(Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones appear in Train Dreams by Clint Bentley, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Adolpho Veloso)
By Jessica Herndon
The Toronto International Film Festival celebrates a major milestone this year — its 50th edition — and Sundance Institute is ready to show up and show out at the fest with nine incredible projects screening across Canada’s film capital from September 4–14. Our films among TIFF’s slate are incredibly diverse — think a harrowing story about motherhood and stress overload screening alongside an avant-guard film about a community dealing with darkness — and they reflect the creative risks and bold voices our programs champion.
Be sure to catch screenings of two films, which premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, including Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut starring June Squibb, exploring an unlikely friendship between a senior citizen and college student in New York, and the North American debut of Diego Céspedes’s modern western set in a Chilean mining town.
TIFF will also showcase works nurtured through our Indigenous Program, Catalyst program, Producers Program, Screenwriters Intensive, and Feature Film Program. Plus, a powerful selection of 2025 Sundance Film Festival premieres, including Kahlil Joseph’s feature debut BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, an enrapturing exploration of the Black experience, and Clint Bentley’s historical drama Train Dreams starring Felicity Jones and Joel Edgerton, set against the dawn of America’s railroads.
Whether you’re catching world premieres or films that first captivated Sundance Festival audiences, these titles deserve to be added to your TIFF screening schedule. For more about the programs and initiatives that helped bring these stories to life, click here.
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions — 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: Preeminent West African curator and scholar Funmilayo Akechukwu’s magnum opus, The Resonance Field, leads her to the heart of the Atlantic Ocean, drawing a journalist into a journey that shatters her understanding of consciousness and time.
Dead Lover — 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: A lonely gravedigger who stinks of corpses finally meets her dream man, but their whirlwind affair is cut short when he tragically drowns at sea. Grief-stricken, she goes to morbid lengths to resurrect him through madcap scientific experiments, resulting in grave consequences and unlikely love.
Eleanor the Great — 2018 Screenwriters Intensive
Synopsis: Oscar nominee June Squibb stars in Scarlett Johansson’s thoughtful, provocative, and very funny feature directorial debut, about a nonagenarian who passes herself off as a Holocaust survivor.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You — 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: With her life crashing down around her, Linda attempts to navigate her child’s mysterious illness, her absent husband, a missing person, and an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist.
Levers — Indigenous Program
Logline: In the beginning was sound. It broke an infinite nothing, hissing, shaking, and rattling out into all directions. Meanwhile, in Manitoba, a canon blasts as a new statue is unveiled, and the following day, the sun does not rise. Worldwide, people huddle around the warm glow of their television sets eagerly awaiting the uprising of a new sun, but in the Red River Valley, mysterious events unfold, weaving together the lives of a sculptor, a security guard, and an intrepid civil servant.
Nomad Shadow — Feature Film Program (Directors Lab, Producers Lab, Screenwriters Lab)
Logline: Disheartened by her deportation from Europe, Mariam is forced to return home to Western Sahara. Adrift in the very place that was once her home, she desperately searches for the means to assert agency over her own life.
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo — Feature Film Program (Directors Lab, Screenwriters Lab)
Logline: In a dusty Chilean mining town in 1982, 11-year-old Lidia, raised by a fierce queer community, faces fear, violence, and love’s transformative power in Diego Céspedes’ poetic, absurd, and deeply human modern western.
The President’s Cake — Feature Film Program (Directors Lab, Producers Lab, Screenwriters Lab), Catalyst, Producer Leah Chen Baker was the 2022 Mark Silverman Honoree
Logline: While people struggle daily to survive under sanctions in Saddam’s Iraq, nine-year-old Lamia must use her wits to gather ingredients for the mandatory cake to celebrate President Saddam Hussein’s birthday or face the consequences—prison or death.
Train Dreams — 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: Robert Grainier is a day laborer building America’s railroads at the start of the 20th century as he experiences profound love, shocking defeat, and a world irrevocably transforming before his very eyes.
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