Toronto and More Fall Lineups

The Venice lineups are all set now that the festival has presented its Immersive program and the independent Giornate degli Autori, or Venice Days, has unveiled its official selection. Between August 31 and September 6, the Giornate will premiere new features from Abel Ferrara, Steve Buscemi, and Sébastien Lifshitz as well as new short films by Janicza Bravo and Carla Simón, who won the Berlinale’s Golden Bear in February for Alcarràs. Meantime, the San Francisco Cinematheque has put together a Crossroads 2022 program that will run from August 26 through 28 and include new work from Jodie Mack, Kevin Jerome Everson, Michael Robinson, Sky Hopinka, Jennifer Reeves, Peggy Ahwesh, and Mike Hoolboom.

After weeks of single titles trickling out of Toronto, the festival has now released a full roster of eighteen Galas and forty-five Special Presentations. TIFF’s forty-seventh edition will open on September 8 with Sally El Hosaini’s The Swimmers and run through September 18. Based on a true story, The Swimmers tracks the journey of Yusra and Sarah Mardini—played by Lebanese actors and real-life sisters Manal and Nathalie Issa—from war-torn Syria to Germany by way of Lebanon, Turkey, and Greece. Yusra became an Olympic swimmer, competing in Rio in 2016 and in Tokyo in 2020, while Sarah returned to the Greek island of Lesbos to assist incoming refugees.

The world premiere that’s immediately stirred the most excitement is Walk Up, the twenty-eighth feature from Hong Sangsoo. Not much is known yet about this latest black-and-white entry into the oeuvre other than that it stars Kwon Haehyo, Lee Hyeyoung, Song Sunmi, Cho Yunhee, Park Miso, and Shin Seokho.

Sarah Polley has lined up an impressive cast for Women Talking: Frances McDormand, Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, and Ben Whishaw. Based on the 2018 novel by Miriam Toews, who starred in Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light (2007), Women Talking is what Toews calls a “fictional response” to a series of rapes that took place between 2005 and 2009 in a remote Mennonite community in Bolivia.

Gabe Polsky (Red Army) directs Nicolas Cage in Butcher’s Crossing, an adaptation of the 1960 novel by John Williams (Stoner). Cage plays a rugged hunter who convinces a young Harvard student (Fred Hechinger) to join him on a buffalo-hunting expedition in the early 1870s. Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke play estranged brothers who meet up to bury their father in Raymond & Ray, the new feature from Rodrigo García (Nine Lives).

Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, shot by Roger Deakins, features Olivia Colman, Colin Firth, and Toby Jones in a love story set in and around an old but gorgeous movie theater on the south coast of England in the 1980s. Jennifer Lawrence stars as a soldier adjusting to civilian life in Causeway, the feature debut of Lila Neugebauer, a theater director best known for overseeing the 2018 Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery, for which Elaine May won a Tony for best actress.

Sally Hawkins and Steve Coogan headline Stephen Frears’s The Lost King, a tale inspired by the actual discovery in 2012 of King Richard III’s remains in a Leicester car park. Tobias Lindholm, a cowriter on the first seasons of the great Danish series Borgen—he also cowrote Another Round (2020) with Thomas Vinterberg and directed two episodes of David Fincher’s Mindhunter—directs Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne in The Good Nurse, a true-crime thriller about a series of killings in a hospital.

Along with such previously announced titles as Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans and Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King, the TIFF lineup includes a batch of films that will screen first in Venice: Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, Jafar Panahi’s No Bears, Florian Zeller’s The Son, and Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children. From Sundance comes Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny, the winner of the Grand Jury Prize.

A fair number of other films will arrive in Toronto following their premieres in Cannes in May: Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider, Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker, Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream, Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave, Saim Sadiq’s Joyland, Maryam Touzani’s The Blue Caftan, and Alice Winocour’s Paris Memories. Dispatching to the Notebook from Cannes, Daniel Kasman recommended Hunt, “an ambitious and boldly accomplished writing, producing, and directing debut from actor Lee Jung-jae, who shot to international stardom as a lead in the series Squid Game.”