TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival season began with the press conference in Toronto today, to announce the Canadian line-up of the 2018 edition, .
Twenty Canadian feature films and 24 short films will be featured from the opening on September 6th, until September 16th, and almost half were directed by women.
“Our ambition is for the work to be revelatory, not accusatory”
Xavier Dolan, the Quebec director who became a darling of the Cannes Film Festival over the years, will be making his English-language directorial debut.
The Death and Life of John F. Donovan is the much-anticipated, star-studded film starring.Kit Harrington, Natalie Portman and Thandie Newton, as well as Canadians Sarah Gadon and Jacob Tremblay.
Two major talents will have the final in their trilogies premiering.
TIFF will feature filmmaker Denys Arcand’s ‘pointedly political’ movie, The Fall of the American Empire, in September. (Graham Hughes/CP)
The Fall of the American Empire, by Denys Arcand, comes 30 years after the first instalment in The Decline of the American Empire.
This one, set in Montreal, about a heist-gone-awry, is sure to be one of the hits in September.
As is the much-anticipated third instalment of the magnificent documentary series by Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and photographer, Edward Burtynsky.
Global environmental issues are at the heart of Anthropocene, the final title in a trilogy that began with Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark. Anthropocene will be screening in tandem with an exhibit of Burtynsky’s images at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
“Our ambition is for the work to be revelatory, not accusatory, as we examine human influence on the Earth both on a planetary scale and in geological time. The shifting of consciousness is the beginning of change.”
This is a quote from the trio behind Anthropocene, on the Art Gallery’s web site, in anticipation of the exhibition and the film.
This year the festival includes world premieres of three films showcasing Indigenous talent, including Gwaai Edenshaw and Helen Haig-Brown’s Edge of the Knife.
It’s described as the first feature-length film made in Haida, an endangered language from Canada’s west coast.
Darlene Naponse’s Falls Around Her stars the renowned Métis actor Tantoo Cardinal.
And Miranda de Pencier, in her feature directorial debut with The Grizzlies, presents a creative collaboration between herself and Inuit producers Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and Stacey Aglok MacDonald.
Also announced this afternoon, were the festival’s “Rising Stars”: Michaela Kurimsky, Jess Salgueiro, Devery Jacobs, and Lamar Johnson. The CBC’s Tashauna Reid was at the press conference today, and got to speak with Devery Jacobs:
