In Italy, the 83rd Venice film festival is coming to a close. The cinemas are thinning, the staff preparing to roll the red carpet on this year’s edition. In Colorado, the Telluride film festival has already ended – though that festival, which prides itself on its informality, rolls joints not carpets.
Telluride and Venice both enjoy a competitive – at times combative – relationship with Toronto, with all three vying for primacy as launchpads for key Oscar contenders. This year’s battle began with Venice offering a first look at Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl, while Telluride gave a kickstart to Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs biopic.
Toronto, by far the biggest event in terms of number of titles shown, has responded with a more intense saturation of prestige pictures than ever before. But the festival is also introducing strands and widening its ambitions. There is a new juried sidebar, Platform, with $25,000 prize, to highlight the work of international arthouse auteurs. And also a nod to the increasing creative primacy of TV with Primetime, which offers big screen premieres to small-screen shows.
“How do you shake things up?” says artistic director Cameron Bailey, who is also masterminding a five year expansion plan for Tiff, involving diffusion programming in London, New York, Los Angeles and Beijing to “expand our global footprint”. Primetime and Platform are intended to grow the organisation’s scope by firefighting industry changes with proactive programming. “It’s very hard for foreign language films to survive in the North American marketplace,” says Piers Handling, CEO of Tiff. “And long-form TV is having a golden age. Film-makers are gravitating to that. And we need to respond.”
Yet despite such energetic diversification, Toronto’s bread and butter remains the championing of serious mainstream cinema, screened to the public alongside the press, with celebrity bells and whistles but less of the pomp of Cannes or Venice. This year, anticipation is high for Ridley Scott’s The Martian, with Interstellar star Matt Damon awaiting space rescue by Chiwetel Ejiofor. That film – an adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel – is a rare piece of fantasy; elsewhere, biopics dominate, alongside dramas ripped from the headlines. Tom Hiddleston is Hank Williams in I Saw the Light, Ethan Hawke Chet Baker in Born to be Blue. Ben Foster plays Lance Armstrong in The Program, Stephen Frears’s film about his downfall; another potential best actor contender is Bryan Cranston, who plays blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Dev Patel is Srinivasa Ramanujan opposite Jeremy Irons as tutor GH Hardy in The Man Who Knew Infinity.
Actual documentaries premiering in Toronto include Where to Invade Next, Michael Moore’s polemic about American interventionism and his first film in seven years, and Je Suis Charlie, about the Charlie Hebdo killings. Thrillers taken from facts loom large: Colonia stars Emma Watson as a woman searching for her husband, who was abducted by Pinochet’s secret police. Meanwhile Our Brand is Crisis – produced by George Clooney, starring his Gravity co-star Sandra Bullock – is a remake of a 2005 documentary about American spin doctors working on the 2002 Bolivian elections. Both that film and Truth, which stars Robert Redford as CBS host Dan Rather and Cate Blanchett his producer, are being touted as the next Argo.
The struggle for gay rights is chronicled in Stonewall, Roland Emmerich’s drama about the 1969 New York riots, and Freeheld, in which Julianne Moore’s cancer-stricken cop employs Steve Carell to fight for her partner, Ellen Page, to receive the same death benefits as a heterosexual partner would. While Tom Hooper’s transgender tale chose to go to Venice, Toronto has About Ray, about female-to-male gender reassignment, with Elle Fanning as Ray and Naomi Watts his mother.
The festival’s long-running fondness for British cinema is also in evidence. Maggie Smith will be in town with Lady in the Van, Nicholas Hytner’s big screen transfer of his National Theatre production with Alex Jennings as Alan Bennett. Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of JG Ballard’s High Rise, with Hiddleston and Irons, features in the Platform programme; there’s also first looks at Terence Davis’s take on classic crofting novel Sunset Song, as well as a long-gestating movie of Martin Amis’s London Fields. The City-to-City strand includes two post-riots movies: one a documentary about the shooting of Mark Duggan, another a feelgood coming-of-age tale set in Hackney.
This year’s festival begins on Thursday with one of the few high-profile original dramas: Demolition, directed by Dallas Buyers Club’s Jean-Marc Vallée and starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a widower struggling to cope. Kate Winslet returns to town following last year’s A Little Chaos and the previous year’s Labor Day with The Dressmaker, an Australian romance co-starring Liam Hemsworth. And Rebecca Miller’s new movie, Maggie’s Plan, offers Julianne Moore another juicy role: as a woman who decides to have a baby by herself before falling for a married man (Ethan Hawke).
It was at last year’s festival that Moore’s movie Still Alice – which went on to win her an Oscar – first screened. As did The Theory of Everything, which won Eddie Redmayne his. Whether this year’s festival repeats the trick for Moore – or anyone else – remains to be seen. But Toronto’s pro-active attempts to innovate suggest that it is likely to succeed in keeping middle-age at bay.
