The Toronto Film Festival is upon us, as the beginning of Oscar season starts taking shape. This year’s festival has a particular focus on women filmmakers and people of colour.
“The whole industry is talking about inclusion in a way it hasn’t in a long time,” Toronto artistic programmer Cameron Bailey said in an interview. “We never want to say ‘[diversity] is the goal’ because I don’t think that’s the right way to do it. But we do want to make sure we’re paying attention and maybe looking more deeply for stories that will help continue that conversation.”
So here are a few female driven, female directed features to get us all exited about the Oscar season to come. As you can see, these films are diverse, provocative and most importantly different in genre, style and visual language. I can’t wait to see them!
Based on Irène Frachon’s bestselling memoir Médiator 150mg, La Fille de Brest is set in Brittany — a key element of the film as there is a constant tension between Paris and the provinces — and revolves around Irène (Sidse Babett Knudsen), a hospital lung specialist who begins to suspect a connection between recent patient deaths and medications being prescribed. After she turns to the hospital’s head of research, Antoine (Benoît Magimel), for help, Irène’s investigation leads her to a powerful drug company. Of course, that’s when things start to get ugly. Antoine’s research unit is suddenly threatened with funding cuts, and Irène’s colleagues begin to view her derisively as a meddlesome crusader.
Frachon’s story calls to mind that of another hard-charging activist: Erin Brockovich. But Bercot’s distinct personality as a director ensures that this is new cinematic territory. In Knudsen, who appears in almost every scene in the film, she finds an actor fully up for the role of the steely heroine, and Magimel offers able support. As this eye-opening and inspiring work illustrates, Frachon simply never gave up, until — well, see the film to find out what happened!
PIERS HANDLING.
With only four features to her name, Andrea Arnold has already earned the title of auteur. Her films are marked by a lyrical shooting style that’s juxtaposed with the harsh reality it captures, and by the great compassion with which she observes characters. Her protagonists are always female, and though she puts them in perilous positions, she never punishes them. Instead, she allows them to flourish against all odds. This humanist streak continues in Arnold’s most recent film, the Cannes Jury Prize winner American Honey.
Star (newcomer Sasha Lane) lives on the fringes of American society, resorting to dumpster diving in order to feed her half-siblings. When she meets Jake (Shia LaBeouf) dancing in the aisles at a Kmart, their attraction is instantaneous and magnetic. Star places the kids in care and immediately joins Jake on a cross-country drive with a Dickensian gang of misfits: slugging hard liquor in the backs of vans, crashing in rundown motels, and selling fraudulent magazine subscriptions. Star and Jake are ecstatic in each other’s company. They begin dreaming of a house and family to call their own. But their relationship offends the crew’s queen bee, Krystal (Riley Keough), and Star’s precarious place — in the gang and in society — becomes clear.
CAMERON BAILEY
One of the boldest and sexiest dramas of the year, April Mullen’s Below Her Mouth tells the story of an unexpected romance between two women whose passionate connection changes their lives forever.
Jasmine (Natalie Krill) is a successful fashion editor living with her fiancé, Rile (Sebastian Pigott). On a night out in the city with her best friend, she meets Dallas (Erika Linder), a roofer recently out of a relationship. Jasmine is taken by surprise when Dallas confidently hits on her; she turns Dallas down, but can’t get her out of her head. Dallas continues her cool, self-assured advances. In a matter of days, Jasmine succumbs and the two women embark on a steamy affair.
Stephanie Fabrizi’s screenplay powerfully and honestly explores what happens when two women fall hard for each other, and Mullen brings the story to the screen with uninhibited flair and assurance, showing us how love can arise from some of the messiest times in our lives.
Below Her Mouth is a rarity in more than one way: it’s a fiction film shot with an entirely female crew, and it’s an uncommonly frank look at the all-encompassing nature of attraction — the good, the bad, the ugly, and the transcendendent.
MAGALI SIMARD
Depending on your point of view, Carrie Pilby (Bel Powley) either has a problem or she is a problem. This very clever girl graduated Harvard at the age of 19 and lives in a small NYC apartment paid for by her London-based father. World on a string, right? On the contrary — Carrie has no job, no purpose, and no friends, because she actively dislikes just about everyone (rating them “morally and intellectually unacceptable”) as only a teenager can. Her one regular contact is her dad’s therapist friend, Dr. Petrov (Nathan Lane), who after a fruitless series of weekly visits finally sets Carrie some homework: a five-point plan to get her life together.
