With the 50th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) kicking off on Thursday, September 4th, running until Sunday, September 14th, we take a look at some of the LGBTQ+ highlights in the exciting anniversary lineup of new features, series and special events. The full 2025 TIFF program also includes performances from actors such as Jodie Foster (A Private Life/Vie privée), Alan Cumming (Glenrothan), Keke Palmer (Good Fortune), Tessa Thompson (who stars in Hedda and is also taking part in an In Conversation With… event with writer-director Nia DaCosta), Simon Russell Beale (The Choral), Simon Callow (Eternal Return), and Ian McKellen. Plus new films from Bryan Fuller (Dust Bunny) and Gus Van Sant, the 1970s-set thriller Dead Man’s Wire featuring Colman Domingo.
Running alongside the official lineup, the 4th annual Trans Filmmakers Summit (TFS) honouring Zackary Drucker will take place on Sunday, September 7th following the Inside Out queer brunch. While the night before, queer cult filmmaker Bruce LaBruce will takeover the Bovine club on Queen Street West from 10pm till late to host his annual TIFF party.
The Little Sister (La Petite Dernière)
North American Premiere
France, Germany | 2025 | 107m | French, Arabic
Fatima (Nadia Melliti) is a good student, a devout Muslim and, as the youngest daughter of her French-Algerian family, “the last one.” She has a supportive mother, two affectionate (though sometimes critical) older sisters, and a father who’s demanding but remote. Like every 17-year-old, she struggles with reconciling the different parts of her life, but there’s an aspect of this that seems particularly impossible — evident the first time we see her uncomfortable interactions with her boyfriend.
We soon realize Fatima isn’t interested in boys but, because of her own misgivings (based on her faith and also her desire not to disrupt her family), she’s reluctant to discuss her sexuality with anyone. Forced to live a secret life, she criss-crosses Paris making clandestine rendezvous with women she finds online. But when she meets Ji-Na (Ji-Min Park), a young Korean woman, Fatima falls hopelessly in love, and can no longer accept the half-life she’s been living.
Directed by Hafsia Herzi, The Little Sister is based on Fatima Daas’ autofictional novel The Last One (La petite dernière). From the lovely moment where Fatima’s mother gives her a football jersey with her name on it, to the quiet scenes where Fatima plays football alone—an index of her loneliness and her independence—to Fatima’s bemused tolerance of the oafish behaviour of the immature boys she meets, this is a film of graceful notes.
The Little Sister has the poetic feel of its quietly observant source material, the vibrancy and assurance of an emerging director coming into her own, and a textured and transfixing performance by Melliti as Fatima. – ROBYN CITIZEN, TIFF Director of Programming, Festival & Cinematheque; Lead Programmer, Platform, US Indies, France and South Asia
Erupcja
World Premiere
USA, Poland | 2025 | 71m | Polish, English
While on vacation in Poland, Bethany (Charli xcx) breaks away from a romantic itinerary planned by her doting boyfriend, Rob (Will Madden), fearing that a marriage proposal is imminent. Reuniting instead with an old friend, Nel (Lena Góra), the two women rekindle a uniquely combustible chemistry over the course of a few days in a chaste but burning tryst predicated on sapphic synchronicity and a mutual penchant for poetry.
However, Bethany’s impulsive behaviour is a star-crossed sonnet that is all too familiar for Nel, and as a lovelorn Rob wanders Warsaw in search of answers, the trio find themselves parsing the difference between destiny and serendipity.
Delicately photographed by Pete Ohs, who also wrote, directed, edited and produced this idiosyncratic postcard romance, Erupcja—the Polish word for “eruption”—was born out of the filmmaker’s unique creative process. First finding inspiration in a location, Ohs then workshops characters with his cast (which further includes Jeremy O. Harris and Agata Trzebuchowska), before commencing production with only half the film outlined. While shooting, he writes with his actors as they and an intimate crew of multi-hyphenates (Michał Wieckowski, Jan Lubaczewski, Agata Dziurgot, and Zofia Chlebowska) live the story one scene at a time.
It’s a practice of pure creativity that instills an infectious charm to this film’s unfettered trajectory; one that is judiciously woven with colourful intervals of volcanic eruptions that reflect the repressed desires of its players, of which Góra and Charli xcx (also at the Festival in Sacrifice) are particularly magnetic.
Further shaded by a Polish narrator’s dry observations of the characters’ personal histories and inner lives, Erupcja is another sly delight from Ohs, a true-blue troubadour of contemporary independent cinema. – PETER KUPLOWSKY, TIFF Lead Programmer, Midnight Madness; International Programmer, US Indies
Maddie’s Secret
World Premiere
USA | 2025 | 98m | English
In Maddie’s Secret, essential alt-comedian cum director John Early plays the titular Maddie Ralph, a major foodie who works as a dishwasher at a trendy Los Angeles food content creation company. While her life seems picturesque—perfect hubby (Eric Rahill), wild lesbian bestie (Kate Berlant), and a cupboard full of women-owned ethically-sourced chili crisp to boot—she simultaneously conceals a dark past with a severe eating disorder. Knowing her history of self-harm conflicts with the perfect image she puts forth to her followers, she continues to hide her bulimic tendencies from friends and family, even when she begins to relapse. With stunning satire and a pitch-perfect read of the cultural room, Early’s debut is the announcement of a lively and inventive directorial voice.
