The Toronto Film Festival has unveiled its lineup for the Industry Selects program of films beyond the official fest lineup and available for worldwide acquisition as each gets an in-person screening for film buyers and industry execs.
Leading the selection is director James Marsh’s Dance First, a biopic with Gabriel Byrne playing the literary giant Samuel Beckett and Sandrine Bonnaire, Maxine Peake, Aidan Gillen and Fionn O’Shea also starring; and director Neil Burger’s Inheritance, a thriller that has a woman played by Phoebe Dynevor learning her father Sam (Rhys Ifans) was once a spy, which puts her at the center of an international conspiracy.
Also picked for market screenings in Toronto is Jimmy Warden’s Borderline, set in 1996 Los Angeles and starring Eric Dane, Ray Nicholson and Samara Weaving as a pop star taken hostage; The Home, a horror pic from Purge series creator James DeMonaco, and starring Pete Davidson as a twentysomething screw-up assigned to community service in a fancy retirement home; and Amelia’s Children, where Diamantino co-director Gabriele Abrantes and star Carloto Cotta reunite for a Euro-Gothic creeper that also stars Brigette Lundy-Paine.
Industry Selects, launched at TIFF in 2002, has sales agents looking to repeat the success last year of select distributors and studio and streamer execs invited to a private market screening of Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, before Focus Features paid $30 million in Toronto for the acquisitions title.
This year’s program includes Julie Jackman’s Bonus Track, where teenager and aspiring pop star George Bobbin (Joe Anders) in his tiny English town meets the son, played by Samuel Paul Small, of a famous musical duo who helps him rehearse for their school’s talent show; Rebecca Snow’s The Boy in the Woods, which stars Jett Klyne as a Jewish boy who survived the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe by hiding out in the forests of Poland; and director Anik Jean’s Les Hommes de Ma Mere, toplined by Léane Labrèche-Dor, Patrick Huard, Marc Messier, Colm Feore and Anne-Marie Cadieux.
Rounding out this year’s Industry Selects program lineup is Orah, from director Lonzo Nzekwe and Star Trek Discovery’s Oyin Oladejo; Robert Budreau’s Queen of Bones, a Depression-era drama starring Martin Freeman, Taylor Schilling, Julia Butters and Jacob Tremblay; John Barker’s Umbrella Men II: Escape from Robben Island, a sequel to the director’s 2022 crime comedy; and the Argentinian drama Vera and the Pleasure of Others from directors Romina Tamburello and Federico Actis.
The Toronto Film Festival is set to run from Sept. 7 to 17, with Industry Selects being part of the official Industry Conference to run Sept. 8 to 12.
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