The three most important European film events are well known to the general public: the Cannes, Berlin and Venice festivals each have their own particularities and a common impact when it comes to bringing auteur films to a wider audience.
In North America, the Sundance Film Festival is the main event of the year, while TIFF, which opens the season in Toronto, is a non-competitive event that is above all a meeting place for professionals from all over the world, with the presentation, in different sections, of the essential films that should leave their mark on the months to come.
This year, it takes place from September 5 to 15 and will feature the World Premiere of two feature films co-financed by Wallimage. Two very different films that reflect the diversity of our very eclectic line-up.
To open the Contemporary World Cinema section, TIFF welcomes director Atiq Rahimi who returns to Toronto with the world premiere of his third feature film, a highly anticipated adaptation of Scholastique Mukasonga’s best-selling 2012 novel, Notre-Dame du Nil.
We are in 1973, in Rwanda, with a group of young girls who live in a Belgian Catholic boarding school. Many of them belong to the country’s elite families, while others come from less privileged backgrounds. Little by little, a division is taking place on the basis of anti-Tutsi rhetoric carried by the Hutu regime in force. With potentially dramatic consequences that obviously foreshadow the events that will upset the country a few years later.
With Our Lady of the Nile, Atiq Rahimi adapts for the first time a novel he did not write. To carry out this complicated adventure, he relied on young Rwandan actresses, who make their film debut here and capture a moment in history through the eyes of those who are not normally spoken of. In Belgium, Belga Films co-produced this ambitious feature film. With the support of Wallimage.
The new flagship of our great “Genre Films” line, Neasa Hardiman’s Sea Fever stars Hermione Corfield, Connie Nielsen and Dougray Scott in a fantasy thriller that should stir the guts of aficionados. A marine biology student traveling on a trawler in the Atlantic Ocean is confronted with a mysterious and uncontrollable organism. If you liked Alien and The Thing, if you are frustrated that this specific genre has not been richly represented in the last few years, here is, without a doubt, something to satisfy your expectations.
Before embarking on this adventure, director Neasa Harediman directed episodes of the excellent British series Happy Valley and Jessica Jones. In preparation and on the set, she impressed the entire production team with her unquenchable will to make the film she had in mind and with her strength of persuasion.
Very difficult to finance, this supernatural thriller is a coproduction between Ireland (Fantastic Film) and Belgium (Frakas). This duo, now well established (Muse, Vivarium…), was joined for the occasion by the Dutch of House of Netherhorror. Add to that an English fundraiser and an American international seller and you have a remarkably effective configuration that was already the subject of an exciting case study (hosted by Wallimage) at the European edition of the Frontiers Market in Helsinki last February.