Maddie’s Secret is a delicious magic trick. On one hand it provides a platform for some of the funniest comedians working today to execute side-splitting and sly commentary on Internet “authenticity,” LA posers, influencer culture, and slightly scary homoerotic best friendships. On the other hand, Early manages to produce a deeply nuanced and horrifyingly realistic portrait of adult eating disorders, a matter more omnipresent than many realize. With perfectly ludicrous performances from Berlant, Vanessa Bayer, and Conner O’Malley, plus a marvellous ’80s-inspired score from Early’s musical collaborator Michael Hesslein, the film seamlessly bridges serious rhetoric with bold comedy chops.
As work stress mounts and Maddie continues to battle her demons, she considers an inpatient program, and must finally tackle the root cause and final boss of many people’s eating disorders: her mother (Kristen Johnston). – DOROTA LECH, TIFF Lead Programmer, Discovery and International Programmer, Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, Turkey and Iran
A Useful Ghost (Pee Chai Dai Ka)
North American Premiere
Thailand, France, Singapore, Germany | 2025 | 130m | Thai
Read our ★★★★★ review from Cannes
Coming from a country with a track record of strong horror films, A Useful Ghost might sound like just another entertaining Thai chiller. But the goosebumps delivered won’t be from scares. From ambitious and creative newcomer Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke comes a genre-smashing amalgamation of fantasy, horror, romance, comedy, art house and everything in between. It smartly plays with tones and social comments while revisiting classism and oppression throughout Thailand’s history.
After the death of an employee at a family-run appliance factory, a strange phenomenon occurs. Spirits are possessing their products. A forced closure by the authorities is imminent, but the coming of the ghosts ironically turns out to be good news for March (Wisarut Himmarat), the son of the factory owner, who is deep in mourning following the dust-poisoning death of his pregnant wife Nat (Davika Hoorne).
March is reunited with his beloved, who is now in the form of a vacuum cleaner. Changing the social conception of ghosts, Nat’s love makes her decide to be of service by getting rid of the useless ghosts. Alongside the tale of the couple is the story of a repair guy (Wanlop Rungkumjud) who shows up at the door of a self-declared “Academic Ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan) to fix another possessed vacuum. The intertwining stories and unimaginable turn of events reveal complex layers and deeper context beneath the setting dust. Don’t let the breathtaking images fool you. There is more than what meets the eye. – June Kim, TIFF Associate International Programmer, Southeast Asia
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (La misteriosa mirada del flamenco)
North American Premiere
Chile, France | 2025 | 109m | Spanish
Some looks can actually kill. At least, that’s how it is starting to feel in this dusty, remote mining town somewhere in Chile in 1982, where several men have lost their lives to a “plague” that is said to spread through sustained stares.
In this charged environment, things aren’t exactly easy for 11-year-old Lidia (Tamara Cortés), who’s being raised by a loving queer community led by Boa (Paula Dinamarca), a strong matriarch figure, and by Flamingo (Matías Catalán), who looks after her. Lidia faces ignorance and fear from the miners and aggression from other young locals.
When the men—who can adore the women at night and loathe them by day—decide to exercise control over the bodily agency of the trans women, things come to a heated and at times absurd point from which there will be no return to normal.
For his feature debut, which won the Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes this year, writer-director Diego Céspedes—whose short, The Melting Creatures, played TIFF ’22—crafts a sort of poetic, modern western with a heart so big it reaches beyond the screen. It makes the point that love takes many different forms, and it’s the only thing that can save humanity in the midst of chaos and pain. – Diana Cadavid, TIFF International Programmer, Latin America, Spain and Portugal
Between Dreams and Hope (Miane Roya Va Omid)
World Premiere
Iran | 2025 | 106m | Persian
A window into the burgeoning underground queer community of Iran, Between Dreams and Hope centres on a young couple with dreams like many others, to live joyfully without restrictions on their love. Azad (Fereshteh Hosseini), a trans man, and his partner Nora (Sadaf Asgari) thrive amongst like-minded friends, a haven of self-expression and acceptance, in bustling Tehran. They live blissfully, but when Azad takes steps towards medically transitioning, he is troubled to learn that his estranged father must grant his permission or the process would be halted indefinitely. Although wary, the couple travel to Azad’s hometown to plead their case to his family. The return is not welcome, and when Azad disappears during a row, Nora must find her lover, with little assistance or care from the local authorities.
