This September, I had the privilege of attending the 51st Toronto International Film Festival – the largest publicly-attended film festival in the world
To attend the revered Toronto International Film Festival was at the very top of my film-cognoscenti bucket list, and it certainly did not disappoint. In between exploring the Canadian city and its leafy suburban neighbourhoods, I filled my schedule with a selection of screenings: some highly anticipated; others quite under the radar.
La Gradiva
French cinematographer Marine Atlan’s directorial debut film La Gradiva premiered at Cannes this year; a highly commendable achievement for a first-time director, and entirely deserved. My first screening at TIFF was a poignant one as it highlighted to me the sole purpose of film festivals – to provide a platform for spotlighting the medium’s up-and-coming talent. Atlan takes us on an adventure from Paris to Naples as we experience a group of French students’ life-altering trip to Pompeii, the preserved Roman city which suffered immense destruction after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. La Gradiva is a haunting coming-of-age film; it delves into the complexities of adolescence, while examining the formative experiences and relationships we acquire.
Búnker
A contender for the Venice International Film Festival’s prestigious Golden Globe award, Florian Zeller’s Spanish-English psychological thriller was one of my favourites of the TIFF lineup. We’re drawn into a Madrid expat’s family, now residing in a wealthy neighbourhood in the heart of London. Architect Miguel (Javier Bardem) and his spouse Sofia (Penélope Cruz) run into marital problems when Miguel gets pitched a project of building an underground bunker for a nihilistic tech billionaire’s (Paul Dano) home in Hawaii. Alongside the issue of a neighbourly feud, Sofia finds solace in a new friendship with an author, Jeremy (Patrick Schwarzenegger), whose book her company is publishing.
Aside from the two leading performances from the real-life husband and wife, the highly Almodovárian set design was a standout, which, as Bardem and Zeller told us in the succeeding Q&A, was entirely built from scratch in a Madrid studio.
The Idiot(s)
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After premiering at Colorado’s Telluride, the surrealist origin story about eccentric Russian novelist Dostoevsky’s literary classic The Idiot(s) returned to the screen at TIFF. Manchester’s own Aimee Lou Wood shines in her portrayal as Dostoyevsky’s wife, Anna, whose constant exasperation at her husband’s incompetence and foolishness sent the audience into hysterics. Johnny Flynn does a marvellous job at portraying the highly unlikeable Dostoyevsky himself, who sees himself as the saviour of Eastern European literature. The Idiot(s) is weird and wacky, as expected from a surrealist film, yet parts of the plot felt over the top in their execution, with absurd moments of sexual transgression. The fact that Aimee Lou Wood herself was sat watching this only about ten rows in front of me ameliorated what I found was otherwise a pretty mediocre production.
La Bola Negra
Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s triptych about queer identity and intergenerational trauma, based on Federico García Lorca’s play of the same name, has already spellbound and captivated audiences across several festivals, having been selected as the Spanish entry for Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards. The film received a long standing ovation – somehow the only one I had experienced at TIFF. While the acting and formal elements were exceptional, I didn’t feel that I connected with it as much as most people seemed to. The three-part narrative became quite difficult to follow at times, and the runtime felt more monolithic than it needed to be. But, as anything produced by Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and his production company El Deseo, La Bola Negra was a raw and sensitive exploration of humanity, and has just arrived in Manchester as part of HOME’s on-tour screenings for London Film Festival.
Misty Green
Halfway through my screenings at the festival, I caught comedian Chris Rock’s A24 comedy-drama hybrid Misty Green. The story follows the titular Misty (Rosalind Eleazar), a washed-up Black Hollywood actress in pursuit of her next big role, who states that these days the only people getting roles are ‘nepo babies and Brits’. She battles substance abuse, a tumultuous relationship with her bipolar brother (Daniel Kaluuya) – who sadly didn’t receive nearly enough screen time, an on-and-off affair with filmmaker-slash-junkie Zach (Adam Driver), and her late boyfriend’s vindictive widow intent on evicting her from her husband’s apartment in which Misty had been living in for years. Misty Green epitomises Hollywood culture, from scenes set in the iconic Roosevelt hotel to its depiction of the relentless nature of auditions. As expected from an A24 picture, the cinematography, crafted by Kira Kelly, was outstanding. The film is an intricate character study of the namesake, but it felt rather hollow and shallow, particularly due to the unlikeable nature of most of the characters.
Magazine
Alexandra Pechman transports us to the New York of the early 2010s, sculpted around Nora (Lily McInerny; notable for her breakthrough role in Palm Trees and Power Lines), an aspiring poet, who begins an internship at a well-regarded literary publication, and subsequently forms a strictly sex-only relationship with her senior colleague, Thomas (Joshuah Melnick). Pechman lifts from her own journalistic experience in this semi-autobiographical dramedy, in an era where HR was seemingly absent despite the rifeness of inappropriate office flirtation and affairs. Laden with laugh-out-loud moments and a well-crafted soundtrack (New Order‘s ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ receives special attention), Magazine serves as a pleasant ode to this departed literary epoch.
Everybody Wants to F*ck Me
Taron Egerton returns in Jonathan Schey’s directorial debut as Adam, embodying the dreaded (and highly current) performative male stereotype: he reads feminist literature, admires latte art, dons the infamous MUBI tote bag, is the only male employee in a female-only business, and works hard to maintain that ‘nice guy’ persona. What’s more, he is a dating app warrior, having hundreds of matches and recycling the same break-up messages – he seems to permanently be in “a bit of a bojangled headspace“. The film swiftly adopted an Obsession-riffed sinister undercurrent, finding itself firmly within cinema’s current craze: the boundary between lust and harassment. Resulting from his pursuit of supposed Classics student Sofia at a theatre bar, he becomes the victim of a sick and twisted science experiment that makes every woman in his vicinity stalk and harass him – including, yes, his own mother, in an attempt to avenge womanising men. This was the most reactive and engaged audience I had been a part of at TIFF; clearly, almost everyone has, at some point, been forced to meet someone like Adam.
After seeing posters plastered around the city, I decided to bag a last-minute ticket to Gail, and this screening perfectly serenaded my time at the film festival. Michael Maxxis provided an inventive spin on the ‘music doc’ genre, honing in on the deeply personal experience of protagonist Gail and her journey following her favourite band, Our Lady Peace, across Canada on their 30th-anniversary tour. Gail considers herself to be the band’s biggest fan (though she constantly reminds us how she hates that word) and is fiercely competitive with other super-fans, seeing them as rivals in her pursuit to become the band’s principal devotee. It was a pleasure for the screening to be paired with a Q&A with Maxxis and Our Lady Peace‘s bassist Duncan Coutts, in which they delved into the struggles they encountered during the <a href="https://cinemamix360.com/2026/10/30/17-youth-trained-in-smartphone-filmmaking-in-srinagar/” title=”17 youth trained in smartphone filmmaking in Srinagar”>filmmaking process, and confirmed the eccentricity and nuances within Gail’s character. Gail created such a profound reaction from me, provoking a solution of both laughter and tears.
My thoughts after my opening screening at TIFF came full-circle after Gail, reinforcing the very importance of film festivals – having the opportunity to engage with beautiful and attention-deserving films you wouldn’t normally encounter. Hopefully, reading about my experience at TIFF will encourage you to attend a film festival, whether that be a local one hosted in your hometown or one abroad, giving you the opportunity to explore a different culture simultaneously. Manchester is home to a multitude of film festivals, including the upcoming Manchester Film Festival and Manchester Animation Festival.
