Monteith feature headed to Toronto fest
TORONTO — Jake Gyllenhaal, Daniel Radcliffe and the late Cory Monteith are among the stars of Canadian features headed to this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
Organizers revealed a starpacked slate from homegrown directors including Denis Villeneuve, Michael Dowse, Jennifer Baichwal, Louise Archambault, Bruce McDonald and Xavier Dolan.
They include Monteith’s ensemble drama All The Wrong Reasons, a debut feature from writer/director Gia Milani that also stars Emily Hampshire, Kevin Zegers and Karine Vanasse.
The late Glee star, who was raised in Victoria, plays an ambitious department-store manager married to Vanasse’s character.
“It’s not a Glee- type performance — it’s about an adult with adult problems,” senior programmer Steve Gravestock said of Monteith’s turn in the film.
“All these characters have these really sort of tortured histories and it’s about them bubbling up and people trying to deal with them.”
Monteith was found dead in a Vancouver hotel room in July. An autopsy revealed the 31-year-old actor died of an overdose of heroin and alcohol.
“Cory is really good in the film and it’s really great that we’re going to get to celebrate him by showing one of his most interesting, I’d say most mature performances,” said Gravestock.
Villeneuve returns to the fest with Enemy, a Canada/Spain coproduction starring Gyllenhaal as a man torn between his mistress and his wife. That’s in addition to his Hugh Jackman thriller Prisoners, a U.S.-backed feature previously announced for the fest.
The Toronto International Film Festival runs Sept. 5 to 15.
“The scope of this year’s feature films is as broad as Canada’s filmmaking community and demonstrates the deep versatility of our filmmakers,” Gravestock said Wednesday in a release.
Dowse follows up last year’s hockey romp Goon with the romantic comedy The F Word, a Canada/Ireland co-production starring Radcliffe, Zoe Kazan, Adam Driver and Canadian actor Megan Park.
McDonald’s The Husband is about a man struggling to keep it together as his wife is released from jail for sleeping with a 14year-old boy, and Dolan’s Tom At The Farm is a Canada/France coproduction about a young advertising copywriter who travels to the country for a funeral.
Jennifer Beals, meanwhile, appears in Terry Miles’ Cine-manovels, which stars Lauren Lee Smith as a woman who prepares a film retrospective for her late estranged father, while Archambault’s Gabrielle centres on a young woman with Williams syndrome struggling to gain her independence.
And Baichwal collaborates with Edward Burtynsky for the documentary Watermark, about our relationship with water.
Previously announced Canadian features in the gala program include Jonathan Sobol’s The Art of the Steal, Don McKellar’s The Grand Seduction, Jeremiah Chechik’s The Right Kind of Wrong and Sarah Prefers To Run, directed by Chloe Robichaud, about a gifted runner who marries a friend to be eligible for university scholarships and loans.