With this stunning and unspeakably brave entrant into the queer canon, Farnoosh Samadi (180° Rule, TIFF ’20) highlights the supreme tension between Iran’s so-called radical youth who engage with queer identity and feminist ideals—amongst other revolutions such as the ongoing “Women, Life, Freedom” movement—and the restrictive violence of conservative generations supported by the overarching regime. Harnessing daring and memorable performances from Hosseini and Asgari, and shooting even the most despairing moments with empathy, Samadi’s eye is gripping and sincere. As the stakes escalate, the film balances a tragic potential outcome with deep-rooted love, never absolving hatred as a thing of the past and crucially, never submitting to desolation in the face of tyranny. – DOROTA LECH, TIFF Lead Programmer, Discovery and International Programmer, Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, Turkey and Iran
Bouchra
World Premiere
Italy, Morocco, United States of America | 2025 | 83m | Arabic, French, English
The fact that Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s insightful and often playful debut feature Bouchra combines documentary techniques with an inventive narrative structure, and uses 3D animation, would be enough to make it an unique work. But what makes it a singular piece is its disarming and affecting honesty.
Bouchra is a queer, Moroccan Coyote and filmmaker living in New York, preoccupied with how her sexuality has impacted her relationship with her mother (also a Coyote). The daughter is anxious to move on with her life and career but is plagued by doubts — and convinced that the only way to move on is to use her art to confront the tensions and unresolved issues with her parent.
Barki and Bennani take a decidedly inventive approach to their subject. The action is split between two different Bouchras and two equally different mothers. “Fictional” Bouchra visits her mother Aicha, a celebrated painter, but their lively exchanges almost exclusively revolve around their mutual love of art — the subject of Bouchra’s sexuality is never broached. “Filmmaker” Bouchra constantly keeps in touch with her cardiologist mother in Casablanca, and their honest and intense phone calls—based on actual conversations had by Bennani—dwell on many of the issues the “fictional” mother and daughter assiduously avoid. Barki and Bennani blur the lines between fiction, art, and reality even further by having friends and family voice versions of themselves.
At its heart, Bouchra is about the complex, deep bonds between mothers and daughters, driven by the realization that sometimes you have to look back to move forward. – ROBYN CITIZEN, TIFF Director of Programming, Festival & Cinematheque; Lead Programmer, Platform, US Indies, France and South Asia
Blue Moon
North American Premiere
USA, Ireland | 2025 | 100m | English
In Blue Moon, director Richard Linklater (Hit Man, TIFF ’23, and also at this year’s Festival with Nouvelle Vague) crafts a riveting chamber piece set in real time at Sardi’s on the historic night in 1943 of Richard Rodgers’ (Andrew Scott) greatest triumph: the premiere of Oklahoma! Ethan Hawke (also at the Festival in The Lowdown) delivers a charming, lived-in performance as Rodgers’ former collaborator, lyricist Lorenz Hart, an alcoholic and marginally closeted raconteur grappling with the fact that Rodgers’ biggest success now belongs to a new partnership with Oscar Hammerstein.
As flowers and accolades pour into the restaurant, heralding a new era of American musicals, Hart holds court at the bar, regaling a plainspoken bartender (Bobby Cannavale) and a young, aspiring composer and military officer with stories. His current fixation is a 20-year-old Yale student, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), whom he reveres with a fervour that drifts between romantic longing and aesthetic worship.
Among the guests is essayist E. B. White (Patrick Kennedy), perched in a corner, making his presence known to offer le mot juste—“ineffable”—during one of Hart’s rhapsodic monologues about Elizabeth. The film imagines White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, drawing creative inspiration from Hart as he contemplates a shift into children’s literature.
Hart and Rodgers affectionately spar throughout the night, working through the regrets in their partnership and promising to start anew. Ultimately, through Hart’s reflections on love, art, and legacy, the film becomes a bittersweet elegy for his overshadowed place in musical history — a graceful tribute to the man behind Pal Joey, A Connecticut Yankee, “My Funny Valentine,” and the titular “Blue Moon.” – ROBYN CITIZEN, TIFF Director of Programming, Festival & Cinematheque; Lead Programmer, Platform, US Indies, France and South Asia
Steal Away
World Premiere
Canada, Belgium | 2025 | 113m | English, French, Lingala
Though its epigraph begins with the words “once upon a time,” Clement Virgo’s bold, opulent, and continually surprising sixth feature soon departs from the realm of fairy tales to venture into far more shadowy and treacherous spaces.
It tells the story of a pair of young women the film’s subtitle calls “two princesses.” The first is Fanny (Angourie Rice), a sheltered teenager whose knowledge of the world barely extends beyond the stately manor house belonging to her glamorous and magnanimous mother Florence (Lauren Lee Smith), which is located in a mysterious country that variously evokes occupied Europe, Algiers, and the Antebellum South.
Into her life comes Cécile (Mallori Johnson), a charismatic visitor who’s one of countless people seeking asylum from the conflicts that consume this alternate and highly stylized reality.
The two women’s mutual curiosity sparks a bond that may prove vital to their ability to survive the maelstrom of desires and dangers that surround them — though they are so immersed in sensory pleasures that they struggle to comprehend the truth about their situation. Similarly, the film’s fevered flow of sounds and images may render viewers slow to register its weight as an uncommonly potent allegory about real-life horrors.
