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12 Films to Anticipate at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival
Bonjour Tristesse With the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival now underway, we at Filmmaker picked 12 films we are anticipating seeing. Consider it a given that higher-profile Telluride and Venice premieres such as the two Sigrid Nunez adaptations (The Friend and The Room Next Door), Conclave, Saturday Night are on our list too, but don’t overlook these films, for which TIFF is either their world premiere or North American launch.
Bonjour Tristesse. For her debut feature author (Too Much and Not the Mood) and cultural critic Durga Chew-Bose — she interviewed Mia Hansen-Love for Filmmaker several years back — has ambitiously adapted the novel by Françoise Sagan previously brought to the screen by Otto Preminger and starring Jean Seberg. Not having formal screenplay experience, she wrote the script with all the visual information and camera moves that the screenplay books say to do without. The result was the producers circling back and asking if she’d want to direct. In the Seberg role is Lily McInerny, excellent in her breakout picture, Palm Trees and Power Lines, with Chloe Sevigny and Claes Bang rounding out the cast. — Scott Macaulay
Revolving Rounds. Kicking off the first of three Wavelengths shorts programs in three-dimensional glory, filmmaker Johann Lurf’s collaboration with fellow Viennese architect, artistic researcher, and performance artist Christina Jauernik is a piece that, like many of Lurf’s previous shorts, spans spaces and formats. Filmed (on film) at an agricultural field outside Vienna, Lurf and Jauernik’s piece is said to be concerned with an autostereoscopic system called the cyclostéréoscope. Developed in 1942 by Frenchman François Savoye, the device uses a kind of revolving cone and projection screen to conjure depth illusions without the need for glasses (though this screening will, somewhat ironically, require spectacles). Any new 3D is an event these days, especially when it arrives in the avant-garde. — Blake Williams
Matt and Mara. If Anne at 13,000 Ft. was his gloss on A Woman Under the Influence, Kazik Radwanski’s new feature is a gloss of sorts on the kinder, gentler Cassavetes title Minnie and Moskowitz about another M&M pair, exes from college who start circling an affair. Both are writers: as Matt, Matt Johnson does his patented high-energy, semi-malicious puppy dog mode, while Deragh Campbell’s Mara counters with a mode where she goes from not-quite-resting to agitated while covering seemingly no distance at all. At a trim 80 minutes, it’s a surprisingly funny riff on a familiar dramedy mode; after premiering earlier this year at the Berlinale, it finally has a screening in the city it’s set in. — Vadim Rizov
Daughter’s Daughter. Arguably the most promising film premiering in TIFF’s competitive Platform section, this is the sophomore feature by Taiwanese filmmaker and NYU Tisch graduate Huang Xi. Huang has been working closely with Hou Hsiao-hsien since 1996 (ca. Goodbye South, Goodbye), and Hou serves as executive producer here (as he did on her debut film, Missing Johnny [2017], which fared well at both the Taipei Film Awards and Golden Horse Awards). Huang also teamed up here with Hou’s longtime editor, Liao Ching-Sung, and, just as Bi Gan did for his sophomore effort (Long Day’s Journey into Night [2018]), snagged iconic actress Sylvia Chang to anchor her cast. Granddaughter would have been a cleaner title, no doubt, though admittedly less distinctive. — BW
Cloud. Fresh from Venice, Cloud is part of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s unusually productive year, which has him working at the speed of the DTV genre films he started out in. Earlier this year came the medium-length short Chime, tied to Roadside, a platform which offers it as a “Digital Video Trading” offering, which they describe as a “Web3-like concept”; and still to premiere at San Sebastián is a remake of his own Serpent’s Path. This, meanwhile, has been described as a jagged, eccentric satire of sorts, and to be honest I don’t want to know a single further thing about it. — VR
