The 2019 Toronto Film Festival on Thursday unveiled more titles set to screen during its 44th edition, including the Nicolas Cage starrer Color Out of Space and Dads, by Bryce Dallas Howard, the daughter of Ron Howard, as she makes her documentary directing debut.
The Midnight Madness sidebar of gore and zombie pics will feature a world premiere of Richard Stanley’s H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space, which Cage toplines, and Takashi Miike’s Japanese action-comedy First Love. The genre film section will also give first looks to Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s dystopian sci-fi film The Platform; Rose Glass’s psychological thriller Saint Maud, starring Morfydd Clark and Jennifer Ehle; Andrew Patterson’s paranormal period drama The Vast of Night, featuring Jake Horowitz and Sierra McCormick; and Keith Thomas’ supernatural horror film The Vigil, in which a former member of the Hasidic community believes something mysterious is stalking him after performing a holy ritual.
Midnight Madness will close with a world premiere for Isaac Nabwana’s gonzo action flick Crazy World. Elsewhere, the TIFF Docs section has world premieres for actress-turned-director Bryce Dallas Howard’s Dads, a comedic documentary about fathers, including her own, Ron Howard, the first film out of Imagine Entertainment’s Documentaries division; Fisher Stevens and Malcolm Venville’s electric race car documentary And We Go Green, which is produced by Leonardo DiCaprio; and Ready for War, a film about immigrants who served in the U.S. military, only to be sent back to Mexico.
Directed by Andrew Renzi, Showtime’s Ready for War is executive produced by Drake, Future and David Ayer. “When you have a team member on a film who brings with them prestige from other work, whether from the music world with Drake or the movie world with Leonardo DiCaprio, that helps,” TIFF Docs programmer Thom Powers told The Hollywood Reporter about the deep-pocket backing for indie docs by celebrity names.
Other TIFF Docs titles headed to Toronto with Hollywood financing and eyeing possible U.S. distribution deals once here include the Endeavor-backed Ebs Burnough’s The Capote Tapes, about the American writer Truman Capote, and the Cinetic Media-backed Gabe Polsky’s Red Penguins, about American hustlers bringing pro hockey to Moscow.
Indie docs coming to Toronto with distribution deals in hand include Netflix’s Bikram: Yoga, Guru, Predator, directed by Eva Orner, about the controversial yoga teacher facing multiple lawsuits for sexual misconduct; HBO’s Letter to the Editor, directed by Alan Berliner, about photojournalism; and History Films’ Desert One, directed by Barbara Kopple, about the ill-fated mission to rescue hostages in Iran in 1980.
The TIFF Docs section will open with Oscar-nominated director Feras Fayyad’s The Cave and include other world bows for Thomas Balmes’ Sing Me a Song; Alla Kovgan’s Cunningham, a 3D film about dance master Merce Cunningham; and a North American premiere for Alex Gibney’s Citizen K, a film about the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who turned against Russian president Vladimir Putin.
And Toronto’s Discovery sidebar of movies from emerging global voices has a world premiere for David Raboy’s The Giant, based on his own short film about a young women trying to put her past behind her, and will open with a first look for Chiara Malta’s Simple Women, in which the director meets an actor she idolized in her youth.
There are also world premieres in the Discovery section for the latest work from Hinde Boujemaa, Oren Gerner, Antoneta Kastrati, Filippo Meneghetti, Mahnaz Mohammadi and Mari?a Paz Gonzalez.
The 44th Toronto Film Festival is set to run Sept. 5-15.