Fully capturing the daring mix of tones and textures in Tamara Faith Berger’s screenplay, which recalls the genre-busting stories of Octavia E. Butler and Angela Carter, Virgo’s startling blend of the sociopolitical and psychosexual marks a thrilling departure for a filmmaker who’s long been one of Canada’s best. – JASON ANDERSON, TIFF Lead Programmer, Canada; International Programmer, Nordic and Benelux regions; Advisor, Short Cuts
Dead Lover
Canadian Premiere
Canada | 2025 | 84m | English
Writer-director Grace Glowicki stars as a wily gravedigger whose stench has left her bereft of amorous suitors. That is, until a horny dandy (co-writer Ben Petrie) with a penchant for her fetid funk enters this vibrantly chiaroscuro picture. The two consummate their love, but when a misbegotten voyage reduces the gravedigger’s lover to a mere severed finger, she feverishly turns to unnatural sciences to concoct a means of literally resurrecting the relationship. And if you know your Mary Shelley, you know that such Promethean malpractice can only go so right, before going so very wrong.
From Sundance to Rotterdam, Glowicki’s wonderfully wackadoo Dead Lover has enjoyed a robust film festival run as one of the year’s most quintessential midnight movie experiences. Concocted from a delightfully campy witches’ brew of influences, from British pantomime to German Expressionism, this madcap gothic comedy wears its bleeding, beating heart on the pointy end of its proverbial shovel as it volleys a cavalcade of impish slapstick and DayGlo splatter upon a romantic parable of love conquering over petty inconveniences like body odour, impotency, and rigor mortis.
Dead Lover is vividly photographed on 16mm by Rhayne Vermette—also at the Festival with her film Levers—within Becca Brooks Morrin’s handcrafted theatrical sets. These are endearingly enlivened by a small but dexterous cast of a mere four players (including Leah Doz and Lowen Morrow) juggling a dozen roles, making Dead Lover one of the great Canadian phantasmagorias following Matthew Rankin’s The Twentieth Century. This is a magnificent monument to the brilliant ingenuity of Glowlicki and Petrie’s continued partnership… ’til death (and beyond) do they part. (The pair are also at the Festival starring in Honey Bunch.) – PETER KUPLOWSKY, TIFF Lead Programmer, Midnight Madness; International Programmer, US Indies
Blood Lines
World Premiere
Canada | 2025 | 89m | English, Michif
A search for family and reconnection drives this pastoral drama, the second feature from director Gail Maurice (Rosie, TIFF 2022).
Blood Lines is a lesbian romance wrapped up in a celebration of Métis culture—with dialogue in the Michif language, which has only about 1,130 speakers in the world, including Maurice—and centres around an upcoming Métis Day festival.
Storyteller and store clerk Beatrice (Dana Solomon) is completely taken by a new woman who arrives in her Métis community looking to find her biological family. Beatrice decides to help Chani (Derica Lafrance) in order to spend more time with her.
Meanwhile, a chorus of older women, collectively referred to as “The Grannies,” try to get Beatrice to mend things with her mom, Léonore (played by director Maurice). Léonore’s past drinking problem had soured their relationship and Beatrice is reluctant to repair it, no matter how many years her mom has been sober.
Solomon is a striking discovery, conveying so much in this role of a disgruntled daughter who has mostly buried her feelings, while The Grannies usher in lighter, funnier moments.
Blood Lines is a singular film—a Métis queer romance—with an ending that will leave audiences talking. – TIFF
Sk+te’kmujue’katik (At the Place of Ghosts)
World Premiere
Canada, Belgium | 2025 | 87m | English, Mi’kmaw, French
Directed by L’nu filmmaker Bretten Hannam (Wildhood, TIFF ’21), Sk+te’kmujue’katik (At the Place of Ghosts) is an eerie thriller focusing on two Mi’kmaw brothers confronting their past trauma.
Mise’l (Blake Alec Miranda) and Antle (Forrest Goodluck) are siblings who have drifted apart after experiencing unimaginable horrors in their shared past. But when Mise’l returns to their home community following an unexpected visit by a malicious spirit, the pair must put their estrangement aside in order to rid themselves of the ghosts that haunt them. In order to do so, they will have to journey through Sk+te’kmujue’katik, a forest where time collapses on itself.
In these woods, their past is unveiled before them as they encounter ancestors they’ve never met, younger versions of themselves, and future iterations of their loved ones. Through it all, they must return to—and unravel—a critical moment in their lives.
