Toronto 2026 Takes Shape

On Tuesday, TIFF unveiled the lineup for Platform, the competitive section introduced in 2015 to champion “exceptional directorial vision and auteur voices.” This year’s program of twelve contenders will open with Miwa Nishikawa’s Children Untold, the story of a twelve-year-old girl in Tokyo who passes herself off as a boy in an effort to survive the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Pablo Trapero will preside over the jury.

Directed by Siân Heder (CODA) and starring Ruth Madeley as disability-rights activist Judith Heumann and Mark Ruffalo as public health official Joseph A. Califano Jr., Being Heumann will open TIFF 2026. The Closing Night film will be Yan Lanouette Turgeon’s Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend, a biopic starring Rémi Goulet as Canadian racing driver Gilles Villeneuve.

Fourteen more films will see their world premieres as Gala Presentations, including photographer-turned-director Anton Corbijn’s A Talent for Murder, starring Helen Mirren as Patricia Highsmith and Alden Ehrenreich as a literary agent who travels to Switzerland with the aim of persuading the famed author to write one more Ripley novel. Lauren Miller Rogen will direct her husband, Seth Rogen, as well as Anna Kendrick, Issa Rae, Dan Stevens, Ed Helms, Zach Cherry, Kate Berlant, Ashley Park, Sharon Stone, and David Strathairn in Babies, an ensemble comedy about becoming parents.

Misty Green, the third solo directorial outing from Chris Rock (I Think I Love My Wife, Top Five), stars Rock, Kendrick, Adam Driver, and Daniel Kaluuya in the story of an actor (Rosalind Eleazar) looking to rebuild her career. Wayne Wang (The Joy Luck Club, Smoke) has adapted Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s 1961 novel Diary of a Mad Old Man, which centers on the relationship between an aging widower and his daughter-in-law. John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) directs Laura Linney and Rhys Ifans as a school teacher and a composer who meet after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease on the same day in Onwards and Sideways.

Amanda Seyfried stars in Tim Blake Nelson’s The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd as Karen, a teacher in an Oklahoma prison, and Scoot McNairy plays Wilson, a student who is drawn to her. “This movie is meant to be dealing with, on every level, the things that we as humans are capable of doing to one another,” Nelson tells David Canfield in the Hollywood Reporter. Canfield notes that the film “progresses nonlinearly between three timelines, anchored by the evolving, complex, ultimately tragic relationship between Karen and Wilson. Both are desperate characters seeking their own escapes; Karen, trapped in a physically abusive marriage to the drunken Kenneth (Grant Harvey), finds both genuine connection and dangerous opportunity in Wilson.”

We’ll likely hear a little more about two films in the program when Venice announces its lineup tomorrow. Marc Fitoussi’s All About Corinne stars Isabelle Huppert as a background actor who befriends Sandrine Kiberlain, and Bunker, directed by Florian Zeller (The Father, The Son), features Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem as a couple whose marriage is strained when he agrees to design a bunker for a billionaire.

Directors’ Fortnight launched Reed Van Dyk’s first feature, Atonement, in Cannes. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney found Atonement—starring Hiam Abbass as the matriarch of an Iraqi family and Kenneth Branagh as the New Yorker reporter who wrote the story the film is based on—“admirable in the way it humanizes people on the opposite side of a conflict, treating their crippling losses as a source of collective pain while observing a U.S. Marine [Boyd Holbrook]—trained to point and shoot with no consequences—as he comes to reflect on and take responsibility for his actions.”

Noah Segan’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York—starring John Turturro as an aging thief, Giancarlo Esposito as a seasoned detective, and Steve Buscemi as a pawn shop owner—premiered at Sundance, screened in Berlin and Karlovy Vary, and will begin its theatrical run on October 16. “Everything is grounded in Turturro’s attentive but world-weary gaze,” wrote Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. Pickpocket is “a twilight fable of a city that’s changing, whose spirit remains distinct and grand and full of mystery, much like the remarkable actor at its center.”

Around half of this year’s Special Presentations will be world premieres. A few selections look as if they will be arriving fresh from Venice and/or Telluride, and a good number of them were launched in Cannes, including a few winners of top awards: Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord (Palme d’Or), Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur (Grand Prix), Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden (Best Actress for Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto), and Lukas Dhont’s Coward (Best Actor for Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne). Beth de Araújo’s Josephine, the winner of a Grand Jury Prize and an Audience Award at Sundance, is heading to TIFF as well.

Previously announced world premieres include Rachel Morrison’s Love of Your Life, Benjamín Naishtat’s Glaxo, and David and Nathan Zellner’s sci-fi comedy Alpha Gang. Toronto will also launch Takashi Miike’s Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, starring Shun Oguri as the corrupt cop and Lily James as an enigmatic FBI agent; Paradise Lost, a mystery thriller directed by Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan, Colony); Hans Petter Moland’s Growth of the Soil, an adaptation of Knut Hamsun’s 1920 novel about a couple starting a family in the remote Norwegian wilderness; and Michaël R. Roskam’s Le Faux Soir, featuring Mélanie Thierry in the story of a media hack conducted by the Belgian Resistance during the Nazi occupation.

Chase Infiniti, Gillian Anderson, Jason Isaacs, and Nina Hoss star in Niki Byrne’s The Jet Set, the story behind a young mathematician’s big moment. Feng-I Fiona Roan, whose debut feature, American Girl (2021), premiered in Toronto and won five Golden Horse Awards, returns with Happily Ever After, starring Taiwanese singer Shuhua as the younger and more vivacious of two sisters. And then there’s Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky, starring Anthony Ippolito as Sylvester Stallone, who wrote the screenplay for his breakthrough hit in three days and then insisted that he play the lead. The rest is Hollywood history.