Blanchett to begin new run at Oscar in Elizabeth sequel at TIFF
The 32nd Toronto International Film Festival will feature a gala presentation of Elizabeth: The Golden Age, with Cate Blanchett reprising her role as Britain's first Queen Elizabeth.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age, with Shekhar Kapur returning as director, premieres at TIFF with high expectations for Oscar glory this time around.
The story starts later in Queen Elizabeth's reign, as she struggles to balance her royal duties, including an open challenge to her rule by the Spanish king, with her love for Sir Walter Raleigh, played by Clive Owen.
With the help of her trusted advisor Sir Francis Walsingham, played by Geoffrey Rush, she foils an assassination plot that may have been backed by her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots.
The film was announced Tuesday as a gala presentation, along with 32 films selected from the world film festival circuit.
Fugitive Pieces, based on the Anne Michaels novel,was earlier announced as the opening night gala.
There will be a special presentation of the Coen brothers' latest film No Country for Old Men, in which Tommy Lee Jones plays an aging sheriff after a heroin stash and $2 million in cash.
From the Cannes Film Festival, TIFF is bringing:
- Silent Light: directed by Carlos Reygadas, in which Canadian author Miriam Toews plays a Mennonite woman caught in a love triangle. It won the Cannes Jury Prize for 2007.
- The Mourning Forest: directed by Naomi Kawase and winner of the Cannes Grand Prize, in which a retirement home resident and staff member have to help themselves after a landslide forces their car into a ditch.
- The Edge of Heaven: directed by Fatih Akin and winner of best screenplay honours, it looks at the lives of six people in Hamburg and Istanbul.
- The Banishment: directed by Andrei Zviaguintsev, about one family's relocation from an industrial city to the remote birthplace of husband and father Alex, played by Konstantin Lavronenko, who was namedbest actor at Cannes.
This year's Palme D'Or winner, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, has not been announced yet in the TIFF program.
Toronto filmmaker Bruce McDonald's The Tracey Fragments, about a 15-year-old outcast with an elaborate imagination, is part of the Visions program. The film won the Manfred Salzgeber Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival.
America Ferrara, star of TV's Ugly Betty, will be on the screen in Under the Same Moon, a Mexico/U.S. production about love between mother and son directed by Patricia Riggen.
TIFF, Canada’s premiere film festival, runs Sept. 6-15.