TFS Alumni & Faculty Shine at TIFF 2024 with Multiple Award-Worthy Projects
Toronto Film School will be well represented at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) next month, with at least seven alumni and an instructor involved in projects screening at the prestigious festival.
Here’s a look at each of the films, the alumni and faculty who worked on them, and how you can check them out:
Class of 2009 Film Production alumnus Chris Hatcher will celebrate the world premiere of his latest independent feature, Sweet Angel Baby.
The film, which marks the producer’s second collaboration with writer/director Melanie Oates, follows Eliza, an unassuming and beloved member of a small fishing community in Newfoundland, who sees all of her relationships put in jeopardy after her secret social media persona is exposed. It stars Michaela Kurimsky, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Peter Mooney.
Watch the trailer HERE.
Hatcher’s other recent projects include an executive producer credit on Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla Presley biopic, Priscilla, starring Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny, and a producing one on the Netflix series Painkiller, directed by Peter Berg and starring Matthew Broderick, Uzo Aduba and Taylor Kitsch. He’s also working on the Netflix series The Madness, starring Colman Domingo, John Ortiz and Marsha Stephanie Blake – his second collaboration with director Clement Virgo.
In addition to his producing credits, Hatcher also serves as founding partner and operator of Aspect Film Studios, a 200,000-square-foot facility in Toronto whose clients include Disney, Netflix, A24 and Amazon, among others.
Tickets to Sweet Angel Baby can be purchased on the TIFF website HERE.
Film Production grads Akhil Khithani (2015) and Mark Andrew (2013) both worked on the set of Canadian Screen Award-nominated director Amar Wala’s first dramatic feature, Shook.
The 113-minute film, which was shot in both English and Hindi, follows struggling writer Ashish (Saamer Usmani) as he is thrown for several loops when he falls for barista Claire (Amy Forsyth) and learns his estranged father has just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
Khithani served as the film’s 3rd Assistant Director, and Sirju as its Line Producer.
Shook’s upcoming premiere will mark Khithani’s second consecutive trip down the TIFF red carpet. He also appeared last year in support of the world premiere of Close to You alongside that film’s screenwriter/star Elliot Page and director Dominic Savage.
Tickets to Shook can be purchased on the TIFF website HERE.
Sofia Bohdanowicz, a 2007 Film Production graduate, will celebrate the world premiere her latest feature film in the director’s chair, Measures for a Funeral.
Billed as a poignant character study, the 142-minute film spotlights a young academic’s run towards one woman – acclaimed early 20th-century Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow – as she simultaneously flees from another, her failed musician mother.
“This film is for Kathleen Parlow, an incredible and unduly forgotten Canadian violinist from the 20th century who mentored my grandfather,” Bohdanowisz said in a recent Instagram post announcing the film’s TIFF premiere. “With (the University of Toronto Music) archive, this film resurrects her ghost through Halvorsen’s lost concerto OPUS 28.”
Tickets to Measures for a Funeral can be purchased on the TIFF website HERE.
Class of 2013 Acting for Film, TV & the Theatre grad Juan Carlos Huguenin will appear in Angelina Jolie’s latest directorial outing, Without Blood.
Starring Salma Hayek and Demián Bichir, this parable-like tale of family, war, and revenge was filmed at Rome’s famed Cinecittà Studios.
Huguenin appears in the film as ‘The Waiter’.
Tickets to Without Blood can be purchased on the TIFF website HERE.
Ahmed Mokdad, a Class of 2021 Acting for Film, TV & the Theatre grad, appears in The Best – a short film screening during TIFF’s Short Cuts 2024 Programme 04.
Directed by Ian Bawa, this “bold and insightful character study” follows a South Asian bodybuilder as waves of grief threaten to shatter his confidence. Mokdad, a Bachelor of Creative Arts student at Yorkville University, plays the lead character’s son.
Watch the trailer HERE.
Tickets to The Best can be purchased on the TIFF website HERE.
Class of 2021 Video Production alumnus Christopher Kezar and Acting for Film, TV & the Theatre instructor John Tench both worked on R.T. Thorne’s upcoming apocalyptic thriller, 40 Acres.
The film, which was shot in both English and Cree, takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where food is scarce and the last descendants of a Black family of farmers who settled in Canada after the American Civil War must protect their homestead from an organized militia hell-bent on taking their land.
While Kezar worked behind the scenes as the Dailies Operator on the film, Tench was in front of the camera, playing the “bad-ass leader of a group of hunters, with a distinct taste for cannibalism.”
Tickets to 40 Acres can be purchased on the TIFF website HERE.
