Press
The Communications Department is responsible for the Toronto International Film Festival's internal and external communications, which includes media relations for all its year-round programming. The Communications Department produces press releases and backgrounders for the media on all Group initiatives and responds to all media inquiries. For media inquiries contact the Communications ...

Locations & Hours
Sales and Industry Office at the Sutton Place Hotel (955 Bay Street) Ballroom A, B, and C: Registration Centre & National Promotional Agency Stands Wellesley Room: Sales & Industry and Press Office Delegates Lounge

Awards 2009
2009 Award Winners Film Title Director Country Award Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire Lee Daniels USA Cadillac People's...

Greenpoint (Films & Schedules)
Jim Jennings (USA)
Jim Jennings’s Greenpoint (USA) is a rapturous and observant portrait of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, that pays tribute to a working-class neighbourhood on the verge of gentrification with a boogie-woogie collage of hot colours, pealing posters, graffiti art and neon signs.

Suck: Showcase (Films & Schedules)
FREE EVENTS IN THE HEART OF THE CITY Suck Spotlight: Concert with the stars of this Canadian rock'n'roll vampire comedy

Cordão Verde (Films & Schedules)
Hiroatsu Suzuki, Rossana Torres (Portugal)
Cordão Verde (Portugal) by first-time filmmakers Hiroatsu Suzuki and Rossana Torres is part poem and part documentary that observes farmers in the greenbelt of Portugal as they work and rejoice off the land’s riches.

Hipsters: Showcase - Swing Dance Lessons / Swing Band (Films & Schedules)
FREE EVENTS IN THE HEART OF THE CITY Hipsters Spotlight: Swing-dance lessons and a live concert by Aelita with the Galaxy All-Star Orchestra in honour of this Russian musical.

Doc Roundtables (Films & Schedules)
Doc Roundtables are held from 2:00pm to 3:00pm and from 3:30pm to 4:00pm from Monday, September 14, to Wednesday, September 16, at Match Club. At Doc Roundtables sessions, filmmakers can meet leading documentary industry figures - distributors, festival programmers, sales agents and consultants.

Pro Agri (Films & Schedules)
Nicky Hamlyn (United Kingdom)
Nicky Hamlyn’s Pro Agri (UK) is a time-lapse composition that bears a powerful and timely pro-land, pro-agriculture message.

Käfig (Films & Schedules)
Karl Kels (Germany)
In 35mm black and white is Karl Kels’s Käfig (Germany), an incredible, archaic burlesque dance of rhinoceroses that uses high-contrast and positive-negative juxtapositions to blend notions of domesticity and wilderness.

010101 (Films & Schedules)
T. Marie (USA)
T. Marie’s 010101 (USA) is an incredibly meticulous digital painting, offering one minute, one second and one frame of shimmering and breathtaking beauty through its diaphanous and forever-changing palette.

Hotel Roccalba (Films & Schedules)
Josef Dabernig (Austria)
Enigmatic human poetry in motion spills forth from Josef Dabernig’s Hotel Roccalba (Austria), a sonata of inactivity starring the filmmaker’s family whose gestures of leisure conspire to operatic heights.

Le Père de mes enfants (Films & Schedules)
Mia Hansen-Løve (France/Germany)
Balancing a successful professional career with a full and happy private life is a familiar challenge for most. In Le Père de mes enfants, Mia Hansen-Løve takes this commonplace dilemma and turns it into a loving but bittersweet portrait of a family whose world comes apart under these conflicting strains.Grégoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) is a happily wedded father of three young girls, an indep...

J'ai tué ma mère (Films & Schedules)
Xavier Dolan (Canada)
With his first feature, Montrealer Xavier Dolan has delivered what is already one of the most talked-about directorial debuts of 2009. In a triple-threat feat, Dolan writes, directs and stars in J'ai tué ma mère, the semi-autobiographical tale of a young gay man coming of age while struggling with his tortured relationship with his mother.Dolan plays Hubert, a cool and composed teenager who sport...

Like You Know It All (Films & Schedules)
Hong Sang-soo (South Korea)
An offbeat, grungy ballad that reveals the frivolity and hypocrisy found in the world of filmmaking, Like You Know It All is the latest delightfully playful masterpiece from director Hong Sang-soo.Imbued with tongue-in-cheek cruelty and humour à la Woody Allen, the Korean auteur's work explores familiar ground through ordinary yet absurdly ironic events. Propelled by melancholic lucidity, the fil...

Interview with the Earth (Films & Schedules)
Nicolas Pereda (Canada/Mexico)
The poignant Interview with the Earth follows two young brothers from a small Mexican town as they come to terms with the loss of their father, who left the family some time ago. Blending documentary and a fictional story of the death of one of their friends, Pereda explores how the boys experience grief and loss. KM Nicolás Pereda was born in Mexico City and studied film at York ...

Edge of the Desert (Films & Schedules)
Lea Nakonechny (Canada)
In a small Saskatchewan prairie town, two teenaged girls, one shy and awkward and the other more confident, are picked up at the local burger joint by a couple of guys who work the oil rigs. Heading out to the Great Sandhills, a desert-like area that stretches as far as the eye can see, they split into pairs, revealing their inner selves against the backdrop of a breathtakingly barren ...