British films at Toronto 2014

This year’s Toronto International Film Festival programme is awash with UK films and talent, including eight films backed by the BFI Film Fund.

4 September 2014

By Sam Wigley

The Riot Club (2014)

After the trickle, a deluge. Last week we reported a clutch of British films by up and coming directors featuring in this year’s Venice Film Festival. Today, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) gets underway and will feature more than 20 British films in the coming 10 days, with eight of them backed by the BFI Film Fund.

There’s Timothy Spall in Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, his long-cherished biopic about the painter J.M.W. Turner, which premiered in Cannes to wide acclaim and even some suggestions that this is the director’s masterpiece to date.

More lavish period fare is to be seen in Alan Rickman’s second film as director. A Little Chaos stars Kate Winslet as a landscape gardener whose flair and imagination breathes new life into the court of Louis XIV in 17th-century France. It’s not due for UK release until February 2015, though, as with Mr. Turner, British audiences will get their first glimpse when it screens as one of the galas at the BFI London Film Festival in October.

Madame Bovary also takes us back into the French past. Mia Wasikowska stars as the eponymous heroine in this latest adaptation of Flaubert’s classic novel, directed by Sophie Barthes (Cold Souls, 2008).

The new film from Peter Strickland will also be unveiled. The tale of a sadomasochistic relationship between two women that tips its hat to underground erotic cinema of the 1970s, The Duke of Burgundy promises to be another singular and eccentric treat from the man who brought us Berberian Sound Studio (2011).

The Duke of Burgundy (2014)

Receiving its world premiere, the latest film by Lone Scherfig, the Danish director behind the award-winning An Education (2008) and One Day (2011), is The Riot Club, based on Laura Wade’s critically acclaimed play Posh and following the members of a privileged and secretive dining society.

Pride, due for UK release on 12 September, brings to life an oft-forgotten moment in UK political history when a group of LGBT activists lent their support to the NUM during the 1984 miners’ strike. Imelda Staunton, Bill Nighy and Dominic West star.

Police corruption thriller Hyena, directed by Gerard Johnson, will also screen, fresh from opening the Edinburgh Film Festival back in June this year, while Luna receives its world premiere. This is the second film by comic book artist Dave McKean, following his 2004 film MirrorMask.

A clutch of debut features will be on show: Yann Demange’s ’71 is a tense thriller set over a violent night on the streets of Belfast in 1971; X + Y is the fiction debut by BAFTA-winning documentary-maker Morgan Matthews, upon whose BBC doc Beautiful Young Minds this is based; and Second Coming is the first film by playwright Debbie Tucker Green, a realist family drama that received support via a BFI Film Fund model aiding first-time filmmakers working to a budget of £2m or less.

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Both ’71 and Second Coming will compete in the LFF’s First Feature Competition come October, alongside another Toronto title, Theeb, a Jordanian-British co-production set in the Arabian deserts on the cusp of the 1916 Arab revolt.

Among more established talents with films to unveil at TIFF are Michael Winterbottom, bringing his film The Face of an Angel, a dramatisation of the Amanda Knox story; and documentary provocateur Nick Broomfield, whose Tales of the Grim Sleeper is a look at a notorious serial killer who terrorised South Central L.A. over a 25-year period.

British shorts travelling over the Atlantic are Boogaloo and Graham (directed by Michael Lennox and produced by Brian J. Falconer), Ako Mitchell’s I’m in the Corner with the Bluebells, and Kasia Nalewajka’s Pineapple Calamari.

The BFI Film Fund eight

  • The Duke of Burgundy
  • Hyena
  • Mr. Turner
  • Pride
  • The Riot Club
  • Second Coming
  • ’71
  • X + Y

Film of the week: ’71

By Trevor Johnston

Film of the week: ’71

Peter Strickland: 6 films that fed into The Duke of Burgundy

By Peter Strickland

Peter Strickland: 6 films that fed into The Duke of Burgundy

 

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