British journalist Caitlin Moran began writing for the rock press in the early '90s, at the age of 16, and her experiences in the field provided the basis for her second novel, How to Build a Girl, in 2014. A film version has been in the works ever since the novel was first published, and this year director Coky…
Terminal illness was a theme that cast a long shadow over this year's TIFF, but Maria Sødahl's film Hope came at the subject from a rather different perspective—from the Swedish director's own experience, in fact, when she was diagnosed with brain cancer several years ago. Nevertheless, the film is not in any way a…
Documentary director Ben Lawrence came to TIFF with his feature debut, in which an Australian photojournalist (Hugo Weaving) and a South Sudanese refugee (Andrew Luri) are forced to confront the horrors of war together. The story had been with Lawrence for a long time, he said—since 2002, in fact, when the director…
Tim Winton's fiction has served the Australian film industry well over the past few years, notably his short stories, but Dirt Music is the first of his novels to reach the big screen. Helmed by Gregor Jordan, last feted at TIFF for 2001's anarchic Buffalo Soldiers, it stars Garrett Hedlund in a torrid tale of love…
Aisling Chin-Yee came to TIFF with her feature debut, an unusual story about a love triangle involving two women and their daughters— as she explained when she came to the Deadline studio. "It's about a woman named Cami [Heather Graham]," she said, "who's a single mother who takes in her ex-husband's wife Rachel [Jodi…
There were quite a few films about cults at this year's TIFF, and one of the more provocative meditations on human manipulation came from Finland. Titled Maria's Paradise, Zaida Bergroth's film was inspired by the true story of Maria Ã…kerblom, who ran a cult in rural Finland that caused a major scandal back in the…
After cult favorites Spring (2014) and The Endless (2017) Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson are starting to break out from under the radar with their trippy TIFF entry Synchronic. "It's about two paramedics in New Orleans who have been friends for a really long time," Moorhead explained when the directing duo stopped…
As the likes of Interstellar and the recent Ad Astra prove, space exploration is a largely male-dominated business—at least, on the big screen. But in real life, there is much more diversity, as director Alice Winocour found out when she began researching Proxima, the story of a female astronaut and mother named Sarah…
The world of bare-knuckle boxing is explored in Max Winkler's TIFF entry Jungleland, which stars Charlie Hunnam as Stanley, who manages his boxer brother Lion (Jack O’Connell).
"I'd always wanted to write sort of an unconventional love story," Winkler told us when he came to the Deadline studio, "and this one is…
TIFF veteran Wayne Wang, often overlooked for his importance in the history of modern U.S.-Asian cinema, returned to the festival with his latest film Coming Home Again, which tells the story of a Korean-American man who cares for his sick mother while trying to learn her traditional recipes.
"[The inspiration] was…
For his second feature film, Ethiopian director Zeresenay "Zee" Mehari came to TIFF with Sweetness in the Belly, an adaptation of Canadian author Camilla Gibb’s award-winning novel of the same name. Moving backwards and forwards from Ethiopia during the final years of Haile Selassie’s reign to England in the early…
