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The Toronto Film Festival on Thursday unveiled world premieres for Amazon’s Homecoming, starring Julia Roberts, and Facebook Watch’s upcoming series Sorry for Your Loss, with Elizabeth Olsen playing a young widow.
Toronto’s Primetime showcase of groundbreaking TV series will screen the first four episodes of Sam Esmail’s psychological thriller Homecoming, and the first four episodes of Sorry For Your Loss, a dark comedy about young window Leigh Gibbs (Olsen) as she deals with the grief of losing her husband while reconnecting with people from her past.
Primetime will also screen two episodes each of the French sci-fi series Ad Vitam, and Folklore: A Mother’s Love & Pob, an Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore horror anthology series. Rounding out the TV showcase is the first four episodes of the Israeli comedy Stockholm, by director Daniel Syrkin.
TIFF also unveiled the lineup for its official mid-September industry conference, to feature debates on Hollywood inclusion and diversity, and movie exhibition in an era of MoviePass and Netflix. USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative founding director Stacy L. Smith, the author of the inclusion rider, will offer a keynote address as part of the TIFF Moguls program.
And National Association of Theatre Owners president John Fithian will moderate a panel on theatrical exhibition as it faces challenges from Netflix and the controversial movie subscription service MoviePass.
Also among the 150 speakers set to take part in the Sept. 7-12 conference are Canadian actress Tantoo Cardinal, New Zealand director and actor Taika Waititi and Chinese actor-director Jiang Wen, each conducting a master class in Toronto.
And film producer Nina Yang Bongiovi, who co-founded Significant Productions with Forest Whitaker, will discuss her own hopes for a more globally inclusive film industry. Other panels include one on GLAAD and its efforts to improve onscreen representation for gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans and queer characters, and another on how to build a diverse film crew, led by April Reign, who created the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, AMPAS’ Shawn Finnie, Women in Media’s Tema Staig and Patricia Gomes of the LA Skins Fest.
Elsewhere, the TIFF Docs Conference will feature talks and crafts discussions that include appearances by Meeting Gorbachev director Werner Herzog, Democracy Now! producer Nermeen Shaikh, Human Rights Watch’s Tanya Cooper, Inuk filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and PEN America’s Polina Kovaleva.
The Toronto Film Festival is set to run from Sept. 6-16.
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