For their third feature, Hannam has created a work that is not only a ghost story, but an interweaving of Mi’kmaw culture and the colonial history of the East Coast. With a gorgeously haunting score from Polaris Music Prize and Juno Award–winning musician Jeremy Dutcher, and beautifully shot by Guy Godfree (Sharp Corner, TIFF ’24; Brother, TIFF ’22), Sk+te’kmujue’katik (At the Place of Ghosts) is a genre-bending, otherworldly drama. – Kelly Boutsalis, TIFF International Programmer, Canada
A Sámi Wedding (Heajastallan – Bryllupsfesten)
World Premiere
Norway | 2025 | 90m | Norwegian, English, Sámi
Weddings are never just about the bride and groom. In Åse Kathrin Vuolab’s sharp, hilarious, and deeply resonant series, the ceremony is only the tip of the iceberg. Set in Kautokeino in northern Norway, A Sámi Wedding centres on Garen (Sara Margrethe Oskal), a weary middle-aged woman who is stuck in a loveless marriage and the de facto matriarch of a lower-income family, perched at the bottom of the town’s social ladder.
When her son announces he’s marrying into a powerful reindeer-herding family, Garen sees a shot at social redemption if only she can pull off the perfect traditional wedding—for 3,000 guests—in a month. Unfortunately, her three younger siblings are at odds with her ambitions and often with each other. To make matters worse, Garen’s longtime nemesis—the groom’s future mother-in-law, a woman of privilege—seems eager to draw attention to her every shortcoming.
With the chaotic energy of Shameless and the charming messiness of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Vuolab crafts a generous ensemble piece full of biting humour, familial chaos, and pointed cultural insight. The characters are flawed, loud, loving, and deeply unforgettable, highlighted by a magnetic lead performance by Oskal (returning to TIFF following her feature directorial debut The Tundra Within Me in 2023).
Vuolab resists easy sentiment. What emerges instead is something more satisfying: a raw, funny, and honest portrait of intergenerational care, cultural expectation, and the mess we call family. – Jason Ryle, TIFF International Programmer, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, and Global Indigenous Cinema
Degrassi: Whatever It Takes
World Premiere
Canada | 2025 | 111m | English
Before viewers ever heard about a street called Degrassi (or De Grassi, as the actual street sign says), most young characters on TV fit a certain type. They were cheerful, smiling, and pretty much perfect unless they were learning a lesson in an Afterschool Special. But these were not the kids a Toronto teacher named Linda Schuyler and her then-partner Kit Hood wanted to put on screen when they began casting for the short films that eventually became The Kids of Degrassi Street (1979–1986), the first series in a decades-spanning franchise that changed teen TV forever.
Both a warm-hearted tribute to a pop culture institution and a clear-eyed look at its ups, downs, and flaws, Lisa Rideout’s documentary relates the Degrassi saga from the perspectives of its creators, writers, superfans, and, of course, its cast members.
It all makes for an engrossing history, one that celebrates the realistic take on adolescence that the franchise pioneered (especially when tackling divisive subjects like abortion) while also delving into thornier matters, like some actors’ misgivings about what the show demanded of them and how little they were compensated. Of course, its most famous alumni—Aubrey Drake Graham—is doing just fine judging by the scenes of him reminiscing about the years he spent playing Jimmy Brooks.
Regardless of whether you’re a Degrassi High devotee, a Next Generation fan or a newcomer to these iconic classrooms and hallways, you’ll have much to learn from Rideout’s engaging and insightful account of a uniquely Canadian phenomenon. – JASON ANDERSON, TIFF Lead Programmer, Canada; International Programmer, Nordic and Benelux regions; Advisor, Short Cuts
Wayward
World Premiere
Canada | 2025 | 88m | English
Multihyphenate Canadian performer Mae Martin returns to serialized storytelling five years after their beloved semi-autobiographical Feel Good debuted. Their new limited series, Wayward, follows rebellious teens Abby (Sydney Topliffe) and Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind) in the early aughts as they skip classes, get high, and listen to their Discmans, unaware that their parents are scheming to remedy their “bad” behaviour by involuntarily admitting them to a mysterious correctional school.
As Abby and Leila innocently enjoy their final days of slacker freedom, detective Alex Dempsey (Martin) arrives in the town of Tall Pines with their wife Laura (Sarah Gadon), who grew up there and feels drawn to return in her final months of pregnancy. Tall Pines is the kind of place where everyone knows your name, and homemade preserves are left on your front porch by neighbours, a gesture Laura finds comforting and Alex finds jarring. Although Alex may warm to small-town life, it’s clear they still have suspicions, especially when it comes to Evelyn (Toni Collette), the headmistress of the correctional school, who appears congenial and caring, but whose connection to Laura raises red flags.
When a teen escapes the facility, the sinister underbelly of the school is exposed, bringing Alex, Laura, Abby, and Leila together under dire circumstances. Featuring a killer soundtrack and Martin’s talents in front of and behind the camera, Wayward shines a light on the “troubled teen” industry, questioning societal definitions of what constitutes “bad” behaviour. – Geoff Macnaughton, TIFF Vice President, Industry & Theatrical, Lead Programmer, Primetime
Julian
World Premiere
Belgium, Netherlands | 2025 | 91m | English, French, Dutch
Full of beauty, warmth, and poignancy, the first feature by Belgium’s Cato Kusters celebrates a true-life love story, one whose impact and importance extends far beyond the two extraordinary people at its centre. It begins with a fleeting but fateful encounter as Fleur (Nina Meurisse) and Julian (Laurence Roothooft) catch each other’s eyes while attending a concert. Soon, the two women are head over heels and thinking about next steps. But an intriguing idea arises during a dinner conversation with friends. In order to raise public awareness about all the places where gay people cannot marry, could it be possible to say “I do” in every country where they can?
