{"id":155232,"date":"2026-08-04T14:52:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T14:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/155232\/"},"modified":"2026-08-04T14:52:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T14:52:08","slug":"scary-news-international-auteur-directors-looking-inwards-at-toronto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/155232\/","title":{"rendered":"Scary News International Auteur Directors Looking Inwards at Toronto"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAfter Cannes<\/a> was dominated by international auteurs amid Hollywood\u2019s retreat from the Croissette, the Toronto Film Festival<\/a> will also foreground artist-driven films in its upcoming Wavelength section unveiled on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen we look at the newspaper, and it\u2019s filled with bad news and cruelty, a lot of these filmmakers are looking inwards. There\u2019s a lot of introspection and personal investment in the films,\u201d Andr\u00e9a Picard, curator of Wavelengths, TIFF\u2019s avant-garde film showcase, told The Hollywood Reporter. Auteurs moving onwards and inwards include Beatrice Gibson with her debut feature, At Night, shot in 16mm for BBC Films. The director plays a filmmaker struggling to make sense of the film she\u2019s making as six women in Paris meet up and discuss the anxiety and psychic exhaustion of the iconic French city after dark.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt Night will have a North American premiere in Toronto after bowing in Locarno. There\u2019s also inward-looking discovery with Biograf\u00eda de Jorge Luis Borges (Life of Jorge Luis Borges), a five-and-a-half-hour documentary by Argentinian director Mariano Llinas headed to Toronto after a world premiere in Venice.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film, while about the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges and drawing on his papers, books he read and global cities he visited, also has director Llinas wrestling over how to capture a literary great known for endless reinvention. \u201cIt\u2019s about the making of that film, and Mariano is in the film and he\u2019s often called a Borgesian filmmaker himself, and so it\u2019s almost a self-portrait as much as it\u2019s a portrait of Borges,\u201d Picard argues.<\/p>\n

\n\tFellow Argentine auteur Lisandro Alonso is bringing La Libertad Doble (Double Freedom) to Toronto for a North American showing after a Cannes world premiere. The movie shot in 35mm film revisits the main character and setting of the director\u2019s minimalist first feature, Freedom, that 25 years earlier chronicled a few days in the life of a solitary woodcutter in the remote Pampas mountains. The loosely-inspired sequel has echoes of Argentina\u2019s ongoing economic crisis today.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe original film was very much isolated in the sort of very rural part of La Pampa in Argentina, and this one still is, but we feel these reverberations in very explicit ways \u2013 how the government austerity policies are impacting the lives of people even as far away from the metropole as this character in La Pampa,\u201d Jesse Cumming, associate curator for the Wavelengths program, adds.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe TIFF section has also booked North American premieres for three Berlin<\/a> titles:\u00a0Sebastian Brameshuber\u2019s London<\/a>; Nicolas Pereda\u2019s comedic film Lo dem\u00e1s es ruido (Everything Else is Noise), set around a musician friend\u2019s TV interview in an apartment in Mexico City; and German auteur Angela Schanelec\u2019s Meine Frau Weint (My Wife Cries), an austere romantic tragedy.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s also a North American bow for prolific Romanian auteur Radu Jude<\/a>\u2019s Cannes entry, Le Journal d\u2019Une Femme de Chambre (The Diary of a Chambermaid), a French-language and highly political film that adapts the classic 19th-century book by Octave Mirbeau.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd TIFF has a Canadian premiere for William and David Greaves\u2019 posthumous historical documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem, which captures a 1972 gathering of surviving notables from the original Harlem Renaissance. Williams Greaves died in 2014, so the film was finished by son David and granddaughter Liani.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Wavelengths section has two world premieres, one for Toronto-based artist and filmmaker Yuula Benivolski\u2019s The Black Box is Orange, a first feature, and another for John Torres\u2019 The Remotes, a film comprising behind-the-scenes footage of films shot in the Philippines and artfully combined to resemble a fictional story.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis year\u2019s Wavelengths short and mid-lengths lineup includes Kamal Aljafari with Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo, a portrait of the legendary Japanese iconoclast; Maryam Tafakory\u2019s Ghazal-e Sorkh, an essay film that recounts the 1976 boycott of the Shiraz Art Festival; and Zheng Lu Xinyuan\u2019s nocturnal Fire Flies, where a filmmaker is led on a flashlight-illuminated stroll through the mountains.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s also world premieres for Parastoo Anoushahpour\u2019s Peacocks Come with the Clouds; Rita Ferrando\u2019s After Image, which traces the director\u2019s family history of migration from Argentina to Canada; Mustafa Uzuner\u2019s The Address Book, shot in 16mm; Ben Russell\u2019s La Prospettiva (1653); Jiaqi Yu\u2019s Moon Palace; and Simon Liu\u2019s ghost tale Splits in Two.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Toronto Film Festival is set to run from Sept. 10 to 20. Additional film lineup announcements will be made in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After Cannes was dominated by international auteurs amid Hollywood\u2019s retreat from the Croissette, the Toronto Film Festival will…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155233,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[30110,50215,50216,48,19255],"class_list":["post-155232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-toronto","tag-berlin","tag-cannes","tag-radu-jude","tag-toronto","tag-toronto-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155232\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}