Adapted from Caren Lissner’s bestselling novel, Carrie Pilby is a winning comedy about the metropolitan life of privileged youth, but it’s also much more than that. As the source of Carrie’s misanthropy is gradually revealed, our empathy for her grows, even if we want to pull our hair out in frustration at her lack of life skills. You might just end up loving her, even if she hates you.
JANE SCHOETTLE
Having made an indelible impact on Indian cinema with her work in front of the camera, renowned actor Konkona Sensharma (Talvar) makes her debut as a writer-director with this tense family drama.
It’s the late 1970s, and just outside the quiet Indian resort town of McCluskiegunj, a family gathers in their country home and prepares to ring in the new year with old friends. On the periphery of the family’s focus hovers the young man Shutu (Vikrant Massey), an innocent attempting to navigate a world that’s unkind to his sensitive nature.
Shutu would rather spend time with his friend’s young daughter than engage with the adults, but he is eventually drawn into the messy realm of mature emotions and desires. Relationships in these close quarters begin to simmer and strain, and Shutu struggles to define his masculinity and sense of self — even as the atmosphere becomes suffused with lust and mystery.
CAMERON BAILEY
Eleanor Coppola (Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse) directs this sexy and charming road movie, about a fiftysomething empty-nester (Diane Lane) with a workaholic husband (Alec Baldwin) who embarks on an impromptu, two-day journey through the French countryside with a rakish bon vivant (Arnaud Viard).
Coppola is best known for Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, her incisive, gripping production diary that ushered us deep into the chaotic genesis of her husband’s legendary epic, Apocalypse Now. Nothing could be more different than this sexy, effervescent travelogue. As writer and director, and as matriarch to a fiendishly talented filmmaking dynasty, Coppola has been in the business for over five decades now. Her first step away from documentary was a long time in coming, but Paris proves to be well worth the wait.
MICHÈLE MAHEUX
A girl walks across a cannibal-infested desert at midday…. Ana Lily Amirpour’s highly anticipated follow-up to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night feints in the direction of sensationalistic horror — and, be forewarned, blood is spilled and limbs are hacked — but The Bad Batch, like Amirpour’s deliciously low-key debut, uses genre as a springboard for high style and social commentary.
The aforementioned girl (Suki Waterhouse) is one of thousands of Americans deemed unacceptable to civilized society. While wandering in her desert exile, she is captured by a community of cannibals. She manages to escape, soon ending up at a very different enclave of outcasts. Our heroine is safe here, but still does not quite feel that she has found her tribe.
Many of the film’s pleasures are in its details, like a boombox-shaped DJ booth and a cannibal camp in an airplane cemetery. But what makes The Bad Batch meaty is the way Amirpour subtly steeps her premise in politics. There’s no mistaking the exclusionary policies of this imagined America for anything less than a cautionary vision of where the real America could go if left unchecked.
JANE SCHOETTLE
Buster (Rami Malek) was once Jonah, a hard-working husband and father whose job as the night-shift concierge at a hotel took its toll on his mood and, consequently, his marriage to the sensitive and long-suffering Marty (Kate Lyn Sheil) — until a chance encounter with a conspiracy-obsessed drifter (DJ Qualls) changed the course of their lives forever. As the sad and solitary present-day Buster drifts from house to house and eludes the local sheriff at every turn, we gradually piece together the events that fractured his life and left him alone on top of a snowy mountain, or perhaps in a small rowboat in the middle of a vast ocean — or both.
Following the found-footage genre twister The Midnight Swim, Sarah Adina Smith’s second feature puts her on another level as a writer and director. Beautiful, enigmatic and elliptical, Buster’s Mal Heart also features a powerful performance from Malek as the silent, broken protagonist. Taking his first big-screen leading role after his starring turn in the hit TV series Mr. Robot, Malek proves here that he’s more than capable of carrying the weight of a feature film.
COLIN GEDDES
The latest film from Kelly Reichardt not only confirms the writer-director-editor as one of today’s leading filmmakers, but an extraordinary director of actors. Based on short stories from Maile Meloy’s collection Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, Certain Women is a tripartite portrait of striving, independent women whose lives intersect in suggestive and powerful ways. Gutsily eschewing narrative closure, Reichardt connects her characters less through plot than through place and various illustrations of one of the film’s main themes: deferred desire.
