The Fall Festival 50: Our Wishlist For The Venice, Telluride And Toronto Film Festivals

02 Jul The Fall Festival 50: Our Wishlist For The Venice, Telluride And Toronto Film Festivals

The Playlist staff has compiled a list of 50 new films that may appear in this Fall’s film festival circuit, including the Telluride Film Festival (TIFF).  In addition to a synopsis of each film, the likelihood of the film being shown at a film festival and the festival that it is most likely to be shown at is discussed.

With June at its end and the days getting shorter, we’re looking down the road, beyond the unstoppable, all-devouring toy franchise behemoth that’s probably about to blot out the sun (“Transformers: Abandon Hope”), toward the fall festival season, and the films that we expect, hope or surmise we might see at the big trio of Venice, Telluride and Toronto, or the lower-profile NYFF or AFI Fest in the unlikely event of us surviving the Summer.

The 50-odd new film titles reviewed in this article range from pretty much dead certs to much dicier prospects, and internally of course the intrepid reporters assigned to these various beats are pulling for their own festival to make the biggest showing (come on Venice!) but taken as a whole, this list serves as a pretty good rundown of some of the films we’re most anxiously awaiting for the rest of the year. At this early stage, we do naturally skew toward the English-language films we’ve heard the most about, though quite a few foreign titles/directors have made their way onto our radars too. Not so promising is the ratio of female to male directors–women, as ever, represent a depressingly small proportion of the overall number of directors and a fair few of those who are on the list are on the dicier end of the spectrum for whether they’re going to show up in the fall at all. Though with the narrative about female director representation ongoing, we’d hope programmers will be anxious to be seen to be championing women in film any chance they get, which may result in a few titles getting the extra boost of encouragement to finish up in time.

As ever, glamorous Venice is the first curtain to rise, starting August 27th and running to September 6th, while little gem Telluride runs the weekend of August 29th-Sept 1st, the vast Toronto starts September 4th and continues till the 14th and the sprawling New York Film Festival brings up the rear in terms of timing and profile, running from September 27th to October 13th, followed by AFI Fest in early November. Fingers crossed for the below…..

Click here to continue reading about each of the 50 new films coming this Fall