Rossellini, Waters join TIFF Lightbox slate
Filmmakers Isabella Rossellini, John Waters, Peter Bogdanovich and David Cronenberg are among those who will visit the Toronto International Film Festival's new headquarters as part of its opening slate of cinema events.
Organizers announced programming details for TIFF's new home, Lightbox, on Monday.
Rossellini, Waters, Bogdanovich and Cronenberg are among a slate of experts and industry figures to present and discuss specially selected films screening this fall at Lightbox, located at the intersection of King and John streets in the downtown Theatre District.
For instance, Toronto director Cronenberg will introduce two screenings of his 1983 film Videodrome.
Meanwhile, Rossellini will present her father Roberto Rossellini's classic Voyage in Italy before screening her own tribute to him, My Dad is 100 Years Old, a selection from her series Green Porno as well as David Lynch's Blue Velvet, in which she stars.
Other events with special guests include:
- Artist Michael Snow will introduce a screening of his 1967 film Wavelength and lead a panel discussion on experimental filmmaking.
- John Waters will present Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1975 film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom.
- American film scholar Jacqueline Stewart will discuss African-American film culture after a screening of the 1939 classic Gone with the Wind.
- After presenting both Orson Welles's Citizen Kane and John Ford's The Searchers, director and author Peter Bogdanovich will discuss his experiences with the two legendary filmmakers.
- Film editor and theorist Walter Murch will screen Apocalypse Now Redux and discuss his collaboration with Francis Ford Coppola.
Other fall programming will include exclusive, weeklong engagements of films both contemporary (from Xavier Dolan, Bruce McDonald and Olivier Assayas) and classic (Breathless, Psycho, The Godfather and Metropolis ). Several silent features will also include live musical accompaniment (ranging from chamber music to jazz-punk-electronica hybrid music).
The new facility will also open its doors for larger cultural festivals — including TIFF itself, the Canada-wide Culture Days, Toronto's Nuit Blanche and Halloween.
Organizers previously announced that a free show inspired by its recent Essential Cinema list and the highly successful Tim Burton art retrospective would be the initial exhibitions.
"We are looking forward to sharing our new home and all of its cinematic treasures, new and old, with the public," Lightbox artistic director Noah Cowan said in a statement.
Cowan also recently revealed that Burton is planning to design a site-specific holiday window display for the new building.