Shot against the stunning backdrop of Montana’s mountains and pastoral, big-skied landscapes in ravishing 16mm, Reichardt’s film adopts an episodic structure as it abruptly drops us into the lives of four strong women, who are all living intensely yet evince a certain loneliness and longing as they endeavour to understand and shape the world around them. Laura (Laura Dern) is an overworked, no-nonsense lawyer battling office sexism who is thrust into a hostage situation by a disgruntled client who feels unjustly served by his worker’s compensation claim. Gina (Reichardt regular Michelle Williams) is an ambitious wife and mother building a new home with her husband, with whom tensions arise over their disparate approaches to the project. Newcomer Lily Gladstone is quietly wrenching as a small-town ranch hand who develops an endearing attachment to the harried lawyer (Kristen Stewart, fidgety and formidable) who teaches her biweekly adult education classes.
Supremely elegant and fiercely intelligent, the deceptively small-scale vignettes in Certain Women combine to create a canvas of vast terrain and small yet meaningful gestures, of quiet yearning and subtle catharsis. With the help of her magnificent cast, Reichardt has created a masterful, profoundly empathetic film about the everyday disappointments and minor victories that make up one’s existence — a film that reveals these certain women as both painfully vulnerable and unfathomably resilient in the face of life’s many uncertainties.
ANDRÉA PICARD
Director Mira Nair returns to the Festival with this rousing tale of a brilliant Ugandan girl whose humble life is transformed after she realizes her gift for chess. Based on an amazing true story, Queen of Katwe stars David Oyelowo (also at the Festival in A United Kingdom), Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o, and newcomer Madina Nalwanga.
From her vantage point in the Kampala shantytown of Katwe, 10-year-old Phiona Mutesi (Nalwanga) can see precious few routes out of destitution, even though her mother, Harriet (Nyong’o), works hard as a vegetable vendor to clothe and feed her children. When a missionary and one-time soccer player named Robert (Oyelowo) begins teaching the local kids to play chess, Phiona is transfixed — and displays an instant affinity for the game.
There are few things more inspiring than a young person realizing their potential, and Nalwanga — as gifted an actor as her character is a chess player — captures Phiona’s self-actualization beat by beat, move by move. Queen of Katwe is a thrilling story of hope and discovery.
Director Lone Scherfig (An Education) returns to the Festival with this rousing romantic comedy set in Britain’s wartime film industry. Featuring a cast teeming with some of the UK’s most charismatic comedic actors, Bill Nighy and Richard E. Grant among them, Their Finest is about boosting morale in a period of national — and personal — crisis.
Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton, who also appears at the Festival in Orphan and The Girl With All the Gifts) is a “slop” scriptwriter, charged with bringing a female perspective to war films produced by the British Ministry of Information’s Film Division. Her current project is a feature inspired by stories of British civilians rescuing soldiers after the retreat at Dunkirk. Catrin’s artist husband looks down on her job, despite the fact that it’s paying the rent. At least lead scenarist Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin) appreciates her efforts.
Based on the novel Their Finest Hour and a Half by Lissa Evans, the film pops with witty banter and flows with lovely period detail. The characters are uniformly textured and the performances nuanced. Nighy is perfectly cast in his endearingly withering role, and Jeremy Irons turns up for a delicious cameo. It is, however, Arterton’s show. She brings subtlety, intelligence, and a range of beautifully gauged emotions to Catrin, whose path to self-renewal is an inspiring example of a talented woman forging her place in the world.
Two luminous actors, David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike, bring to life one of the great forbidden romances of the 20th century. That it’s all based on a true story gives Amma Asante’s follow-up to the acclaimed Belle even greater impact. Both sweeping and intimate, A United Kingdom illustrates how love can challenge even the harshest constraints.
Having already portrayed Martin Luther King Jr. in 2014’s Selma, Oyelowo provides another stirring depiction of a heroic figure who used nonviolence to change the world’s attitude toward racial integration. Pike is likewise magnetic as a woman whose openheartedness won over a culture initially inclined to shun her.
Their story plays out against a backdrop of regal English offices and sun-kissed Botswana plains. With her third feature, Asante has masterfully invoked a tumultuous moment in 20th-century Africa — one that boasts a glorious ending.
All reviews were found on TIFF’s official site.
Girl's got direction 