Toronto Film Festival Announces 62 Films Including New Work From Malick, Russell, Affleck, Cianfrance and Baumbach
The Toronto International Film Festival has made the first of many announcements regarding its 2012 lineup, and it’s a juicy one.
New films from Ben Affleck (“Argo”), Deepa Mehta (“Midnight’s Children”), Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (“Cloud Atlas”), David O. Russell “(Silver Linings Playbook”), Joe Wright (“Anna Karenina”), Ramin Bahrani (“At Any Price”), Neil Jordan (“Byzantium”), Mira Nair (“The Reluctant Fundamentalist”), Robert Redford (“The Company You Keep”), Cate Shortland (“Lore”), Francois Ozon (“In The House”), Roger Michell (“Hyde Park on Hudson”), Joss Whedon (“Much Ado About Nothing”), Robert Pilcini and Shari Springer Berman (“Imogene”), Derek Cianfrance (“The Place Behind The Pines”), Laurent Cantet (“Foxfire”), Noah Baumbach (“Frances Ha”), Sally Potter (“Ginger and Rosa”) and, yep, Terrence Malick (“To The Wonder”) are among the 62 titles the festival announced.
A complete list of all announced films so far can be found here.
All of the noted films are either World or North American premieres, the latter suggestive of whether a film is also destined to play at the Venice Film Festival a week prior. It is already officially known that Mira Nair’s “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” will open Venice, but the premiere statuses of these Toronto films seem to suggest Ramin Bahrani’s “At Any Price,” Malick’s “To The Wonder” and Redford’s “The Company You Keep” may join it. Notably, potential Venice titles “Cloud Atlas,” “Foxfire,” “Argo,” “Silver Livings Playbook,” “The Place Behind The Pines” and “In The House” will all have their world premieres in Toronto.
Also among the news announced today was the festival’s opening night film, which is markedly more high profile than previous years. Rian Johnson’s “Looper,” which stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis (as the same person), will open the festival on September 6th.
“Rian Johnson is a film auteur known for combining different genres to give his projects an original spin,” said Piers Handling, Director and CEO of TIFF. “We’re thrilled to have Looper open the Festival.”
“I saw Rian’s debut feature Brick at the Sundance festival and was impressed by his ability to engage both the mind and the heart,” said Cameron Bailey, Artistic Director, Toronto International Film Festival. “We were fortunate enough to premiere his follow-up film The Brothers Bloom. Now, with Looper, Rian has taken his filmmaking to a new level, and we can’t wait to present it to the Toronto audience in the most prestigious platform we can offer. This is a new kind of Opening Night: an exciting, thinking-person’s action film from a director who really understands genre.”
It is expected that another 140+ films will join the Toronto lineup before the festival, which runs September 6-16.
A complete list of all announced films so far can be found here.
