Books on Film at TIFF 2016
The annual Toronto International Film Festival (a.k.a. TIFF) is on from September 8-18, 2016, and the city is buzzing with excitement about all the films, directors, and star power in town.
Of course, like any self-respecting book lover, I'm excited about all the literary adaptations and other bookish films at #TIFF16 -- from award-winning novels to extraordinary memoirs, tales for children and plays for grownups, plus works by two CanLit greats.
Here is my list of 35 films inspired by books at this year's festival. I hope you will be inspired to see/read a few of them yourself.
Ewan McGregor makes his directing debut and stars alongside Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly and Dakota Fanning in this ambitious adaptation of Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about a "perfect" American family that is torn apart by the social and political upheavals of the 1960s.
Book | Audiobook CD | eAudiobook | in Romanian
Visionary Quebecois auteur Denis Villeneuve directs Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker in this sci-fi drama about the panic that follows a wave of mysterious spacecraft landings across the globe. Adapted from the title story in a collection by Ted Chiang.
Book | eBook | Book - reference
Toronto-based documentary filmmaker and cinematographer Nicholas de Pencier examines the complex global impact that the internet has had on matters of free speech, privacy, and activism. Based on the book by Ron Deibert, a professor at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs.
A New York Post journalist (Chloë Grace Moretz) suffering from a rare autoimmune disorder is repeatedly misdiagnosed following a series of violent outbursts and severe amnesia, in Gerard Barrett's adaptation of Susannah Cahalan's bestselling memoir.
Book | eBook | Audiobook CD | eAudiobook | Large Print
Awkward, isolated and disapproving of most of the people around her, a precocious 19-year-old genius (Bev Powley) is challenged to put her convictions to the test by venturing out on to the NYC dating scene, in this adaptation of Caren Lissner’s best-selling novel.
Kelly Reichardt 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. Based on short stories from a collection by Maile Meloy.
THE DAY MY FATHER BECAME A BUSH
Adapted from the children's novel by award-winning author Joke van Leeuwen, The Day My Father Became a Bush tells a story of war as seen through the eyes of a 10-year-old girl.
Academy Award winner Rachel Weisz and Timothy Spall star in this riveting, true-life drama about the courtroom showdown between historian Deborah Lipstadt and notorious Holocaust denier David Irving. Based on Lipstadt's book, previously published as History on Trial.
Book | eBook | eAudiobook
Academy Award winner Christopher Plummer and Janet McTeer star in this adaptation of Alan Judd’s novel about German Kaiser Wilhelm II’s post-WWI exile in the Netherlands.
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. Adapted from the bestselling novel by M. R. Carey.
Book | eBook | eAudiobook
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. With The Handmaiden, Park transplants Sarah Waters' Victorian England-set bestseller to Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s.
Book | Audiobook CD | eAudiobook
Ivory Coast-born filmmaker Katell Quillévéré adapts Maylis de Kerangal’s Booker Prize–longlisted novel for this elegant and affecting film which draws three seemingly unrelated stories together into a tale about the moment when tragedy meets hope.
Book | eBook | in French | in French - Audiobook CD | in French - Large Print |
The prolific, cinephilic, and endlessly imaginative Matías Piñeiro (Viola) continues his multi-film meditation on Shakespeare’s comedies with this marvellous riff on A Midsummer Night’s Dream centred on an Argentine theatre director's sojourn in New York City.
Book | eBook | eAudiobook | Audiobook CD | Large Print | Talking Book (restricted to print disabled patrons) | in Amharic | in Chinese | in Czech | in Esperanto | in Japanese | in Korean | in Tagalog
A café proprietor spends a decade petitioning the Chinese legal system after being swindled by her ex-husband, in this caustically comic contemporary fable from superstar director Feng Xiaogang, adapted from the novel by Liu Zhenyun.
Working from the text of James Baldwin’s unfinished final novel, director Raoul Peck creates a stunning meditation on what it means to be Black in America. In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his new endeavour: the writing of his final book, Remember This House, recounting the lives and successive assassinations of his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin was not able to complete the book before his death, and the unfinished manuscript was entrusted to Peck by the writer's estate.
James Franco directs and stars alongside a fine cast — including Vincent D’Onofrio, Robert Duvall, Selena Gomez, and Nat Wolff — in this adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Depression-era novel about two labour organizers trying to unionize exploited California fruit pickers.
Book | eBook | Large Print
IT'S ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD
Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, the new film from Quebecois wunderkind Xavier Dolan 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. Based on the play by Jean-Luc Lagarce, who was recognized as one of France's foremost modern playwrights only after his untimely death due to AIDS-related illness.
