TIFF16 Shortlist

A divorced man struggles to regain his estranged family’s trust while sheltering with them during a typhoon, in the latest film from celebrated Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda (Like Father, Like Son, Our Little Sister).

A shady cop finds himself in over his head when he gets caught between Internal Affairs and the city’s corrupt mayor, in this scintillating crime drama from Korean maestro Kim Sung-soo (Musa: The Warrior).

A young girl wanders a savage desert wasteland in a dystopian future United States, in Ana Lily Amirpour’s highly anticipated follow-up to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.

Filmmaker Alex Pitstra investigates his own roots as the love child of a holiday romance in Tunisia, part of a wider phenomenon in the 1970s wherein young, impoverished Muslim men would target and seduce European women on vacation.

Dakota Fanning, Guy Pearce, and Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington and Carice van Houten star in this gritty revenge western, about a young woman in a frontier community who must go on the run when she is targeted by a diabolical preacher.

A reunion between two old school friends (Sandra Oh and Anne Heche) sparks a no-holds-barred war of attrition, in this outrageously madcap black comedy.

Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy, Night Moves) directs Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone in this tripartite portrait of striving, independent women whose lives intersect in suggestive and powerful ways.

A going-nowhere party girl (Anne Hathaway) discovers a mysterious connection between herself and a giant monster wreaking havoc on the other side of the globe.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse, Tokyo Sonata) makes his first film outside Japan with this French-language fantasy, about an aging photographer whose obsession with an archaic technique draws his young assistant and beautiful daughter into a dark and mysterious world.

Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe star in this blackly comic crime caper from director Paul Schrader (Affliction, The Walker), about a crew of ex-cons hired by a Cleveland mafioso to kidnap the baby of a rival mobster.

A professional duellist in 19th-century Russia has second thoughts about his profession when he meets the beautiful sister of a future opponent, in this handsome historical epic spectacularly shot in IMAX.

The tentative romance between a gentle Madrid labourer and a working single mother becomes a struggle for survival when the woman’s violent boyfriend returns from prison, in the gritty, suspenseful debut feature from popular Spanish actor Raúl Arévalo (Ghost Graduation, DarkBlueAlmostBlack).

An intimate portrait of Maria Toorpakai, who defies threats to herself and her family from Islamic fundamentalists in order to represent Pakistan as an internationally competitive squash player.

A sweet little girl who may hold the key to a cure for the zombie virus that has decimated most of the world’s population escapes from a military compound and sets out to find her place in the world.

A crook-turned-servant falls for the vulnerable heiress she had originally schemed to swindle, in this audacious, visually sumptuous, and highly erotic period piece from acclaimed writer-director Park Chan-wook.

A naïve young nurse caring for an aging, reclusive horror novelist begins to believe that her patient’s new novel contains ominous clues about her own fate, in the new film from director Osgood Perkins (February).

In director Maysaloun Hamoud’s remarkable feature debut, three Palestinian women sharing an apartment in the vibrant heart of Tel Aviv find themselves doing the same balancing act between tradition and modernity, citizenship and culture, fealty and freedom.

Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, the new film from Quebecois wunderkind Xavier Dolan (Mommy) ropes in an all-star French cast (including Marion Cotillard, Vincent Cassel, Léa Seydoux and Nathalie Baye) for its tempestuous tale about the fraught reunion of a fractured family.

Spanish maestro Pedro Almodóvar adapts three stories from Canadian Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro for this time-tripping tale about the relationship and eventual rupture between a Madrid teacher and her beloved daughter.

Bereft of earthly memories, a new arrival in the afterlife struggles to recover the past, in this poetic fantasy that offers a dark reflection on personal atonement in the shadow of Kenya’s violent past.

Top Hong Kong stars Shawn Yue and Eric Tsang star in this daring independent drama about a former financial analyst suffering from severe bipolar disorder, who is released from a mental health facility into the unwilling custody of his truck-driver father.

Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner) returns with this Arctic epic inspired by the classic John Ford western of the same name, about a vengeful husband who sets off in pursuit of the violent men who kidnapped his wife and destroyed his home.

Kristen Stewart reunites with director Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria) for this artful ghost story about a young woman trying to reconnect with the spirit of her departed brother.

In 1930s France, two sisters (Natalie Portman and Lily-Rose Depp) who perform as supernatural mediums cross paths with a visionary film producer.

Alice Lowe (Sightseers) is a triple threat as the writer, director and star of this pitch-black comedy about a pregnant woman whose unborn child psychically spurs her on to murder.

Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) takes us on an unnerving (and sometimes grisly) globe-trotting journey to explore different cultures’ methods of controlling, killing, or profiting off the common rat.

A shy, vegetarian student at a veterinary college develops an insatiable lust for flesh as the result of a gruesome hazing ritual, in this grisly and gory tale of a cannibalistic coming of age.

Two iconic J-horror franchises face off in this wild monster mash-up that pits the house-haunting phantoms of Ju-on (The Grudge) against the analogue-to-digital demon of Ringu (The Ring).

Austrian provocateur Ulrich Seidl (Dog Days) returns to Africa for this raw, grimly humourous portrait of European tourists hunting animals for sport.

Amanda Kernell's powerful feature debut follows a teenage Sámi girl in the 1930s who is forcibly removed from her family and sent to a state boarding school that is intended to raise its Indigenous charges to a level "acceptable" to the rest of Swedish society.

One of the most talked-about films at this year’s Cannes, the new film from Maren Ade (The Forest for the Trees, Everyone Else) is an alternately hilarious and mortifying comedy about the fraught relationship between a repressed corporate consultant and her incessantly prank-playing dad.

Rooney Mara (Carol) and Ben Mendelsohn (Mississippi Grind, Netflix’s Bloodline) star in this adaptation of David Harrower’s play Blackbird, about a young woman who arrives in the workplace of an older man from her past, seeking answers for the long-ago events that have fatefully shaped both of their lives.

Cannes prize-winning director Amat Escalante (Heli) combines family drama and social commentary with science fiction and horror in this hypnotic and utterly enthralling tale, about an unhappily married couple whose life is turned upside down when they encounter a mysterious creature that is both a source of pleasure and a force of destruction.

An accident during a bar mitzvah celebration leads to a gendered rift in a devout Orthodox community in Jerusalem, in this rousing, good-hearted tale about women speaking truth to patriarchal power.