The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), taking place September 8-18, 2022, announced this morning the complete lineup for its Documentary and Contemporary World Cinema sections, which includes films from Cuba, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico, in their world, North American, and Canadian premieres.
Having its North American premiere in TIFF Docs is My Imaginary Country / Mi país imaginario, the latest film by Chilean master documentarian Patricio Guzmán, who turns his gaze on the social outburst sparked in Chile in October 2019, in a gut-wrenching and beautiful account of change happening before our eyes.
Also screening in TIFF Docs, in its Canadian premiere, is the Brazilian documentary Miúcha, The Voice of Bossa Nova by Daniel Zarvos and Liliane Mutti, which dives into the career and personal life of singer Heloísa Maria Buarque de Hollanda, aka Miúcha. Despite her position at the epicente rof the Brazilian bossa nova scene, she has been largely underappreciated.
Five Latin American films will screen in TIFF’s Contemporary World Cinema section, three of them in their world premiere: the Mexican film Love & Mathematics / Amor y matemáticas by Claudia Sainte-Luce, the Cuban film Vicenta B. by Carlos Lechuga, and So Much Tenderness by Colombian director Lina Rodriguez.
Set in Monterrey, the fifth film by Sainte-Luce (The Amazing Catfish) is a nuanced satirical comedy about longing and disconnection, that follows a former boy-band pop star and an erstwhile fan struggle with social norms and expectations living in the suburbs.
In Lechuga’s third feature (Santa & Andrés), a touching ode to life and the healing power of letting go, a Cuban woman who can see into the future and communicate with spirits faces an existential crisis and confronts her own anxiety.
So Much Tenderness by Canadian-Colombian director Lina Rodriguez follows a Colombian environmental lawyer who flees to Canada after the death of her husband, but her attempt at a new life is challenged when she discovers that the past is not so easily left behind.
And two Latin American films, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last May, will have its North American premiere at Toronto in September: the Costa Rican film Domingo and the Mist / Domingo y la niebla by Ariel Escalante Meza; and the Colombian film La Jauría, the debut feature by Andrés Ramírez Pulido.
In Escalante Meza’s deeply atmospheric and evocative second feature, a widowed loner is pushed by progress and unscrupulous developers threatening both his land and his connection to the past; while in the brooding, resonant feature debut by writer-director Ramírez Pulido, troubled teenagers are forced to fend for themselves after they are are locked away in an experimental tropical-forest prison.