Spanish maestro Pedro Almodóvar adapts three stories from Canadian Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro's exquisite collection Runaway, relocating them to Spain, for this time-tripping tale about the relationship and eventual rupture between a Madrid teacher and her beloved daughter.
Book | eBook | Audiobook CD | eAudiobook | Talking Book (restricted to print disabled patrons) | in French | in Greek | in Persian | in Serbian
The beguiling third feature from Argentine writer-director Gastón Solnicki takes inspiration from Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle (itself based on the French folktale "La Barbe bleue" by Charles Perrault) for this charming tale about several young women attempting to make their way into adulthood.
Book | Walter Crane picture book 1898 - Osborne collection and PDF
Acclaimed theatre director William Oldroyd relocates Nikolai Leskov’s short story to 19th-century England, in this Gothic tale about a young woman trapped in a marriage of convenience whose passionate affair unleashes a maelstrom of murder and mayhem on a country estate.
Book | Book | eBook | Book - reference
Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, and Nicole Kidman star in the true story of Saroo Brierley, who was adopted by an Australian couple after being separated from his family in India at the age of five, and then located his original home using Google Earth 25 years later.
Book | eBook | Audiobook CD | eAudiobook | Talking Book (restricted to print disabled patrons)
Liam Neeson, Sigourney Weaver, and Felicity Jones star in this adaptation of the award-winning children’s book by Patrick Ness, about a lonely young boy struggling with the imminent death of his terminally ill mother who is befriended by a friendly, shambling monster that arrives in his room nightly to tell him stories.
Book | Book - reference | eBook | eBook | Audiobook CD
MY ENTIRE HIGH SCHOOL SINKING INTO THE SEA
The title tells the tale in this inventive, beautiful, and bizarre animated feature from acclaimed graphic novelist Dash Shaw, featuring the voices of Jason Schwartzman, Lena Dunham, Maya Rudolph, Susan Sarandon, and Reggie Watts.
Award-winning filmmaker Anne Émond returns to the festival with this creatively imagined biopic of controversial Quebec writer Nelly Arcan, who scandalized the French literary world with her semi-autobiographical novel based on her experiences as a sex worker.
Benoit Jacquot adapts a novella by Don DeLillo for this tale of amour fou between a self-centred filmmaker and a beautiful body artist.
Book | eBook | Audiobook CD | Large Print
Pablo Larraín weaves an engrossing metafictional fable around the 1948 manhunt for celebrated poet and politician Pablo Neruda, who goes underground when Chile outlaws communism and is pursued by an ambitious police inspector (Gael García Bernal) hoping to make a name for himself by capturing the famous fugitive.
Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Armie Hammer headline the second feature from director Tom Ford (A Single Man), about a woman who is forced to confront the demons of her past as she is drawn into the world of a thriller novel written by her ex-husband. Based on a novel by Austin Wright.
David Oyelowo (Selma) and Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave) star in the true story of a young girl from rural Uganda (played by newcomer Madina Nalwanga) who discovers a passion for chess, and sets out to pursue her dream of becoming an international champion.
Cynthia Nixon stars as the legendary poet Emily Dickinson in this luminous biopic from director Terence Davies (The Deep Blue Sea).
A young student at a drama school faces a moral conundrum when his budding romance becomes fodder for a final-year performance, in director Alison Maclean’s adaptation of the novel by Booker Prize–winning author Eleanor Catton.
Book | eBook | eAudiobook
Michael Shannon and Gael García Bernal star in this ecological thriller from the great Werner Herzog, about a scientist and a corporate CEO who must overcome their ideological differences in order to avert potential disaster from a volcano on the verge of eruption. Inspired by the short story "Aral" by Tom Bissell.
The hidden memoir of an elderly woman confined to a mental hospital reveals the history of her passionate yet tortured life, and of the religious and political upheavals in Ireland during the 1920s and ’30s. Rooney Mara, Jack Reynor, Eric Bana, and Vanessa Redgrave star in this adaptation of Sebastian Barry’s award-winning 2008 novel from Oscar-nominated director Jim Sheridan.
Book | eBook | eAudiobook | Large Print
Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in this real-life political thriller from Oscar winner Oliver Stone, based in part on the book by Luke Harding.
Academy Award nominee Catherine Keener and Hannah Gross star in this adaptation of the final novel by the late, great Canadian novelist Carol Shields, about a writer who discovers her runaway daughter panhandling on the street and seemingly deprived of speech.
Book | eBook | Audiobook CD | eAudiobook | Talking Book (restricted to print disabled patrons)
Bryan Cranston stars as a successful lawyer and family man who disappears from his own life and observes his baffled loved ones from a hiding place in the attic, in writer-director Robin Swicord's adaptation of the short story by E.L. Doctorow.
Note: All film synopses and stills are from TIFF.
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