After Cannes was dominated by international auteurs amid Hollywood’s retreat from the Croissette, the Toronto Film Festival will also foreground artist-driven films in its upcoming Wavelength section unveiled on Tuesday.
“When we look at the newspaper, and it’s filled with bad news and cruelty, a lot of these filmmakers are looking inwards. There’s a lot of introspection and personal investment in the films,” Andréa Picard, curator of Wavelengths, TIFF’s avant-garde film showcase, told The Hollywood Reporter. Auteurs moving onwards and inwards include Beatrice Gibson with her debut feature, At Night, shot in 16mm for BBC Films. The director plays a filmmaker struggling to make sense of the film she’s making as six women in Paris meet up and discuss the anxiety and psychic exhaustion of the iconic French city after dark.
At Night will have a North American premiere in Toronto after bowing in Locarno. There’s also inward-looking discovery with Biografía de Jorge Luis Borges (Life of Jorge Luis Borges), a five-and-a-half-hour documentary by Argentinian director Mariano Llinas headed to Toronto after a world premiere in Venice.
The film, while about the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges and drawing on his papers, books he read and global cities he visited, also has director Llinas wrestling over how to capture a literary great known for endless reinvention. “It’s about the making of that film, and Mariano is in the film and he’s often called a Borgesian filmmaker himself, and so it’s almost a self-portrait as much as it’s a portrait of Borges,” Picard argues.
