Nacho Vigalondo’s Daniela Forever, starring Crazy Rich Asians star Henry Golding, will open the Toronto Film Festival’s Platform competition program with a world premiere.
The Madrid-set sci-fi romancer has Golding playing Nicolas, a man grieving after the sudden death of his girlfriend (Beatrice Brannò) six months earlier and taking part in a clinical trial for a drug that reunites him with his former lover via lucid dreams, only to leave him obsessed with a fantasy world. XYZ financed the indie from the Spanish filmmaker Vigalondo, who is best known for movies like Timecrimes and Colossal, starring Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis.
Toronto unveiled in all 10 features with world premieres for the festival section where international films outside of the Hollywood studio orbit compete.
There’s selections for Netflix’s Mexican novel-to-screen adaptation Pedro Páramo, which marks the feature directorial debut of Rodrigo Prieto, the celebrated cinematographer behind Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and The Irishman; Huang Xi’s Daughter’s Daughter, produced by Cannes and Venice award winner Hou Hsiao-hsien and Sylvia Chang, who starred in the director’s HBO anthology series Twisted Strings; Tallulah H. Schwab surrealistic drama Mr. K, starring Crispin Glover as a traveling magician who finds himself in a hotel full of unusual guests, and with no way out.
There’s also first looks for Paying For It, a sex worker drama by director Sook-Yin Lee that adapts Chester Brown’s 2011 graphic novel of the same name; and Australian director and screenwriter Gabrielle Brady’s The Wolves Always Come at Night, a drama about a young nomadic couple in Mongolia forced by a devastating storm caused by climate change to leave the countryside for the city and a new way of life.
The TIFF jury that will pick the Platform Prize winner — Atom Egoyan, Hur Jin-ho and Jane Schoenbrun — will also choose from among Carlos Marques-Marcet’s They Will Be Dust, an ensemble drama about a woman with an incurable disease headed to Switzerland to end her life, her husband who can’t cope with losing her and a daughter who mediates for her parents; and Triumph, by Bulgarian directors Petar Valchanov and Kristina Grozeva. The dark tragicomedy stars Maria Bakalova, who appeared opposite Sacha Baron Cohen in Amazon’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm and returns to her Bulgarian film roots.
There’s also world premieres for filmmaker and war photographer Olivier Sarbil’s Viktor, a personal perspective on the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and Koya Kamura’s Winter in Sokcho, about a young woman struggling to claim her identity and independence when a French artist checks into the small guesthouse in snowy Sokcho where she works.
Toronto earlier announced the 2024 edition will open with Ben Stiller’s comedy Nutcrackers, from director David Gordon Green. And Rebel Wilson’s The Deb, a musical comedy set in rural Australia, will close TIFF.
The Toronto Film Festival is set to run from Sept. 5-15.
