After two years of interruption due to the pandemic, the Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff) will begin later today.
After being postponed or held virtually in 2020 and 2021, expectations are high for this year’s festival.
Awards season officially begins with the fall festivals, and the films that do well there are frequently good indicators of who might do well at the Academy Awards.
Opening night will feature The Swimmers, a play by British author Jack Thorne.
Two Syrian sisters flee their country by boat, but their motor breaks down hours into their journey, forcing them to spend that time pushing and pulling their dinghy.
Knives Out: Glass Onion, a sequel, and The Lost King, a film about the finding of Richard III’s remains in a Leicester parking lot, are two more must-sees at the festival.
Brendan Fraser, who is riding high in the awards race, will be presenting his latest effort, The Whale, while Steven Spielberg will make his Toronto debut with his autobiographical picture The Fabelmans.
Olivia Colman will be a part of Sir Sam Mendes’s love letter to the film industry, Empire of Light, and Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson will try to recapture their chemistry from In Bruges in The Banshees of Inisherin.
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Singers Taylor Swift and Harry Styles are two of the top names at Toronto International Film Festival this year.
Swift will do an interview to promote the 10-minute version of her short film All Too Well, which just won the top prize at the MTV Video Music Awards and may now earn her an Oscar nomination in the best live-action short category.
Styles, meanwhile, will promote his romance film My Policeman, in which he co-stars with Emma Corrin and was directed by Michael Grandage.
It’s the first of two films the ex-1D member has coming out this fall. This week, the world premiere of his other film, Don’t Worry Darling, took place at the Venice Film Festival.
Over the course of the 11-day festival in Canada’s largest city, over 240 films will be shown.
Tiff began in 1976, and several of the films it has featured have gone on to win Oscars.
Toronto’s festival does not have a jury to evaluate the entries and award prizes like many others.
Rather, it holds a public vote and presents the People’s Choice award based on the results.
Winners in the past include Green Book, Nomadland, Slumdog Millionaire, Belfast, La La Land, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
A number of Tiff’s awards serve as a precursor to the Academy Awards, not simply the People’s Choice winner.
For instance, Jessica Chastain (2021), Anthony Hopkins (2020), and Joaquin Phoenix (2019) have all won the Tiff Tribute Award for Performance in the past three years (2019).
When the Oscars finally came around, all three of them took home the statue for their respective roles.
The winner of this year’s award has already been announced: Brendan Fraser. As a result, many people will be watching his upcoming film, The Whale.
The film had its world debut in Venice, and early reviews have Fraser in the running for best actor.
On Thursday night, the Toronto International Film Festival will officially begin.