Named for the number of nations where gay marriage was legal in 2017, the 22 Project swiftly began to take shape. Yet in spite of Fleur’s formidable planning skills and some early triumphs, the couple’s quest runs into a challenge that neither could have anticipated, one that adds different shades to the brighter colours that had suffused Fleur and Julian’s story.
Adapted from Fleur Pierets’ acclaimed memoir, Kusters’ feature debut possesses an emotional richness and sensitivity that it shares with the films of Lukas Dhont — appropriately enough, the Belgian filmmaker co-produced Julian with his brother Michiel Dhont. The chemistry between Roothooft and Meurisse—a rising French star thanks to her roles in recent films by Céline Sciamma and Boris Lojkine—also helps ensure that Kusters’ remarkable film resonates as deeply and profoundly as it does. – Jason Anderson, TIFF Lead Programmer, Canada; International Programmer, Nordic and Benelux regions; Advisor, Short Cuts
Babystar
World Premiere
Germany | 2025 | 98m | German
Baby-faced 16-year-old Luca (Maja Bons) is the envy of every chronically online teen and, as the star of her parents’ family-oriented social-media empire, she has never had a day out of the limelight. The picture-perfect family enjoys—and lives off—the extravagant spoils of their brand deals and ad revenue, and is set to capitalize on Luca’s personally trained AI model, a digital copy of her lucrative look.
But when she learns she will not be an only child for much longer, Luca’s flawless smile begins to falter. As a new sibling—who would be similarly subjected to the cloying realities of social-media stardom—looms, Luca discerns that the life constructed around her is just as curated as her Instagram grid, and she starts violently rejecting the only world she knows.
This debut feature from director Joscha Bongard is equal parts envy—and anxiety—inducing. Bongard harnesses his own work experience in social media to consider the darkness embedded in our attention economy, building a sense of surveillance with a creeping camera and multiscreen approach. Bons’ star-making performance as Luca lends an authentic horror to a teenager’s experience with family, intimacy, and fame, amid the satire of her deeply oblivious and uber-cringe parents.
Unique as her situation may seem, as Luca’s online identity crumbles, a universality emerges in her conflicted dependency on her parents and desire for escape. Desperate for a modicum of control and exhausted by her previous perfection, Luca’s slipping reality pushes her to take drastic measures, destroying her easy likeability online and, perhaps, IRL. – DOROTA LECH, TIFF Lead Programmer, Discovery and International Programmer, Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, Turkey and Iran
Dinner With Friends
World Premiere
Canada | 2025 | 96m | English
With so many major distractions like kids and careers, adult friendships are hard to maintain, reducing in-person quality time to a minimum. That is the basis of Dinner With Friends, the feature debut of Sasha Leigh Henry (Sinking Ship, TIFF ’20; Bria Mack Gets a Life, TIFF ’23).
Channelling films like The Big Chill, Husbands and Wives, and Past Lives for inspiration, Dinner With Friends follows eight longtime friends as they meet up for dinner parties—sometimes after months have passed—that often end in surprise announcements and hurt feelings.
Henry, alongside frequent collaborator Tania Thompson, takes topics that are realistic and mundane, like caring for aging parents or sitting in city traffic, and uses those as launching points for major drama and full character developments.
Fittingly, we only ever see the group together, with the exception of the first scenes introducing long-married couple Joy (Tattiawna Jones) and Malachi (Alex Spencer) as they debate whether to put in the effort to reunite the friend group. Once together, long-held tensions and inside jokes lend authenticity, suggesting these friends have spent their twenties together.
Dinner With Friends offers a look inside this set of millennials, with full access to their group chat and a seat at their tables, begrudgingly hosted by anyone except for the Type A Joy. – Kelly Boutsalis, TIFF International Programmer, Canada
Powwow People
World Premiere
USA | 2025 | 88m | English
Visionary director Sky Hopinka’s Powwow People invites audiences into the vibrant orbit of a powwow. And not as detached observers but as welcomed participants. Both a celebration and a radiant assertion of sovereignty, Hopinka’s second feature immerses viewers in a globally iconic First Nations event, rendered here with a cinematic language that defies easy categorization.
Eschewing conventional documentary structures and narration, Hopinka deploys direct verité with subtlety and atmospheric precision to open intimate spaces where dancers, singers, and drummers prepare to enter the circle. Among them: a charismatic emcee, a Two-Spirit dancer imagining new futures, and a host of intergenerational presences that mark time in gesture, regalia, and rhythm.
Shot over three days and unfolding across the arc of a single one, the film moves from daylight into darkness, where the participants’ arrivals, preparations, and performances braid memory, motion, humour, and cultural resonance, culminating in a mesmeric 30-minute unbroken shot of a Northern Traditional dance special.
