Almost 300 feature-length films are to be shown at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which opens on Thursday with the world premiere of The Magnificent Seven – the remake of the 1960 classic Western – starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt.
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138 films making their world premieres. Many of them are awards-hopefuls, including most of the top films from Cannes, Venice and Telluride. The powerful film, which also stars David Oyelowo and is directed by Mira Nair, will be released in USA theaters in September. Snowden, starring Joseph-Gordon Levitt as the NSA whistleblower, and the big-budget Deepwater Horizon, about the 2010 oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, have world premieres at TIFF. This year will see a particular spotlight shone on the work of women in film, as well as a strand dedicated to the crucial contributions of the LGBT+ community.
Tracey’s first 2013 stop-motion, Kreb, won numerous awards, including the Atlantic Film Festival’s Best Animation, Screen Nova Scotia’s Best Short Film, Houston Worldfest’s Best Animated Short, and the Helen Hill Animated Joy Award.
Fashion designer Tom Ford will also bring his new film Nocturnal Animals, the follow-up to 2009’s A Single Man.
83 countries represented at the festival in 2016.
6,933 films submitted for consideration.
32,320 minutes of film altogether.
28 screens showing TIFF films around Toronto.
– The longest screening at the fest is 449 minutes, for the Czech Republic mystery miniseries “Wasteland”, which is in the Primetime television program.
2 minutes, the length of TIFF’s shortest offerings, Anima, Silueta de Cohetes and Silueta Sangrienta.
“I developed this desire to just have more breadth of what you’d seen out of Africa”, Oyelowo told The Associated Press. All of which is true. “But there was nearly nothing else balancing it out”.
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Movies with a regional connection screening at the festival include eight films supported by the Doha Film Institute: Blessed Benefit, directed by Mahmoud Al Massad; Off Frame aka Revolution Until Victory, by Mohanad Yaqubi; By the Time It Gets Dark, by Anocha Suwichakornpong; White Sun, by Deepak Rauniyar; The Salesman, by Asghar Farhadi; Apprentice, by Junfeng Boo; Mimosas, by Oliver Laxe; and Divines, by Houda Benyamina. So festivals have to offer something more. “As our official digital projection partner, Christie enables us to be on the cutting edge of technology, seamlessly presenting films onscreen with precision and brilliance, faithfully reproducing for our audiences exactly what the filmmaker saw in the final stages of completing their film”. “You can laugh and cry and gasp together in a cinema”.
