Obomsawin, Nguyen, Côté lead Quebec contingent
No sign yet of Denis Villeneuve or Xavier Dolan. And so Kim Nguyen leads the Quebec contingent announced by the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) on Wednesday, along with new features by Alanis Obomsawin and Denis Côté.
Villeneuve’s Blade Runner reboot Blade Runner 2049 and Dolan’s star-studded English-language debut The Life and Death of John F. Donovan are both hotly anticipated, and will surely be part of the TIFF lineup, but will likely be announced with more fanfare in the coming weeks.
Nguyen’s Eye On Juliet will have its North American première at the festival, which runs Sept. 7 to 17. The film’s world première takes place as part of Venice Days, a sidebar to the Venice Film Festival, Aug. 30 to Sept. 9. It tells the virtual love story between an American hexapod operator and a Middle Eastern woman he sees through the eye of his drone.
Nguyen shot to prominence with his film Rebelle, nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film in 2013. He followed in 2016 with Two Lovers and a Bear, which screened as part of Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight.
Obomsawin’s Our People Will Be Healed has its world première as part of TIFF’s Masters program. The Abenaki director’s 50th film goes inside an innovative school in the remote Cree community of Norway House, 800 kilometres north of Winnipeg.
Côté’s Ta peau si lisse screens in the experimental Wavelengths section. Made completely independently on a shoestring budget of $70,000, the documentary on the world of bodybuilding premièred this week in competition at the Locarno Film Festival.
The boundary-pushing filmmaker describes the project as a tender but impressionistic study of human nature, subtly twisting reality in the vein of his previous documentary excursions Carcasses and Bestiaire. Côté is also known for his wry dramas Curling, Vic et Flo ont vu un ours and Boris sans Béatrice.
TIFF’s Discovery section includes Carlos and Jason Sanchez’s A Worthy Companion, starring Evan Rachel Wood as a woman who becomes obsessed with a teenage girl, played by Julia Sarah Stone. The film is produced by Luc Déry and Kim McCraw, of Montreal’s micro_scope (Villeneuve’s Incendies, Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar).
Also in that section is Ian Lagarde’s All You Can Eat Buddha, a dramatic comedy set on an allyou-can-eat resort in Cuba.
Two Quebec films turn up in TIFF’s Contemporary World Cinema section: Robin Aubert’s rural zombie flick Les affamés, starring Marc-André Grondin, Monia Chokri, Micheline Lanctôt and Brigitte Poupart; and Simon Lavoie’s La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes, based on the bestselling 1998 novel by late Montreal author Gaetan Soucy. Lavoie co-directed last year’s TIFF winner for best Canadian Film, the wildly ambitious Ceux qui font les revolutions à moitié n’ont fait que se creuser un tombeau.
Anne Émond (Nelly, Nuit #1) has been selected as TIFF’s 2017 Len Blum resident. The Quebec filmmaker will set up shop in the TIFF Bell Lightbox in October, where she will receive guidance from Toronto screenwriter Blum as she works on two scripts: Jeune Juliette, about an overweight teenager; and Monde neuf, an apocalyptic drama about nine people who decide to change their lives in the face of oblivion.