A multidisciplinary artist and academic whose work has reshaped the aesthetics of Indigenous cinema, Hopinka continues to reconfigure how we look at, listen to, and witness Indigenous experiences. With Powwow People, he subverts the extractive lens of ethnography, co-organizing the powwow itself and inviting the dancers, vendors, singers, and spectators into a consciously constructed collaboration for film. This is not a document of a powwow. It is a powwow in cinematic form. – Jason Ryle, TIFF International Programmer, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, and Global Indigenous Cinema
Follies (Folichonneries)
North American Premiere
Canada | 2025 | 102m | French
A big-hearted look at the complexities of contemporary relationships, Eric K. Boulianne’s debut feature may also be the year’s most hilarious movie. It’s the rarest kind of farce, one that is frank and funny on the subject of sex, yet also extends a spirit of generosity to characters who are doing their best to figure out what it is they really want.
Boulianne and the equally fearless Catherine Chabot play François and Julie, a longtime couple living in Montreal with two kids. Feeling stagnant but still committed to each other and their family, they decide that opening up their relationship could lead to happier lives. But, as is so often the case with new possibilities and new partners, circumstances soon get more complicated than they expected, making it hard for François and Julie to abide by the rules they set for themselves.
The co-writer of such TIFF features as Vincent Biron’s Prank (2016) and Stéphane Lafleur’s Viking (2022), Boulianne also demonstrated his skills as an actor and director in his short Faire un enfant (2023), a prizewinner at the Locarno Film Festival and a selection for Short Cuts and Canada’s Top Ten. The energy he exudes on screen is more than matched by Chabot and other castmates who do whatever it takes to portray this exploration of new sexual frontiers, all without a trace of judgment or kink-shaming. Indeed, for all the bodies on display in all their many configurations, Boulianne’s film may be at its most revealing when sharing its insights about love, commitment, and what it takes to be truly honest. – Jason Anderson, TIFF Lead Programmer, Canada; International Programmer, Nordic and Benelux regions; Advisor, Short Cuts
Modern Whore
World Premiere
Canada | 2025 | 80m | English
An impassioned and insightful rebuttal to the assumptions, misconceptions, and faulty representations that surround sex work and sex workers, Modern Whore may also be the most audacious and engaging movie ever made about the oldest profession.
Successfully expanding on their 2020 short film and book of the same name, director Nicole Bazuin and subject and co-writer Andrea Werhun take viewers on a very eventful journey through Werhun’s experiences as an escort and exotic dancer, a career she began when she was a university student in Toronto. As Werhun recounts with great flair and frankness in the film’s stylized, fourth-wall-breaking re-enactments, there were many lessons to be learned and challenges to be faced, including the lack of protection from toxic clients and her own internalized versions of the shame that society associates with female pleasure and the sex industry.
Though Modern Whore doesn’t flinch from portraying the darker and more disturbing aspects of sex work, its greater aim is to validate and celebrate the people who perform it, presenting them as fully complex individuals. The film also ventures beyond the scope of Werhun’s career to include experiences and perspectives that are different from her own as a white cisgendered woman, resulting in a wider view of the sex worker community.
Werhun’s wealth of insight and her work as an activist and advocate has already impacted such films as Anora (TIFF ’24), for which she served as a consultant and whose director Sean Baker is one of Modern Whore’s executive producers, and Paying for It (TIFF ’24), in which she also acted. Yet even when compared with those narrative companion pieces, the writer’s latest collaboration with Bazuin may be both wiser and wilder. – Jason Anderson, TIFF Lead Programmer, Canada; International Programmer, Nordic and Benelux regions; Advisor, Short Cuts
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
World Premiere
USA | 2025 | 144m | English
In 2019, Oscar nominated writer-director Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig revitalized the British drawing room murder mystery with the gleeful, star-laden Knives Out, creating their own version of Agatha Christie’s unflappable detective Hercule Poirot with Craig’s brilliant Southerner, Benoit Blanc. The follow-up, Glass Onion (TIFF ’22), focused on a tech-bro billionaire, ratcheting up the humour and evoking Herbert Ross’ cult classic The Last of Sheila. (It also threw in the added fun of seeing obscenely rich people’s gaudiest stuff get trashed.) Wake Up Dead Man shifts gears again with a relatively sombre look into the tensions between faith and logic.
This time, Johnson riffs on the dark, gothic elements of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue—a seemingly impossible locked-room scenario involving a corpse—while still incorporating many of the series’ signature elements. Set in a small town and focusing on its local church, Wake Up Dead Man is packed with stars, including Josh O’Connor as a the younger cleric to Josh Brolin’s autocratic, abrasive priest, Glenn Close as his right-hand person, plus Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Jeremy Renner (whose likeness had a memorable appearance in Glass Onion), and Mila Kunis as a local cop who is as determined as Blanc to solve this seemingly insoluble case. And there’s a murder that presents itself as an impossible crime. All that and Craig delivers perhaps his best Blanc yet.
