Matt and Mara, from acclaimed director Kazik Radwanski, stars Matt Johnson and Deragh Campbell.Supplied
New films from such internationally renowned auteurs as America’s Steven Soderbergh, South Korea’s Hong Sangsoo, Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Iran’s Mohammad Rasoulof and a number of acclaimed Canadian directors will screen at the 49th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival next month.
On Tuesday, TIFF programmers announced the 43 feature films, representing 41 countries, that will make up this year’s Centrepiece program (a slate formerly known as Contemporary World Cinema).
Highlights include Soderbergh’s new thriller Presence, starring Lucy Liu and Julia Fox, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival at the beginning of the year; By the Stream, the latest microbudget film from minimalist master Sangsoo; the hotly anticipated psychological thriller Cloud, from Kurosawa, best-known for his landmark 1997 horror film Cure; and Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which won over audiences at Cannes this past spring days after its director escaped impending imprisonment by the Iranian regime.
Canadian filmmakers with new works in Centrepiece include a number of TIFF veterans. Sofia Bohdanowicz will bring to Toronto the world premiere of her music-academia drama Measures for a Funeral (formerly titled Opus 28), her latest collaboration with actress Deragh Campbell, who will be pulling double duty as the star of Kazik Radwanski’s new romantic dramedy Matt and Mara, co-starring BlackBerry director Matt Johnson.
Michaela Kurimsky, who starred in Jasmin Mozaffari’s TIFF breakout Firecrackers in 2018, is back at the festival leading director Melanie Oates’s Newfoundland drama Sweet Angel Baby. And Johnny Ma, whose debut feature Old Stone played TIFF in 2016, returns with his Winnipeg-set drama The Mother and the Bear.
Speaking of Winnipeg: the Manitoba metropolis gets an unusually delightful remix in the new comedy Universal Language from director Matthew Rankin, who previously beguiled TIFF attendees with his surreal 2019 debut The Twentieth Century. The film, which imagines a Winnipeg equally Canadian and Iranian, earned rave reviews after making its world premiere at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight program this past May.
TIFF, which last week announced that Rogers Communications is coming onboard as the “presenting sponsor” of its 2024 festival, will run this year from Sept. 5-15. Organizers will announce films from the festival’s Docs, Wavelengths, Classics, Short Cuts and Primetime programs throughout this week.