Ten titles selected for Toronto International Film Festival

14 August 2013

Nine Film4 films and a Channel 4 drama have been selected for this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

The prestigious festival will see the World Premieres of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, Roger Michell’s Le Week-End, Richard Ayoade’s The Double, Kevin Macdonald’s How I Live Now and David Mackenzie’s Starred Up, and the North American premieres of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (following its forthcoming World Premiere at Venice Film Festival) and Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant. 

Southcliffe, Sean Durkin’s critically acclaimed drama commissioned by and currently showing on Channel 4, will receive its international premiere, while Mark Cousins’ A Story of Children and Film and Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England will screen in the Docs and Wavelengths strands respectively.

Tessa Ross, Channel 4 Controller of Film and Drama, said: “We’re incredibly proud of all the filmmakers who’ve been selected for this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.  It’s always exciting to launch films to audiences for the first time, and never more so when you have a range of work such as this, showcasing bold, distinctive, original storytelling at its very best.”  

Toronto International Film Festival takes place between 5th-15th September.

 

The titles:

Set in pre-Civil War United States, McQueen’s third feature 12 Years a Slave is based on an incredible true story of a free man who is abducted and sold into slavery.  It stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender and Brad Pitt, and is Film4’s third collaboration with McQueen following his critically-acclaimed and award-winning Shame and Hunger.

Jonathan Glazer’s highly anticipated Under the Skin stars Scarlett Johansson as an alien in human form.  Part road movie, part science fiction, part real, it’s a film about seeing ourselves through alien eyes, and is Glazer’s third feature following Birth and Film4’s Sexy Beast.

Roger Michell’s Le Week-End follows married couple Meg and Nick (Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan) as they revisit Paris to revitalise their marriage, and run into an old friend (Jeff Goldblum) who gives them a new vision on life and love. 

The Double is Richard Ayoade’s second feature following his Film4-backed debut Submarine. Based on Dostoyevsky’s novella of the same name it stars Jesse Eisenberg as a man whose life is interrupted by the arrival of his doppelganger.

Starred Up stars Jack O’Connell as a troubled and explosively violent teenager transferred to adult prison where he finally meets his match – a man who also happens to be his father.  Rupert Friend and Ben Mendelsohn also star in David Mackenzie’s drama.

Kevin Macdonald’s How I Live Now stars Saoirse Ronan as Daisy, a teenager from New York who’s sent to the English countryside for the summer to stay with cousins.  She soon immerses herself in a dreamy pastoral idyll as she falls madly in love with Eddie (MacKay), until their perfect summer is blown apart by the sudden outbreak of a 21st century world war. 

The Selfish Giant is Clio Barnard’s second film after the award-winning Channel 4-commissioned The Arbor.  The Selfish Giant is a contemporary fable about two teenage boys, Arbor and his best friend Swifty, who get caught up in the world of copper theft.  It receives its North American premiere at Toronto following rave reviews on its World Premiere Cannes in May this year.

Set during the English Civil War, A Field in England is the third collaboration between Film4 and Ben Wheatley following Kill List and Sightseers, and stars Reece Shearsmith and Michael Smiley.  It was released in the UK on 5th July simultaneously in cinemas, on free TV (Film4), on DVD and VoD.

Starring Rory Kinnear, Sean Harris, Eddie Marsan and Shirley Henderson, Southcliffe tells the story of a fictional English market town devastated by a spate of shootings which take place over a single day; a tragedy that has ripped apart the community.  The Channel 4-commissioned drama was written by Tony Grisoni and directed by Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene).
Director Mark Cousins follows his epic documentary The Story of Film with this rumination on how children are portrayed in cinema, A Story of Children and Film, exploring such classics as The 400 Blows, E.T., Fanny and Alexander, Los Olvidados, and The White Balloon.