Rita (Carrie Coon), a woman haunted by the weight of her past, encounters Ricki (Lily James), a magnetic, manipulative spiritual leader, and abandons her family to follow the persuasive guru to an all-female commune. But when her daughters Ella (Bella Ramsey) and Jo (Odessa Young) arrive unexpectedly and become drawn into the group’s seductive world, Rita is forced to choose between the family she left behind and the life she believes can save her.
Drawing on his grandmother’s experiences as a Holocaust survivor, director Guy Nattiv crafts a gripping and psychologically complex account of the ends one might go to in a bid to liberate themselves from trauma and experience a semblance of salvation. Featuring an absolutely riveting performance from Coon, The Liberation is an unsettling yet deeply empathetic thriller that explores the themes of personal freedom, devotion, and control to devastating effect.
Sit down with Carrie Coon at her VIFF Talk, The Close-Up: In Conversation with Carrie Coon, on Oct 4.
Supported by
Carrie Coon, Lily James, Bella Ramsey, Odessa Young, Tracy Letts, Jaime Ray Newman
USA
2026
English
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits & Director
Executive Producer
Daniel Bekerman, Jordan Hart, Neil Mathieson, Leonid Lebedev, Jessica Lacy, Andrew Karpen, Kent Sanderson, Ben Ross, Rami Yasin, Bryan Meng, Terence Chan
Producer
Julia Lebedev, Eddie Vaisman, Oren Moverman, Jaime Ray Newman, Guy Nattiv
Screenwriter
Guy Nattiv, Noa Berman Herzberg
Cinematography
Tudor Vladimir Panduru, Fabian Gamper
Editor
Yuval Orr, Sabine Hoffman
Production Design
Brian Kane
Original Music
Dascha Dauenhauer
Guy Nattiv
Guy Nattiv is an internationally acclaimed writer, director, and producer. His work includes SKIN, the Academy Award-winning short film and its FIPRESCI Prize-winning feature adaptation, GOLDA starring Helen Mirren, and TATAMI, which premiered at Venice and was acclaimed as a landmark collaboration.
Filmography: Skin (2018); Golda (2023); Tatami (2023)
Photo by Matt Kalish
Missing VIFF? Check Out What's Playing at the VIFF Centre
You Had to Be There
In a strange quirk of fate, the legendary Toronto '72 production of the musical comedy Jesus hit Godspell launched a constellation of comedy stars, all unknown at the time but now known to us as Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Victor Garber, et al
House of Hope
"House of Hope" is the name of a Waldorf elementary school near Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank, founded by Manar and her husband Milad. This documentary follows their efforts to go about their lives before, during, and after the events of October 7.
Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie
Alex Gibney's doc relates the near-lethal attack on Salman Rushdie in 2022, the writer's painful rehab and recovery, and his reflections on life before, during and after the publication of The Satanic Verses.
The Sandbox
Borders are the faultlines of the world. Kenya-Jade Pinto's doc examines how modern surveillance technology, bio-metrics and AI are combining to make land and sea borders as impenetrable as air travel, and suggests the unspoken cost is our own humanity.
Atonement
A former Marine suffering from PTSD seeks a meeting with the Iraqi family to which he did great wrong ten years earlier in the Gulf War. Atonement navigates challenging, politically-charged psychological territory with diligence and sensitivity.
NAZA
NAZA is a codeword euphemistically used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians it expects will be killed in an airstrike. This chilling documentary exposes the policy and process of state-sanctioned mass killings.