The latest entry in one of the most successful mystery series in recent film history is as strong, inventive, and entertaining as ever. – ROBYN CITIZEN, TIFF Director of Programming, Festival & Cinematheque; Lead Programmer, Platform, US Indies, France and South Asia
Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery
World Premiere
Canada | 2025 | 99m | English
Lilith Fair changed everything. Upon its emergence in 1997, this revolutionary travelling music festival, helmed by superstar Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan and featuring exclusively women or women-led acts, exploded the notion that popular music could only support a token quota of women’s voices. This galvanizing documentary from director Ally Pankiw (I Used To Be Funny) chronicles Lilith Fair’s triumphant three-year run and features new interviews with key performers such as Jewel, Bonnie Raitt, Erykah Badu, and Emmylou Harris.
Back in the ’90s, conventional “wisdom” suggested that commercial radio couldn’t play two women in a row. Frustrated by this, McLachlan went on tour with Paula Cole to offer audiences an entire night of women’s artistry. That tour went so well that the next summer McLachlan debuted Lilith Fair, named after the Lilith of Jewish lore: Adam’s renegade first wife. It became the year’s top-grossing festival simply because the artists were so good. Besides the luminaries noted above, the Fair’s eventual roster included Fiona Apple, Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, Suzanne Vega, Indigo Girls, and Pat Benatar.
With beautifully integrated performances, backstage footage, and media coverage, Pankiw explores the logistics and challenges in making these events happen. She also highlights the festival’s significance to younger up-and-coming artists through interviews with Brandi Carlile and Olivia Rodrigo. There’s also testimony from actor-filmmaker Dan Levy, a producer of the film, who caught his first Fair as a boy and was forever affected. The legacy of Lilith Fair lives on, and this inspiring film tells us why. – TIFF
The Captive (El Cautivo)
World Premiere
Spain, Italy | 2025 | 134m | Spanish, Arabic, Italian
The setting is Algiers in the year 1575. The protagonist is one of the most important storytellers of all time. While his literary work reshaped the Spanish language, bringing it into the modern era, little is known about the life of Miguel de Cervantes. The icon, interpreted in this instance by Julio Peña Fernández, is held for ransom as a young ex-soldier, and the narrative astutely presents him on the verge of discovering his true calling and abilities.
Far from being a canonical depiction of the few facts that have transcended history, in the hands of visionary writer-director Alejandro Amenábar (The Others; The Sea Inside, TIFF ’04; While at War, TIFF ’19) the drama unfolds as a complete, bold retelling of plausible events. Peña Fernández’s Cervantes is fully embodied and complex, forced to discover humanity in the seemingly alien world of his captors. Despite the dire situation he finds himself in, Cervantes makes use of his talents and captures the attention of Hasan, the Bajá of Algiers (Italian star Alessandro Borghi), with whom he develops a shifting connection that alters his fate.
The production is exquisitely designed, with a rich and textured quality captured by cinematographer Alex Catalán. Its careful use of light and attentive direction bolster finely tuned performances by Peña Fernández and Borghi, taking audiences on a journey to a fraught place and time, offering a window into the mind of the resourceful author of the foundational masterpiece Don Quixote. – Diana Cadavid, TIFF
International Programmer, Latin America, Spain and Portugal
Christy
World Premiere
USA | 2025 | 135m | English
By turns devastating and triumphant, the latest from Australian auteur David Michôd (Animal Kingdom) chronicles the astonishing life of pioneering women’s boxer Christy Martin. Featuring career-best performances from Sydney Sweeney (TIFF ’24’s Eden) and Ben Foster (TIFF ’24’s Sharp Corner), Christy is a fierce tale of self-actualization in the face of terrifying adversity.
Born in West Virginia—her nickname, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” derives from her father’s profession—Christy (Sweeney) excelled at sports and attended college on a basketball scholarship. In the late 1980s, she starts fighting in—and winning—“Toughwoman” contests before beginning training with boxing coach Jim Martin (Foster) and embarking on what will prove to be a hugely successful career in a still-nascent sport.
Despite a 25-year age difference, Christy and Jim marry, intensifying a codependency exacerbated by drug use, financial malfeasance, and acts of physical and psychological abuse. Just as Christy is making historic strides in her sport, she’s forced to contend with a horrendous private life — climaxing in an act that nearly kills her.
Written by Michôd and Mirrah Foulkes, Christy doesn’t shy away from the harsh side of its subject’s story, but neither does it sensationalize brutality. Dealing with themes of misogyny, domestic violence, and sexual identity, the film does justice to Christy’s journey by being frank about the obstacles she overcame.
Foster exposes the darkness driving the man who was first Christy’s champion and then her tormenter, but the heart of this film lies with Sweeney, who disappears into this role of a woman who confronted many demons as she fought her way to the top. – ROBYN CITIZEN, TIFF Director of Programming, Festival & Cinematheque; Lead Programmer, Platform, US Indies, France and South Asia
Compiled by James Kleinmann, descriptions courtesy of TIFF
The 50th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival runs September 4th – 14th, 2025. For the full lineup and to purchase tickets head to TIFF.net.
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