From TIFF to Venice and beyond, check out these festival-bound films made with the invaluable contributions of DGC Ontario Members hitting the festival circuit this season.
Watch this space for updates as festival announcements continue to roll out over the coming weeks!
CURRENTLY ANNOUNCED
TIFF Presentations
Click here to view the 2023 TIFF schedule.
Fingernails
International Premiere
Click here for a full list of DGC Ontario Members who worked on Fingernails.
Starring Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, and Jeremy Allen White, Greek director Christos Nikou’s English-language debut weaves an allegory about our desire for certainty, reliance on technology, and the price we pay for losing the connection to our most primal instincts.
Seven Veils
World Premiere
Click here for a full list of DGC Ontario Members who worked on Seven Veils.
DGC Ontario Director Atom Egoyan and his Chloe star Amanda Seyfried reunite for this knotty psychodrama about a young theatre director forced to re-examine her own trauma while working on a remount of Salome. Seven Veils will also screen at Cinefest Sudbury and the Vancouver Film Festival this fall.
Swan Song
World Premiere
Click here for a full list of DGC Ontario Members who worked on Swan Song.
DGC Ontario Director Chelsea McMullan takes us inside the National Ballet of Canada’s 2022 production of Swan Lake, directed and staged by the legendary Karen Kain.
The Dead Don’t Hurt
World Premiere
Click here for a full list of DGC Ontario Members who worked on The Dead Don’t Hurt.
Set in the 1860s, Viggo Mortensen’s second outing as Writer-Director (after his previous DGC Ontario Production Falling, which screened at TIFF ’20) is an elegantly realized feminist western starring Mortensen himself and Vicky Krieps as immigrants attempting to forge a life in a corrupt California town.
Dream Scenario
World Premiere
Click here for a full list of DGC Ontario Members who worked on Dream Scenario.
This satirical swipe at celebrity and groupthink from writer-director Kristoffer Borgli and co-producer Ari Aster stars Nicolas Cage as an inconspicuous academic who is thrust into the limelight after he starts inexplicably appearing in people’s dreams.
The Queen of My Dreams
World Premiere
Click here for a full list of DGC Ontario Members who worked on The Queen of My Dreams.
Fawzia Mirza’s stylish feature debut mashes up the textures of Indian cinema and a Canadian coming-of-age picture, tracing key moments in the lives of a mother and daughter born three decades apart.
Fitting In (previously titled Bloody Hell)
Canadian Premiere
Click here for a full list of DGC Ontario Members who worked on Fitting In.
When 16-year-old Lindy is diagnosed with a reproductive condition, MRKH syndrome, the diagnosis upsets her understanding of womanhood and sexual identity and throws her relationships with her new boyfriend, her friends, and her mother into disarray. Fitting In previously premiered under the title Bloody Hell at the 2023 South By Southwest Film Festival this past spring and will also screen at Cinefest Sudbury. Check out our interview with the creative team of Fitting In: Director Molly McGlynn, Picture Editor Maureen Grant, Production Designer Thea Hollatz, and Director of Photography Nina Djacic.
In Flames
North American Premiere
Click here for a list of DGC Ontario Members who worked on In Flames.
In present-day Karachi, a medical student struggles to keep her family together while being stalked by forces she can’t entirely understand.
I Am Sirat
World Premiere
Caught between duty and self-determination, Sirat Taneja is a transgender woman who must act as her mother’s son when at home in New Delhi, but can be the woman she really is with her friends and at work with the Government of India. A collaboration between DGC Ontario Director Deepa Mehta and Sirat, the film has been constructed around Sirat’s lens. Shot on smartphones, Sirat controls her narrative and makes it accessible to us.
Close To You
World Premiere
Click here for a full list of DGC Ontario Members who worked on Close To You
Sam (Elliot Page) hasn’t been home since his transition, and after four years in Toronto, he takes a long-dreaded trip back to Cobourg for his father’s birthday. On the train there, he runs into Katherine (Hillary Baack), a friend from high school with her own complicated life now, and feelings from their unresolved past begin to bubble to the surface.
TIFF Short Cuts
Motherland (سرزمین مادری)
World Premiere
Click here for a full list of DGC Ontario Members who worked on Motherland.
Brandishing all the energy and texture that made her debut feature Firecrackers so special, DGC Ontario Director Jasmin Mozaffari’s new short film tells the story of a man whose personal crises are compounded by the tensions that surround him as an Iranian in America circa 1979.
Redlights
World Premiere
Click here for a full list of DGC Ontario Members who worked on Redlights.
Riveting performances by Kaniehtiio Horn and Ellyn Jade add further levels of tension and texture to Eva Thomas’s drama about two Indigenous women whose evening outing takes a dangerous direction.
Aftercare
World Premiere
Click here for a full list of DGC Ontario Members who worked on Aftercare.
A tattoo studio becomes the site for an emotionally charged reunion between a woman and the now-grown person she used to babysit in Anubha Momin’s affecting drama.
TIFF Primetime
Bria Mack Gets A Life
World Premiere
Click here for a list of Members who worked on Bria Mack Gets A Life
Bria Mack Gets A Life is a self-assured comedy series from DGC Ontario Director Sasha Leigh Henry. Malaika Hennie-Hamadi stars as Bria “Mack” McFarlane, a young Black Canadian woman who has recently graduated from university and is navigating the challenges of establishing her adult life with the help of Black Attack (Hannan Younis), her invisible hype girl.
Black Life: Untold Stories
World Premiere
Click here for a list of Members who worked on Black Life: Untold Stories
Black Life: Untold Stories is a new CBC documentary series tracing the individual and collective histories of Black people in Canada, dedicated to “dispelling common myths and celebrating the many contributions of Black Canadians.” Employing different visual aesthetics and editorial approaches in each episode, the show’s first episodes address the history of enslaved people in Canada that our politicians whitewash, and the attempts of Black Canadians to create their own communities in the face of intimidation and violence from their racist neighbours.
Classics Programme
Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got
Unavailable for decades, Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got returns to the screen in a pristine new restoration. DGC Ontario Director Brigitte Berman’s Oscar-winning study of the legendary clarinetist and bandleader — whom she’d first interviewed while working on her 1981 documentary about Bix Beiderbecke — is a portrait of a gifted, driven musician with an ambivalent relationship to his own stardom.
Venice Film Festival
Priscilla
World Premiere
Click here for a full list of DGC Ontario Members who worked on Priscilla.
A24’s highly-anticipated biopic of Priscilla Presley, directed by Sofia Coppola and featuring the talents of DGC Ontario Members like Production Designer Tamara Deverell, premieres at the Venice Film Festival in early September. It will also screen as the Centerpiece Selection of the 2023 New York Film Festival on October 6.
Cinefest Sudbury
Better Days
Click here for a full list of DGC Ontario Members who worked on Better Days.
From DGC Ontario Director Joan Carr-Wiggin. After Kate’s husband of more than 30 years dies, she withdraws into a world of vodka, grief — and Halloween.
