2025 Toronto International Film Festival Preview: 10 Titles to Look Forward To

Courtesy of TIFF

From September 4-14, the Toronto International Film Festival will celebrate a major milestone: Its fiftieth edition in Canada’s largest city.

Since its conception in 1976, when it was initially called the Toronto Festival of Festivals, TIFF has experienced massive transformations: relocating from Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood to the heart of downtown, weathering global economic and pandemic crises, and most significantly, introducing some of the world’s most enthusiastic film lovers to exciting new works of cinema, ranging from Oscar winners to arthouse darlings, from every corner of the globe. In the years since its first edition, TIFF has attracted millions of spectators thanks to its devotion to the films it platforms and the audiences that return year after year.

Foremost Film will once again return to TIFF this year with plans to cover many of the newest films that will go on to inform the landscape of cinema in the months to come, from buzzy awards contenders to experimental projects of the avant-garde. Please continue reading to check out ten of the titles we are most anticipating at the fiftieth edition of the Toronto International Film Festival:

‘Arco,’ Courtesy of TIFF

‘Arco’

Director: Ugo Bienvenu

Centrepiece

Fresh off winning the Cristal Award for Best Feature at the Annecy International Animation Festival earlier this summer, Arco makes its North American debut at TIFF. Through kaleidoscopic visual language and spirited storytelling, Arco follows a ten-year-old boy from the distant future whose time-traveling adventures land him in the year 2075, when the Earth is facing extreme environmental degradation. Reviewed with much praise following its Cannes world premiere (where the film was picked up for U.S. distribution by Neon), Arco seems set up for a fall awards campaign much like last year’s Flow, which eventually scored two Oscar nominations and a win for Best Animated Feature. Notably, Natalie Portman serves as a producer and voice actor on Arco.

‘Couture,’ courtesy of TIFF

‘Couture’

Director: Alice Winocour

Gala Presentation

From The Neon Demon to Phantom Thread, Foremost Film has always been fascinated by movies that embed themselves within the world of fashion. Winocour’s latest takes place in the couture capital of Paris, with Angelina Jolie starring as Maxine, a movie director hired to shoot a fashion film while grappling with a recently diagnosed medical illness. Her time in Paris finds her crossing paths with a newly discovered young Sudanese model (Anyier Anei) and a veteran makeup artist (Ella Rumpf), opening the path for a rumination on womanhood and how it conforms and subverts concepts built around fashion and clothing. Additional casting includes French heavyhitters Louis Garrel and Vincent Lindon.

‘Duse,’ courtesy of TIFF

‘Duse’

Director: Pietro Marcello

Centrepiece

Known for the tactile poetry of his filmmography, the Italian auteur’s newest work (which premieres in competition at Venice before making its way to TIFF) stars Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as Eleonora Duse, a once-famed Italian actress making her return to the stage just as World War I dawns upon Europe. Marcello’s last movie to appear in the TIFF lineup was 2019’s Martin Eden, which took home the festival’s esteemed Platform Prize and aided the director’s career in reaching a much broader audience than it had previously.

‘Hamnet,’ courtesy of TIFF

‘Hamnet’

Director: Chloé Zhao

Gala Presentation

Best known for her excavations of the contemporary American landscape through her work (minus a venture into the MCU universe for 2021’s Eternals), Hamnet marks the most significant departure of Zhao’s filmmaking career yet. Starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley as William and Agnes Shakespeare, Hamnet is adapted from a novel of the same name, fictionalizing the account of their shared grief after losing their son, Hamnet, who went on to inspire Hamlet, obviously one of Shakespeare’s most famed works. Notably absent from the Venice lineup despite Zhao winning the 2020 Golden Lion for the awards darling Nomadland (which also won TIFF’s celebrated People’s Choice Award that year), Hamnet will world premiere at Telluride ahead of its Canadian premiere at TIFF. We are particularly intrigued to see how the collaboration between Zhao and The Zone of Interest cinematographer Lukasz Zal informs the visual language of Hamnet.

