This year TIFF, by my count, has 68 feature films directed by women (two less than last year’s 70). I always get FOMO knowing there is no way I’m going to watch all of these films and try my best to really focus on catching smaller films that might not get wide distribution after the festival is over. Like I did last year, I’m highlighting fifteen films off the beaten path1 that I am the most excited about. Some of these I have been lucky enough to screen in advance, others I’m hoping to catch on the ground in Toronto, and several I am reviewing for various outlets.
In Leila Amini’s heartrending documentary A Sisters' Tale the filmmaker follows her sister Nasreen in Tehran as she pursues her dream of becoming a singer, despite the country’s ban on women performing in public. This personal portrait is a deeply moving ode to sisterhood and to the strength and perseverance of women. But, as we see Nasreen’s son support his mother, it’s also a plants a hopeful seed for the future of women in Iran as the next generation comes of age.
I was a big fan of Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s brutal drama Beginning, so I truly cannot wait for her second film April, which follows OBGYN Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) as she performs illegal abortions. I’ll be writing a bit about this one for RogerEbert.com, so keep an eye out for that.
In Ana Endara’s Querido Trópico (Beloved Tropic) two women living in Panama City find solace in each other’s company. Ana María (Jenny Navarrete) is a pregnant Colombian immigrant with a secret. She is hired to look after the wealthy matriarch Mercedes (Paulina García), whom she calls Mechi, as she succumbs to early on-set dementia. It’s a beautiful film about the power and warmth of human connection.
I’m not going to lie, I was not very well versed in the work or life of celebrated Irish writer Edna O’Brien before I watched Sinéad O'Shea’s amazing documentary Blue Road — The Edna O'Brien Story, but afterwards I felt fired up. Not just to read her work, but to get focused on my own creative writing (I have so many half finished projects). The film includes excerpts from O’Brien’s diaries read by Jessie Buckley, as well as some of the last on camera interviews with O’Brien herself (she died earlier this summer).
Now, I am a fan of Otto Preminger’s take on Françoise Sagan’s novella, but I do think the book is way better. So, I am excited to see what writer Durga Chew-Bose does with her take on Bonjour Tristesse. The cast is perfect. I’m sure everyone knows Chloë Sevigny, but Claes Bang was so good as the charming yet smarmy museum curator in 2017 Palme d’Or winner The Square (plus he did a take on Dracula I have not yet seen), and Lily McInerny gave a truly knockout performance in Palm Trees and Power Lines a few years ago. I’ll also be writing about this one for RogerEbert.com
I’m not familiar with the short films of Vietnamese director Dương Diệu Linh, but the plot of her debut feature film Mưa trên cánh bướm (Don't Cry, Butterfly) sounds promising. It follows a woman who discovers her husband is having an affair from a live TV broadcast and must learn to face the fall out. I love this part of the description on the TIFF website: “The incorporation of surrealism leads to a distinctive and captivating film, one that somehow manages to invoke absurdity, pity, and humour at the same time.”
If I’ve learned anything in my few years going to TIFF, it’s that if programmers Dorota Lech or Robyn Citizen recommend the film, I’m gonna try to catch it. That’s how I learned about Romanian filmmaker Sarra Tsorakidis’s directorial debut Ink Wash. The film follows Lena (played by Ilinca Hărnuț, also the film’s co-writer), a mural painter, who as she approaches her 40th birthday, and reeling from a breakup, decides to leave Bucharest for a job at a dilapidated brutalist hotel in south-western Romania. I am willing to bet chaos ensues!
Filmed during the spring of 2019, filmmaker Hind Meddeb’s documentary Soudan, souviens-toi (Sudan, remember us) is a portrait of young Sudanese activists in Khartoum in the wake of the overthrow Omar Al-Bashir’s 30-year dictatorship. Along with filming their demonstrations and push for a government led by the people, she also captures the violence of factions scrambling to control the country’s wealth and resources.
Elizabeth Lo’s documentary Mistress Dispeller follows Wang Zhenxi, a woman who works as a “mistress dispeller,” aka someone who breaks up extramarital affairs. We follow a case where Wang speaks with the aggrieved wife, her husband, and the younger woman he is seeing. Through this lens the film takes a more nuanced approach to the complexities and messiness of human feelings. It also works as an examination of how economic and class disparities impact the choices of women in China.
Inspired by the work of Franz Kafka, Tallulah H. Schwab’s Mr. K follows the titular Mr. K (Crispin Glover), a traveling magician who finds himself in a decaying hotel filled with eccentrics and cannot seem to check out again. I’ll be reviewing this one for IndieWire, so keep an eye out for that.
Laura Carreira’s debut feature film On Falling follows an isolated Portuguese migrant named Aurora (Joana Santos) as she struggles to make ends meet working inside a mega-warehouse in Scotland. I can already feel my soul dying just looking at the dreariness of the neon-lit workplace hellscape in the film’s one promotional still.
In Lina Vdovîi & Radu Ciorniciuc’s heartfelt documentary Tata, Vdovîi turns her lens on her own father, who left Moldova in the 1990s to seek work in Italy. As she becomes pregnant with her own child, Vdovîi decides to confront the toxic cycle of domestic violence that has plagued her family for generations, with an aim to not only break the cycle for her own son, but to help her father heal as well. It’s a really beautiful film that uses a personal story to explore a culture built on toxic masculinity and the path towards a healthier world for all.
I have really enjoyed the last few films from Gia Coppola, so I am pretty excited for her film The Last Showgirl, which stars Pamela Anderson as a showgirl in Las Vegas trying to figure out what to do with her life after the show she’s performed in for the last thirty years abruptly closes. Coppola’s films are always so rich in their aesthetic world-building, so at the very least I know this one is going to be a feast for the eyes. I should be writing about this one for RogerEbert.com as well.
A few years ago Oscar-nominated Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova co-founded a production company with the specific aim to bring more Eastern European and Balkan films to the world stage. Enter Triumph, the third film in a filmmakers — and Bakalova’s one-time acting professors — Kristina Grozeva & Petar Valchanov’s trilogy inspired by sensationalist Bulgarian news stories. Bakalova stars as the daughter of a Colonel (Julian Vergov) on a mission to find a buried alien artifact on the tip of the General’s personal psychic (Margita Gosheva). Things get, uh., weird. I’ll be writing about this pitch black comedy for RogerEbert.com, so watch out for that in the future.
As a major fan of Angelina Jolie’s By The Sea, it is my duty to always hype her films. Without Blood, Jolie’s Her fifth(!) feature film as a director, is based on a novel by Italian writer Alessandro Baricco and stars Salma Hayek Pinault and Demián Bichir as a woman whose family has been murdered and the man who did it.
A film I have written a lot about, Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor’s powerful Palestinian documentary No Other Land, is also playing the festival — and still doesn’t have U.S. distribution! I urge everyone to make time on their schedule to see this vital film. You can read my review of the film below:
You can find all of the films directed by women programmed at this year’s festival here.
Some other films that are worth watching, but already have distribution, that I’ve already seen or am excited to see include: Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (Janus), Halina Reijn’s Babygirl (A24), Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (A24), Andrea Arnold’s Bird (MUBI), Mati Diop’s Dahomey (MUBI), Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (MUBI), Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch (Searchlight), Sydney Freeland’s Rez Ball (Netflix), Rachel Morrison’s The Fire Inside (Amazon/MGM), Sue Kim’s The Last of The Sea Women (AppleTV+), Sandhya Suri’s Santosh (Metrograph Pictures), and Janicza Bravo’s The Listeners (which is actually a BBC series).