A drama about an Iranian human rights activist and a documentary about the hacking of queer indie pop duo Tegan and Sara are among the films that have been added to the lineup of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, which unveiled its Centrepiece section on Tuesday to kick off a second week of programming announcements.
The 43 films come from filmmakers representing 41 countries, with 18 of the titles receiving their world premieres at TIFF. Those premieres include “Seven Days,” a film about an imprisoned Iranian activist directed by Ali Samadi Ahadi and written by Mohammad Rasoulof, a filmmaker who was himself sentenced to flogging and prison by Iranian authorities; “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,” a romantic comedy from French writer-director Laura Piani; “The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos,” a debut from the Nigerian filmmaking group known as the Agbajowo Collective; and Erin Lee Carr’s “Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara,” a documentary about the Canadian duo whose online community was victimized by identify thieves in 2011.
A number of films in the Centrepiece program premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Those include Rasoulouf’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” which won a special award in the main competition; Boris Lojkine’s “Souleymane’s Story,” which was given the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize and Performance Prize; and Matthew Rankin’s “Universal Language,” which took the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award.
Other Cannes titles in the Centrepiece lineup include Gints Zilbalodis’ “Flow,” Sandhya Suri’s “Santosh,” Rúnar Rúnarsson’s “When the Light Breaks,” Lou Ye’s “An Unfinished Film” and Mahdi Fleifel’s “To a Land Unknown.”The lineup will also include Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. More than 30 of the films are sales titles that will go to Toronto looking for distribution.
The Centrepiece program was introduced last year as a rebranding of the festival’s Contemporary World Cinema section. Centrepiece selections in 2023 included the Oscar nominees “Perfect Days,” “The Teacher’s Lounge” and “Robot Dreams,” as well as “About Dry Grasses,” “Fallen Leaves,” “The Monk and the Gun” and “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed.”
TIFF previously announced the selections in its Galas, Special Presentations, Discovery, Platform and Midnight Madness sections. The Centrepiece announcement begins a week in which the festival’s TIFF Docs, Wavelength, Classics, Short Cuts and Primetime programs will also be announced.