Exceptional films by revered directors, major award winners, and work that’s very much of the moment
Featuring new work from international titans such as Jia Zhangke, Miguel Gomes, and Hong Sangsoo, Showcase also highlights rising stars like Mati Diop, who picked up the top prize at Berlin this year, and Constance Tsang, who’s served notice that she’s one to watch. Other highlights include a selection of Canadian films that have already made big waves internationally before debuting on home soil and several of the year’s outstanding documentaries. With many of these films hinging on journeys, either across national borders or through time, we’re reminded of cinema’s transcendent power.
Dying
With death looming for both elders of the Lunies clan, their estranged children are forced to meet once more, while dealing with their own tumultuous personal lives. Age-old enmities resurface in this raw and invigorating family saga.
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Flow
In this wordless and gorgeously atmospheric animated feature, a solitary black cat survives a tsunami and must confront his fear of water whilst sailing through a flooded world with a group of misfit animals. An enchanting adventure film for all ages.
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A Traveler's Needs
Isabelle Huppert and VIFF mainstay Hong Sangsoo reunite for a whimsical, winning tale of culture-clash. She plays a French tutor at large in a South Korean city; he deploys his usual mixture of suggestive repetition, oddball humour, and humble profundity.
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Blue Sun Palace
In the heart of Flushing, New York’s largest Chinatown, three working-class immigrants eke out a meager living. When together, there's an easy intimacy—until tragedy strikes, leaving a painful absence in its wake.
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Universal Language
In a wintery, Farsi-speaking city that’s equal measures Winnipeg and Tehran, storylines entangle and the concepts of space, time, and identity grow increasingly opaque. Inventive and absurd, Rankin's poetic fable reminds us that Winnipeg is a wonderland.
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Black Dog
Set in a city on the verge of demolition, the award-winning Black Dog tells the story of a discontented ex-con and the stray dog he comes to love. Graced with panoramic imagery and the music of Pink Floyd, it’s a soulful, triumphant film.
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A Different Man
This haunting, unclassifiable film tells the story of a facially disfigured man who is cured by a new drug therapy and given a new lease on life. Director Aaron Schimberg fuses elements of horror, melodrama, and comedy into a work of true originality.
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Sharp Corner
This superb psychological thriller stars Ben Foster as Josh, a man who comes unmoored from the safety of middle-class life. The problems start with a car accident in front of his new house, and soon our protagonist is on the verge of losing everything…
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Matt and Mara
Featuring terrific performances from Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson, this is a film that buzzes with vitality. In exploring the fraught, ambiguous relationship between two writers, director Kazik Radwanski produces indelible, deeply relatable moments.
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Grand Tour
A prizewinner at Cannes, the latest from the director of Tabu is a playful Asian travelogue, set in 1918 and now, in black and white and colour, a critique of colonialism, and a journey into the history of cinema itself.
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Gloria!
This cheeky, inventive film brings contemporary pop music to 17th century Italy. It’s the story of a Catholic orphanage where the girls have been taught to play orchestral music. Little does the priest know they’re composing their own tunes in secret…
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No Other Land
For Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist from the southern West Bank, the fight against the mass expulsion of his community has been a lifelong struggle. Filmed vérité-style over five years, this is a sobering look at the realities of Israeli occupation.
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Paying For It
Sook-Yin Lee adapts a graphic novel by her ex-boyfriend Chester Brown about the end of their relationship and Brown’s decision to start paying for sex. Brave, bracing, and funny, this is a film unafraid to explore sexuality in all its complexity.
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Caught by the Tides
Over two decades, across China’s rapidly changing landscape, two lovers meet and part and meet again. In this magisterial film, Jia Zhangke refracts the twenty-first century through a reflexive, retrospective look at his era-defining filmography.
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Secret Mall Apartment
The stranger-than-fiction true story of a group of artists who built and furnished a hidden apartment inside a mall, remaining undetected for years. This is an absurdly fun and surprisingly profound film about gentrification and art.
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Happyend
Neo Sora (Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus) fuses teen high school comedy and political protest to winning effect in this raucous, creative, and poignant "story of the near future." It features earthquakes, digital surveillance, thumping techno music, and more...
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Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat
In January 1961, seven months after Congolese independence, Patrice Lumumba is assassinated. In excavating the history of this political murder, this essay-film traces the complex and unlikely intersections of American jazz and Cold War geopolitics.
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Shepherds
Mathyas abruptly quits his marketing job in Montreal and goes to France with the romantic notion of becoming a shepherd. He's in for a rude awakening... Sophie Deraspe’s film is an elemental epic of personal growth.
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Dahomey
The return of stolen cultural artifacts to the Republic of Benin is the inspiration for Mati Diop's Berlin Golden Bear prize winner, which fuses dreamy metaphysics and incendiary political commentary on issues of restitution and self-determination.
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