TIFF Classics, Wavelengths, and Centerpiece Lineups

That lineup—announced today along with the selections for Toronto’s Wavelengths and Centerpiece programs—also includes the world premiere of a new restoration of Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town (1948), “universally acclaimed as one of the greatest of all Chinese-language films,” as Sean Gilman noted in his 2019 Notebook overview of influences on Jia Zhang-Ke. Another restoration seeing its world premiere is Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed (1996), “a serene, civilized art movie about necrophilia,” as Michael Atkinson described it in Spin. “Corpse-fucking isn’t a perversion here so much as a way to transcend death and touch the cosmic. I’m not kidding: Stopkewich has chutzpah enough to bench a car, and in terms of social taboos, her mysterious movie is a wrecking ball in perpetual swing.”

TIFF Classics will present North American premieres of a program of five short films by Artavazd Pelechian, John Abraham’s Report to Mother (1986), and Kon Ichikawa’s Ten Dark Women (1961), in which the nine mistresses of a television executive team up with his wife to kill him. “Following a noir-parody opening,” wrote Emiliano Morreale when Ten Dark Women screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato in June, “the film develops through a series of plot twists toward an unexpected ending, with an ironic and paradoxical style that inverts male and female roles through virtuosic direction (the director produced a meticulous manga-style storyboard) and assembles a gallery of female characters and stereotypes, with touches of satire aimed at the television world.”

Foregrounding “artist-driven works that embrace risk, defy convention, and challenge cinematic form,” this year’s Wavelengths will offer eleven features and four programs of short and medium-length films. Attendees will be treated to a sneak peek at Once Upon a Time in Harlem—David and William Greaves’s lively document of a 1972 gathering of Harlem Renaissance luminaries—before the film sees a theatrical release on October 16.

There are two world premieres among the features, Yuula Benivolski’s The Black Box is Orange, which Wavelengths is calling “a multimodal essay film” that “balances the political with the poetic,” and John Torres’s The Remotes. According to its logline, The Remotes is set on “an island where humans are controlled as avatars by a mysterious voice in a driving app.”

Curators Andréa Picard and Jesse Cumming have selected three films first seen in Berlin. Angela Schanelec’s My Wife Cries “draws from her work in the theater, where cataclysmic events often occur offstage, a convention dating back to the Greeks and cut to the measure of the material realities of what kinds of scenarios can practically be mounted before a live audience,” writes Michael Sicinski at In Review Online. “In a way, this film could be seen as Schanelec’s attempt to bring her Bressonian frame to bear on the sorts of scenarios that might have appealed to Cassavetes.”

Sebastian Brameshuber’s London, featuring Bobby Sommer (Museum Hours) as a driver striking up conversations with the people he picks up along his regular route between Vienna and Salzburg, is “a peculiar kind of road movie,” finds InRO’s Chris Cassingham, “less about the limitless possibilities of the open road than it is about confinement. The result reveals as much about the state of the world as it does the man in the driver’s seat.” And Nicolás Pereda’s Everything Else Is Noise, a comedic chamber piece in which a musician hosts a television crew, has so far chalked up an impressive score of 4.1 on the Moirée critics’ grid.

Directors’ Fortnight launched Lisandro Alonso’s Double Freedom and Radu Jude’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, a loose adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 novel, in Cannes. At IndieWire, Vadim Rizov finds Alonso “dramatizing with very direct clarity his previously stated conviction that life in Argentina has become harder in the twenty-five years since his first film,” La libertad (2001). Writing for Film Comment, Beatrice Loayza senses that Jude is “less interested in the original’s bourgeois psychodramas of sex and murder than in wryly foregrounding its class divisions and adapting them to modern European dynamics of labor and exploitation.”

At Night, which artist and director Beatrice Gibson calls an “autofiction” in “the shape of a question,” and Denis Côté’s Nobody's Violence, starring Larissa Corriveau as a loner who helps people kill themselves, will both premiere in Locarno on Saturday. And Mariano Llinás’s five-and-a-half-hour Life of Jorge Luis Borges is slated to premiere out of competition in Venice.

Fifty-four titles are lined up for Centerpiece, the program formerly known as Contemporary World Cinema. Ten of these are world premieres, and a record-setting eight are animated, including Sébastien Laudenbach’s Viva Carmen, a reimagining of Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera that Variety’s Guy Lodge calls “a veritable triumph of movement, design, and above all, color.”

For the New Yorker’s Justin Chang, La Gradiva is “undoubtedly one of the year’s great discoveries.” Marine Atlan’s debut feature “follows a group of unruly French high-school seniors on a five-day class trip to Naples and Pompeii, where the weather is warm and the scenery gorgeous enough to keep college-admissions anxieties at bay. It’s a travel saga, a coming-of-age drama, and a movie of precisely drawn, superbly individuated young characters who are nonetheless locked in myriad crises of identity, flailing about for a deeper understanding of who they are.”

Another standout of the year so far is Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, in which a young woman’s mother, sister, and boyfriend struggle to cope with her sudden death. “Elevating low-key domestic portraiture with extraordinary technical finesse, toward a big-swing finale of radical conceptual daring,” writes Guy Lodge, “the Austrian filmmaker’s third feature felt like the most refined and inventive formal statement in this year’s Un Certain Regard program at Cannes, and duly won the top prize there.”

With The Dreamed Adventure, Valeska Grisebach “reworks the conventions of the gangster movie, spinning them into a grim, graceful, yet unassuming epic about the dangerous secrets of a community in Svilengrad, a dusty border town at the shared frontier of Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey,” writes Beatrice Loayza at the top of her interview with the director for Film Comment.

And Fernando Eimbcke’s Flies “harks back in many ways to the captivating debut feature about adolescent ennui that put him on the map in 2004, Duck Season, not least in its appealingly unmanicured black-and-white aesthetic,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “It’s a movie whose relatively simple means of communication give it a disarming emotional directness.”