Women-centric Toronto festival gets underway
With a special tribute to Meryl Streep, a gala line-up dedicated to women filmmakers and an inaugural award for female talent, organisers say this week’s Toronto International Film Festival will honour leading ladies in the movies.
A-listers from Natalie Portman to Nicole Kidman, and Kristen Stewart to Streep, will tread the red carpet at North America’s biggest film festival, also known as TIFF, which opens today and runs through September 15.
The festival in Canada’s largest city is seen as a key step on the journey to Oscar glory - recent Best Picture winners including Green Book and The Shape of Water emerged as frontrunners here.
Among world premieres generating buzz this year are Taika Waititi’s Nazi satire
Jojo Rabbit, and star-studded death-row tearjerker Just Mercy, featuring Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan and Brie Larson.
They will show alongside heavyweights fresh from the ongoing Venice festival such as Joker.
Venice triggered controversy by only putting two films directed by women on its main prize program - a storm compounded by the decision to invite director Roman Polanski, who admitted to statutory rape decades ago.
Toronto’s organisers said it was a “priority” to correct the industry’s historic imbalance against women.
“We’ve really just chosen to foreground gender and the representation of gender,” festival boss Cameron Bailey said. “As a concern in movies generally, there’s a long history of this from the very beginning... it affects films at every stage.”
Nearly half of the festival’s gala films are directed by women - nine of 20 - including all three on the Saturday evening line-up.
Dreamworks’ animation Abominable, written and directed by Jill Culton, tells the story of a young Chinese girl trying to help a magical yeti return to his family. It is followed by the world premiere of the biopic of TV personality Fred Rogers, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, honouring outstanding careers in film. Streep, who is currently promoting Netflix’s Panama Papers thriller The Laundromat, will receive the inaugural actress prize.
TIFF will open today with the documentary Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, a biopic of the musical group which formed in Toronto in the 1960s and became one of the most successful rock outfits of all time. The film features interviews with a who’s who of rock’n’roll including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Eric Clapton.