TIFF scales down for 2020
The festival this year will run one day shorter than usual, from Sept. 10-19
The Toronto International Film Festival has announced its full feature-film lineup for the pandemic-truncated 2020 event. While the 50 films are a fraction of the festival’s usual lineup (last year there were 245), organizers stress there is a mix of male and female filmmakers, new and established directors, Black and Indigenous and Canadian voices, as well as films from around the world.
If any group or region is underrepresented it may be Africa, which has only two films in the lineup, and those are co-productions with European and other nations.
Even so, there is much to get excited for in the lineup. Werner Herzog and his Into the Inferno co-director Clive Oppenheimer have a new documentary called Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds, about the threat of asteroids and other space debris. Canadian Indigenous filmmaker Michelle Latimer delivers Inconvenient Indian, a documentary that takes its title from Thomas King’s 2012 book about colonial history. And Chloe Zhao, whose 2017 drama The Rider wowed festival audiences at Cannes, TIFF and beyond, brings her newest, Nomadland, starring Frances McDormand and David Strathairn.
There are also new films from Naomi Kawase (True Mothers), François Ozon (Summer of 85), Regina King (One Night in Miami), Viggo Mortensen (Falling), Frederick Wiseman (City Hall) and Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott (The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel).
The closing-night film will be A Suitable Boy, Mira Nair’s mini-series adaptation of Vikram Seth’s sprawling 1993 novel. The festival this year will run one day shorter than usual, from Sept. 10 to Sept. 19.