The EDM sensation’s collaboration with Harmony Korine, Spring Breakers, was among today’s Special Presentations announcements.
Sure, TIFF has had rock superstars like U2, Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam and Neil Young all make nice at the festival in recent years—but might their red carpets have enough room for Skrillex? That’s just one of many questions prompted by today’s announcements of titles being readied for TIFF’s 37th edition, which runs Sept. 6-16.
While the creatively coiffed EDM sensation has yet to get a star vehicle of his own in either feature or documentary form, he does provide the score for Spring Breakers, the latest by Harmony Korine. The Gummo director’s new co-ed romp makes its North American premiere in TIFF’s Special Presentations section alongside two more movies that seem similarly geared to music fans: Bad 25, Spike Lee’s documentary on the making of Michael Jackson’s follow-up to Thriller, and Greetings From Tim Buckley, a drama depicting events leading up to Jeff Buckley’s historic debut at a tribute concert to the father he never knew. (Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley plays the equally ill-fated young singer.)
Elsewhere among the 18 films added to Special Presentations are new efforts by Susanne Bier (Love Is All You Need), Brian De Palma (Passion, with Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams) and Lee Daniels (The Paperboy). Most exciting of all is the long-awaited and much-predicted announcement for Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, a new drama that may or may not be a fictionalized account of the origins of Scientology—audiences who miss its TIFF bow will know when it goes into wide release Sept. 14. Three new Galas were also added, including closing-night film Song for Marion, a British drama starring Terence Stamp and Vanessa Redgrave—a.k.a. the only two Limey geezers who weren’t in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
TIFF’s most adventurous-minded patrons will be happy with the offerings in Wavelengths, which has now expanded to absorb what used to be the Visions program. Compilations of new shorts by avant-garde all-stars like Nathaniel Dorsky, Ben Rivers, and Paolo Gioli are well-complemented by feature-length works such as Carlos Reygadas’ Cannes curiosity Post Tenebras Lux, Ying Liang’s recent Locarno prizewinner When Night Falls, and Leviathan, a seafaring experimental doc by the team behind Sweetgrass. Site-specific works by Sook-Yin Lee and more are featured in Future Projections, as is a one-night spectacular by Peaches at The Drake Hotel.
Finally, the catch-all Contemporary World Cinema program added a whopping 62 titles, five of which will be augmented with talks by Michael Ignatieff and other scholars at the U of T’s Munk School of Global Affairs. Among the filmmakers with new wares at the fest are Edward Burns (The Fitzgerald Family Christmas), Japanese maverick Sion Sono (The Land of Hope), Mika Kaurismaki (Road North), Russian upstart Sergei Loznitsa (In the Fog) and Germany’s Christian Petzold (Barbara). Existential-minded J-horror great Kiyoshi Kurosawa also returns with Penance, a five-episode TV series for Japanese TV that is sure to be one of TIFF’s longest entries at a running time of four-and-a-half hours. Weird but true: my forthcoming dubstep remix lasts more than seven!
