We’ve got the whole team together for Day Four of TIFF, and what a variety of experiences we all had today. For me (Sachin) personally, it featured a rollercoaster of emotions centred around parent-child relationships, but your BBP team traveled from Iran to Italy to Ireland and all points in between, even stopping at the peak of Mount Everest to bring you all the action from the Festival!
Karen Shute
In Ghasideh Golmakani’s Head To Head, an acclaimed female director has assembled a group of men to shoot a narrative film where they must dress and behave like women, but her true purpose is to document their struggles as they gripe behind the scenes about the discomfort of wearing head scarves and heavy skirts in the stifling heat. Her hope is that the men will learn to empathize with a women’s plight by experiencing these restrictions firsthand, but instead, one of the men rips his scarf off at every opportunity and complains about the unfairness of it, oblivious to his privilege at having the option to do so without fear of punishment. There’s plenty of absurd humour in this film within a film within yet another film as we see the men get scolded for innocuous offences like taking overly long strides when walking into a scene, but behind that humour is the constant buzz of danger, as the cast and crew are keenly aware that if the authorities knew about the production, they would all be sent to jail. Despite these threats, she stoically stands her ground in her effort to make her male actors finally get the message. “I’ll stay here until you put the scarf on. Until you realize women’s fight is yours too”. It’s well worth catching this thought-provoking gem from the Discovery program before the festival wraps up.
Jeromme Graham
The hot ticket at TIFF today for me was Pretenders, the new documentary about the iconic Chrissie Hynde-fronted band. Naturally, I didn’t get a ticket. Because apparently I was not destined to breathe the same rarefied air as Hynde. Am I salty? Maybe just a little. But TIFF is TIFF, and there’s always something else waiting around the corner. And I’m not talking about activations and free stuff.
What I did end up watching today was The City of the Living, Edoardo Gabbriellini’s gripping Italian crime drama based on Nicola Lagioia’s bestselling chronicle of the shocking 2016 murder of Luca Varani in Rome. The film takes a decidedly anti-true-crime approach, choosing to examine the people and social circumstances surrounding the tragedy rather than turning an already horrific death into typical exploitative ripped-from-the-headlines true-crime fare.
I made the mistake of reading up on the real case beforehand, so I knew exactly where things were headed. That said, the film’s beats make the trajectory fairly easy to piece together anyway. Luca, played by Emanuele Di Stefano, is a young mechanic drifting through life, trying to make ends meet and build a future with his girlfriend. A seemingly incidental encounter eventually pulls him into the seedy world of gay for pay and turning tricks for cash, ultimately culminating in an act of senseless violence.
Gabbriellini pretty decidedly chooses not to indulge in the ugliness of it all. The brutal torture Luca suffers is largely kept offscreen, though the aftermath is pretty difficult to look at. More importantly, The City of the Living keeps Luca at the centre of the story as an ordinary person rather than simply a victim, while using his death to expose some of the deeper fractures in contemporary Rome.
Sanjay Rajput
Having seen Everest: The Other Side by the team behind Free Solo I can confidently say a better documentary about climbing Everest will never be made. It’ll be on streaming but nothing compares to seeing the majesty of the mountain projected on a giant screen is breathtaking.
TIFF’s In Conversation With series is always a hot ticket and with good reason. At today’s In Conversation With…Chris Rock, Cameron Bailey’s intimate dialogue revealed much about Chris’s approach to filmmaking with interesting revelations including about how he used his downtime while filming Grown-Ups (2010) writing scripts for his solo features and, while discussing making Head of State (2003), he confessed wanting to be President at one point in his past. Though it was a serious discussion that was focused primarily about his directorial career, it’s fantastic to see how effortlessly funny Rock can truly be. No prepared material, just riffing off Cameron’s questions with answers that could easily fill out a further stand up routine.
