Catching up a bit after a couple of “easy” days (which for me means only 1-2 movies per day and a full 7 hours of sleep), but I think Sanjay, Karen, and I are well into the double digit number of screenings at this point so things are starting to run together a bit. Check out our thoughts on some of the things we’ve seen mid-week, including two tree-centric films for potential arborists and a couple of killer Canadian selections.
Karen Shute
If Train Dreams (2025) whet your appetite for lushly filmed foliage then you might want to check out Katharina Rabl’s Memories of a Forest. In the film, a doctorate student (Julia Windischbauer) approaching the finish line of her dissertation receives news that her grandmother has passed away, and that she has bequeathed the family tree farm to her. When she arrives, she sees that the forest needs an enormous amount of work and sets out to ready the trees for sale with the help of a handsome friend from her past. It all sounds like the premise of a Hallmark movie, but the film quickly dispels any romantic notions as we watch her fall behind on her dissertation while trying to manage one calamity after another at the farm. It becomes apparent that this is a seemingly cursed enterprise that has kept the women of her family bound by struggle and poverty to an unforgiving land. The film examines the generational cycles that keep us trapped in lives we don’t want out of notions of tradition and loyalty, and challenges our concept of what a happy ending looks like.
In anyone else’s hands, a documentary about Brian Mulroney’s ascension to political power and the Conservative Party’s slow slip towards populism could’ve been a very dry and boring affair. But in Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney, Matthew Rankin flips the form on its head by using a surreal patchwork of real moments filtered through a kaleidoscopic lens to tell this story in an endlessly entertaining fashion. I’m not sure how many of the extremely Canadian references like Ananas [the pineapple mascot from TVO’s Téléfrançais that taught French to a generation of kids] or the Edison Twins [the teenagers that taught science to a generation of kids] will play for those didn’t grow up with them, but if this was the kind of documentary I could have had a as a kid I would probably have watched a lot more of them. A quick shoutout to the National Film Board who is the real MVP this year for providing hours of archival footage to both this film and The Stunt Driver, giving both films a springboard or realism to bounce off of as they approach their individual subjects in unique and humorous ways.
If you’ve ever wondered what a Safdie brothers film would look like if they grew up in a Quebec suburb, Rémi St-Michel’s Toy Gun Bandit might be a close approximation. Bursting with frenetic energy and white-knuckle tension, this utterly compelling tale of a 15 year old boy’s transformation from awkward prankster to bank robbing mastermind plays like Good Time with a thick Québécois accent, and will have you shouting “Tabarnak” at the film’s many twists and turns.
Jeromme Graham
I only saw one film on Day Six, but it was a pretty fascinating one. Hombre al agua, the latest directorial effort from Gael García Bernal. His latest effort is a sociopolitical comedy of manners that throws expat culture, class, masculinity, ambition and social climbing into one increasingly complicated blender.
The story follows Cuban lifeguard Camilo (García Bernal), whose rescue of a wealthy Mexican businessman leads him into a luxurious new life in the Yucatán. But paradise comes with costs and complications, including a pregnant mistress, family secrets, a union uprising and a vanity film project. There’s a lot going on here, and admittedly, the film can feel a little all over the place at times. You get the sense of a filmmaker finally having the opportunity to bring a passion project to life, with ideas and observations spilling out in every direction. But even with that said, it’s never particularly difficult to follow and the big swings are part of the fun.
It’s got beautiful people being messy, plus sharp observations about power, identity and the performances we put on for one another. Hombre al agua is a frontrunner for one of my favourite watches of this festival.
Sanjay Rajput
It’s hard for me to objectively review a Werner Herzog film because I’ve loved practically everything he’s made since Grizzly Man (2005) but here we go. Bucking Fastard was everything you’d want from a Herzog film: lovingly long takes of gorgeous nature landscapes, quirky oddball cuts to animals, amazing operatic music, characters delivering mini-monologues as stand-ins for Werner as they pontificate about the world around them, and the zaniest characters you can imagine trying to fit into the world around them. As a friend with whom I saw the film said: “This could go on for several more hours and I’d still be enthralled.”
Sachin Hingoo
One thing horror does really well is making an insane premise credible (one might argue that it’s the main thing horror does), and in Trees Are Watching, Bahman Ghobadi posits that people, good and bad, are reincarnated as wooden objects, including trees, and heck if you don’t believe it by the end. It’s a real, classic spook-a-doodle with a few ‘elevated’ elements while retaining the inherent silliness that comes with “a chair comes to life and terrorizes people.” I really love when a horror makes an inanimate object scary and while the effects may not be top-tier here, some cool cinematography, a very good performance by Eva Green, and a couple of screen-stealingly excellent performances from the child actors (and an honourable mention to Booch the Dog, who sees all this crazy shit coming long before anyone else) make Trees Are Watching worth, um, watching.
Putting a teen’s escalating series of misadventures on display, Rémi St-Michel’s Toy Gun Bandit has low-key Spring Breakers (2012) vibes. Starting with a fairly innocent prank, we follow Félix (Félix Munger) as he descends into a life of crime. Really, this is a movie about Félix’s desire to find acceptance among friends and forming a successful gang of bank robbers by accident. It’s far less colourful and ostentatious than Spring Breakers, but the core ideas are very much intact and Munger is terrific as the anchor for all of this, displaying ingenuity and confidence even as a mask for his many teenage insecurities.
I also got to catch the world premiere of Theja Rio’s debut feature ANGH, based on the filmmaker’s award-winning 2021 short. Ultimately a father-son tale about preserving ones culture in desperate times, Rio beautifully tells the story of the last two holdouts of a traditional Naga village on the border of India and Burma in the 1960’s. An American missionary (Douglas Henshall) has set up a church and parallel village in the same jungle and has lured away, as they do, most of the Naga population with the promise of food, medicine, and other resources. I think what really succeeds here is the way that Rio depicts the seductive nature of colonization and how difficult it can be to resist the pull of those forces even if they’re not taken with overt violence and force, but rather by the equally-evil starvation of an indigenous community of resources like food and medicine. Henshall is very good here as the charming and gentle face of the American missionary system, and Anghlong Konyak is riveting as a father torn between two worlds. This one also has one of the biggest mic-drops of a closing title card that I’ve seen at TIFF this year.
Stay tuned here to BBP for coverage of the final days and a Festival wrapup at the end of TIFF, but thanks for sticking with us all week! See you soon, friends.
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!