Nightbitch. Marielle Heller writes and directs this adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel, which spins a darkly comic, near-gothic tale of maternal transformation and neurosis out of the life experiences of a stay-at-home suburban mom who finds herself turning into the titular canine. Amy Adams plays the artist who has stepped away from her work to raise her son while her businessman husband comes on and goes on a series of business trips. Suspiria‘s Jessica Harper plays a librarian wise in the transformative powers of motherhood. A TIFF world premiere, the film is the first Heller has also written since her debut, Diary of a Teenage Girl. — SM
Sad Jokes. Fabian Stumm’s sophomore feature just premiered at the Munich Film Festival, where Jonathan Romney positively reviewed it in a way that sounds promising, even if a chunk of the premise is familiar (Stumm is writer, director and also star as…a film director having problems). But the visual style on display in the film’s trailer is promising, and it wouldn’t be a proper TIFF without taking a chance on a dark horse festival title. — VR
The Wolves Always Come at Night. Premiering in Platform is Gabrielle Brady’s follow-up to her Island of Hungry Ghosts, which is a beautiful and ambitious film layering stories of the human and animal world in its tale of a trauma counselor living on Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. Her new film is announced as a hybrid work about a sheepherder couple having to flee the effects of climate change to adopt wholly new lives. — SM
Diciannove. The debut feature from Luca Guadagnino’s sometimes assistant director and camera operator, Giovanni Tortorici, so the pedigree is there (Guadagnino is also the producer, naturally). This coming-of-age debut (the title of which translates to Nineteen in English) was shot on 35mm, is premiering in Venice’s Orizzonti sidebar, and looks like it has the potential to be more genuinely queer than Queer. More than happy to take a flyer on that. — BW
The Luckiest Man in America. Movies about game shows are rare, even though they’re staples of American TV still, and frequently being relaunched. After an initial 1983-86 run on CBS, Press Your Luck returned to ABC in 2019, where it’s still on; this biopic goes back to the original, retelling the incident in which contestant Michael Larson effectively found a cheat code to break the game. The big curiosity here is the actors: after Richard Jewell, Paul Walter Hauser offers up a different portrait of an American under an unexpected spotlight, while Walton Goggins incarnates original host Peter Tomarken. — VR
exergue – on documenta 14. A 14-hour (!) film in 14 chapters about the controversial, chaotic, literally boundary-demolishing 14th edition of documenta—an art exhibition so major that it only takes place once every five years, and which was inaugurated in Kassel, Germany in 1955 as an effort to wash away some of the lingering stink of Nazism. The numerical conceit is a bit cute, and inevitably results in a film that feels too long (yet also, paradoxically, far too short). As an in-depth, observational portrait of an institution—Wiseman is an obvious reference point, National Gallery (2014), in particular—filmmaker Dimitris Athyridis’s years-spanning, allover access to this event’s execution, spearheaded by Polish artistic director Adam Szymczy, has to be as comprehensive a look as we’ll ever get at the art world’s ever-entangling and self-asphyxiating relations between creative freedom, economics, ideology, power, and language. — BW
Young Werther. Ever since reading Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (as a teenager, naturally), I thought there should be a contemporary film adaptation, a notion that has never left me as various forms of digital communication would now naturally replace the letter-writing of the original novel. There have been adaptations over the years, including a 1938 one by Max Ophuls, but Young Werther, a debut feature by Toronto-based José Avelino Gilles Corbett Lourenço, looks to be the first contemporary English-language take on the proto-Romantic 1770 novel that propelled Goethe to fame and, with the cluster of suicides that followed its publication, is considered to have produced an an early example of social contagion. Starring Douglas Booth and Alison Pill, the work, according to the TIFF program guide, “succeeds in the difficult task of preserving the pertinence of Goethe’s dark and philosophical work in a bright and fun romantic comedy for a modern audience.” That’s a tall order I’ll be interested in judging! — SM
Correction: The original publication of this article incorrectly identified Diciannove director Giovanni Tortorici as also a music video director and playwright.