Sachin Hingoo
It’s always interesting when a TIFF day kind of naturally falls into a theme. Today’s selections were broadly about children, and while I started off the day with a far lighter and more positive selection with Louise Bagnall’s sweet animated feature Julián, the latter two – Beth D’Araujo’s Josephine and Yeon Sang-ho’s Paradise Lost – took a decidedly darker turn while exploring some very difficult questions around parenting. But I strongly think that I was lucky enough to see not one, but two very different breakout debuts from two very young stars today.
Louise Bagnall presented a truly international animated feature with her adaptation of Jessica Love’s children’s book ‘Julian Wants To Be a Mermaid’ that’s a co-production of Irish studio Cartoon Saloon and Canadian studio GURU. Julián that tells the story of an art and glitter-obsessed young Dominican boy who fights against the tide to live his dream of being a mermaid, and attend the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade. It’s a beautifully-animated story about finding one’s identity through family and community, and being true to oneself in the face of those that don’t understand your uniqueness. Knyght Darius Jack as the voice of Julián and Milcania Diaz-Rojas as the voice of his abuela are so perfectly aligned and feel so natural, and I think Jack especially is someone to watch in the future as he expands his voice work and beyond.
Beth D’Araujo follows up her deeply disturbing Soft & Quiet (2022) with the equally affecting family drama/thriller Josephine, starring Channing Tatum, Gemma Chan, and introducing its young breakout star Mason Reeves. For an actor that was 10 years old at the time of the production of Josephine, Reeves provides an unforgettable, powerful, and difficult performance far beyond her years and I think has every chance to end up on an awards stage one day.
As a parent, we want certain things for our kids – a feeling of safety and to be able to protect them from the many dangers of this world being paramount. I think that, like I talked about yesterday with Trash Mountain, we inherently want some level of control over our lives. All of that gets thrown out the window early on in Josephine as Reeves’ titular character and her father witness a violent sexual assault in a park, then have to go through the process and many difficult conversations that sprout from the assailant being brought to justice. We see this primarily through Josephine’s still-developing perspective, still learning what sex and consent and rape even are, and watching as both she and her parents navigate these difficult lessons and decisions.
D’Araujo draws from her own personal experience as a child and expands it to discuss the way that hypervigilance in the wake of traumatic events can often be a self-defeating way of addressing PTSD. And the way that she and cinematographer (who also worked with D’Araujo on Soft & Quiet) Greta Zozula present that PTSD takes the film into horror territory more than once. Overall, Josephine is a remarkable effort on multiple levels.
I sometimes wonder how Yeon Sang-ho finds the time to sleep and eat with the number of projects he always seems to have on the go. Fresh on the heels of the Netflix series Human Vapor and the zombie film Colony, the prolific writer/director is back at TIFF with techno-thriller Paradise Lost.
Continuing my afternoon theme of difficult explorations of parenting, Sang-ho tells the story of a single mother grappling with the loss of her son, who disappeared along with several other students on a field trip. It is later confirmed that the majority of the students were murdered by a serial killer, but Ryu’s son’s body was never found. An AI company provides the grieving families with a set of augmented reality glasses trained on the children’s voices and from data provided by the parents and which create lifelike, non-aging avatars of the lost children that come to be called Children of Paradise. Ryu gets hooked on the tech and when revalations about her real son come to light, she is forced to choose between the idealized version in “Paradise” and the one in the real world.
We want the best for our kids, and that includes thinking the best of their intentions and place in the world. But with the ever-advancing march toward realistic AI replicas of people on screens and elsewhere, Sang-ho imagines a world where the line between the virtual world and our own becomes ever-thinner. I think there’s a little fat that could be trimmed from this one, and as compelling as the prolific director’s take on a Black Mirror concept is, the ending is a little predictable. But there’s a lot of thrills and some good performances to be found in Paradise Lost.
And that’s a wrap on Day Four!
The 51st edition of the Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 10-20, 2026. Ticket and lineup information can be found at the TIFF website, and stay tuned to Biff Bam Pop for all of our coverage all week!