‘Hen,’ courtesy of TIFF

‘Hen’

Director: György Pálfi

Platform

In Hen, eight different chickens play the role of the movie’s foremost feathered hero, a mother hen hellbent on escaping an industrial farm to raise her brood in a safe place. This summary bears a strong resemblance to 2022’s EO (our favorite movie from that year) in its unorthodox filmmaking approach and animal characters, which remark on the wretched state of the post-modern world. Pálfi has made films for many years now, notably two of his works from the early 2000s served as Hungary’s Oscar submissions for Best International Feature. Still, Hen’s placement in TIFF’s Platform section should introduce his filmmaking to a fresh audience.

‘Noviembre,’ courtesy of TIFF

‘Noviembre’

Director: Tomás Corredor

Discovery

TIFF’s Discovery section is excellent for, well, discovering some of the world’s most promising new filmmakers that may have flown under the radar. Foremost Film is excited to check out Corredor’s Noviembre, which is based on the takeover of Colombia’s Palace of Justice by the M-19 guerrilla group in November 1985. The film hinges upon a narrative device that unfolds within one of the palace’s bathrooms, where members of the institution’s staff were historically held hostage by the insurgents, likely to imbibe Noviembre with claustrophobic tension that will match the ruthlessness of the event, which continues to inform Colombia’s national trauma to this day.

‘Nuestra Tierra,’ courtesy of TIFF

‘Nuestra Tierra’

Director: Lucrecia Martel

TIFF Docs

Martel’s long-awaited follow-up to 2017’s unforgettable Zama, Nuestra tierra serves as the filmmaker’s first foray into feature-length documentary cinema, capturing the underserved account of the death of Javier Chocobar, an Indigenous leader of Argentina’s Chuschagasta people who was assassinated in 2009 by armed men attempting to seize their land. Collaging archival footage and interviews with the Chuschagasta community, Nuestra tierra will undoubtedly work as a further exploration of Argentina’s colonial history, depicted through Martel’s singular sensibilities as one of South America’s most captivating filmmakers. Nuestra tierra will world premiere at Venice before screening at TIFF.

‘Orphan,’ courtesy of TIFF

‘Orphan’

Director: László Nemes

Centrepiece

Nemes rose from obscurity to become one of Hungary’s most well-known filmmakers when his 2015 feature debut, Holocaust drama Son of Saul, swept awards season in the Best International Film category. His latest effort (co-written with Clara Royer, who also worked on Son of Saul) finds him returning to mid-century Europe once more, this time centering around a young boy in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution as the country attempted to throw off the Communist yoke of the Soviet Union. Known for the frenetic camera movements and claustrophobic closeups that define his early work, Nemes will likely channel a similar spirit in Orphan as it captures the formation of youth against the backdrop of extreme political instability. Orphan will screen in Competition at Venice ahead of its North American premiere at TIFF.

‘Rose of Nevada,’ courtesy of TIFF

‘Rose of Nevada’

Director: Mark Jenkin

Special Presentations

Starring George Mackay and Callum Turner, Rose of Nevada seems primed to serve as Jenkin’s (Enys Men, 2022) most high-profile movie to date. Shot in the English coastal town of Cornwall, the director’s birthplace that informs much of his work, Rose of Nevada concentrates on a mysterious fishing vessel that reappears in a fishing village thirty years after it was assumed to be lost at sea. Shot on 16mm with the aid of university students from Cornwall’s Falmouth University, we can anticipate another artisanal effort from one of England’s most intriguing filmmakers on the rise.

‘Winter of the Crow,’ courtesy of TIFF

‘Winter of the Crow’

Director: Kasia Adamik

Platform

Starring Lesley Manville and Tom Burke, Winter of the Crow is based on a short story by Nobel Prize–winning Olga Tokarczuk. The film is set in 1981 Warsaw, where Manville’s character, an English academic, finds herself trapped on the eve of Communist Poland’s martial law mandate as the country’s population fights back against the increasing oppression of the Iron Curtain. Winter of the Crow is poised to be an intriguing Cold War thriller with splashes of film noir and will compete for TIFF’s competitive Platform Prize.

The 50th annual Toronto International Film Festival will be held from September 4 to 14. Click here for more information.