“There are a lot of really good films out there at the moment - the quality of work during the pandemic has not dropped. So it's a very exciting time for filmmakers with lots of sales and deals being made.”  DIFF Artistic Director Grainne Humphreys reports from Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).  As told to Sarah Hughes.  

This year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), was held online, which caused some issues in that although there were more films in the programme - 120 - many of them were geo-locked and couldn’t be viewed outside Canada.  

I enjoyed much of what I did see.  I thought that ‘Monsieur Bachmann and his Class’ – a three-hour film about a German school teacher –  was quite wonderful, as was ‘Le Prince’, an ‘opposites attract’ love story from Switzerland.  

The new film from Laurence Cantet (‘The Class’) is ‘Arthur Rambo’, which tells the story of an acclaimed French author who is cancelled when his racist tweets are found.  Other highlights included ‘Futura’, an Italian film about teenagers by the fantastic Alice Rohrwacher and ‘Montana Story’, a Western which slowly wins you over with its sunsets and low key story about siblings.

A lot of films at the festival will be going to streaming services, including Jake Gyllenhaal’s ‘The Guilty’, a remake of a Danish film which was really well received and is coming to Netflix soon. 

'The Guilty', starring Jake Gyllenhaal, screened at TIFF.

One of my favourite cinematic discoveries has been ‘Sundown’, which is set in Acapulco and directed by a Mexican filmmaker called Michel Franco, who we’ve shown a lot in Dublin. The film stars Tim Roth, who came to our festival in Dublin many years ago, with the opening night film ‘Broken’ and he received our Volta award. 

Between all of the festivals which I’ve attended this year, one of the key significant aspects is that there are a lot of really good films out there at the moment - the quality of work during the pandemic has not dropped. 

It's a very exciting time for filmmakers with lots of sales and deals being made, as those ever looming streaming platforms ready to bite on anything they think would work for them with their insatiable appetite for content. But other than that, it's just been lovely to be back in the cinema seeing new work, uncovering new names, and hopefully, finding lots of things that will work for DIFF’s 20th anniversary event in February 2021.