TORONTO ANNOUNCES TITLES FOR 2010 FEST

Titles for the 35th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival were announced today. The mixture of world and North American premieres range from directors like Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden‘s It’s Kind of a Funny Story, to Julian Schnabel‘s Miral to Susanne Bier‘s In A Better World. The full list of titles screening in the Gala and Special Presentations sections are below. TIFF has also announced that the festival, running from Sept. 9 -19, will be extended one day longer this year and in celebration of their 35th year will be running a “TIFF For Free” series were past films that have screened at the fest will be shown at no cost (some of the titles include The Big Chill, Crash and Water). Learn more at the fest’s site.



Galas

The Bang Bang Club, directed by Steven Silver (Canada/South Africa)
(World Premiere)

Barney’s Version, directed by Richard J Lewis (Canada/Italy)
(North American Premiere)

Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky (USA)
(North American Premiere)

Casino Jack, directed by George Hickenlooper (Canada)
(World Premiere)

The Conspirator, directed by Robert Redford (USA)
(World Premiere)

The Debt, directed by John Madden (UK)
(North American Premiere)

The Housemaid, directed by Im Sang-Soo (South Korea)
(North American Premiere)

Janie Jones, directed by David M. Rosenthal (USA)
(World Premiere)

The King’s Speech, directed by Tom Hooper (UK)
(North American Premiere)

Little White Lies, directed by Guillaume Canet (France)
(World Premiere)

Peep World, directed by Barry Blaustein (USA)
(World Premiere)

Potiche, directed by Francois Ozon (France)
(North American Premiere)

The Town, directed by Ben Affleck (USA)
(North American Premiere)

The Way, directed by Emilio Estevez (USA)
(World Premiere)



Special Presentations

Another Year, directed by Mike Leigh (UK)
(North American Premiere)

Beginners, directed by Mike Mills (USA)
(World Premiere)

The Big Picture, directed by Eric Lartigau (France)
(World Premiere)

Biutiful, directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Spain/Mexico)
(North American Premiere)

Blue Valentine, directed by Derek Cianfrance (USA)
(Canadian Premiere)

Buried, directed by … Read the rest

SUSANNE BIER / AFTER THE WEDDING

AFTER THE WEDDING

The marriage ceremony in Danish director Susanne Bier’s haunting After the Wedding, penned by frequent collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen and one of this year’s five nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, greatly alters more lives than those of the young heiress bride, Anna (Stine Fischer Christensen), and her betrothed. Indeed, the film could be entitled Before, During, and After the Wedding. Anna’s father, burly, big-bucks exec Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard), invites Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen), an expat Dane whose energy is totally tied up with the orphanage for street children he works at in Bombay, but who is reluctantly in Copenhagen to solicit much-needed funding from the wealthy potential donor. What Jacob doesn’t know, and Anna’s post-ceremony toast reveals, is that Jorgen is not her biological father. Having seen that Jorgen’s wife is his own ex, Helene (Sidse Babett Knudsen), who had abandoned him in India 20 years before, Jacob realizes that Anna is the child he never knew he had.

Jorgen has stage-managed the reunion of Helene and Jacob, and the introduction of the latter to Anna. He recognizes his own mortality, and, in an act that melds selflessness with a Mabuse-like need to control those in his orbit, he wants to reconfigure a nuclear family to insure the future happiness of his wife and daughter. How does a rich industrialist manage to succeed in this? With money, naturally. He essentially blackmails the equally headstrong Jacob by creating a huge fund for the orphanage, with the caveat that Jacob must remain in Denmark and supervise its financing with Anna. That Jacob has an “adopted” son, Pramod ((Neeral Mulchandani), at the orphanage becomes almost beside the point. The eight-year-old boy becomes dispensable in the grand scheme of things.

A graduate of Denmark’s National Film School, the 46-year-old Bier has been making movies about familial rupture since her first feature, Freud Leaving Home (1991), the story of a Swedish Jewish family in which the mother’s dying of cancer precipitates dramatic acting out by her three children–particularly daughter Freud, the one who never managed to get away … Read the rest