CineManiax: Podcast Transcripts
Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2026
Monday, October 12, 2026Intro
[upbeat music plays]
CHRIS REED:
Hello, and welcome to the CineManiax podcast. I'm your host, Chris Reed, editor of Film Festival Today and lead critic at Hammer to Nail. On today's show, we'll talk about the recent 2026 Toronto International Film Festival, and some of our favorites from it.
Joining me on the show is freelance film critic Clara Cuccaro, who is based in Queens, but is originally from Indiana, Pennsylvania, the hometown of Jimmy Stewart. And, like me, was on the ground in Toronto. It's great to have you here, Clara. Welcome to the show.
CLARA CUCCARO:
Hi. Thanks so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.
CHRIS REED:
So what were three of your favorite films that you saw on the ground in Toronto?
CLARA CUCCARO:
I'd like to kick things off with Clarissa, which is the newest film by Chuko and Arie Esiri. This is their second feature. This is an adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway. It takes place in Lagos, Nigeria. It's set in present day. It still follows the stream of consciousness of Virginia Woolf's original novel.
It stars Sophie Okonedo, who's one of my favorite actresses. She's a luminous performer. I think really pulls off the role of Mrs. Dalloway. And I was totally surprised by this film. I have a weird relationship to Mrs. Dalloway. My mom introduced me to one of the film adaptations when I was quite young, and it really startled me. I didn't understand what PTSD was at the time. And there's a character in the novel that's represented in this film as well who suffers from that.
But I found all the performances really moving. It's a great ensemble cast. I really love Sophie, like I said. And David Oyelowo, he's also really incredible in the film. And the way they interwove flashbacks into the film with present day is really great.
CHRIS REED:
I also really like David Oyelowo and Sophie Okonedo, so this makes the film quite appealing to me, even though I have neither read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway nor seen, I'm ashamed to say, any of the film adaptations, but I'm down for those two actors alone.
CLARA CUCCARO:
Totally. They're both such great performers. And I know that David, his parents are Nigerian. I think that Sophie's parents, one of her parents, might be as well. But at TIFF, it was just really great to see this in a public screening. It was very lively. And it was totally unexpected. I was between seeing this and one other film, and I'm so glad that I decided to see Clarissa. I think it's coming out in December with Neon, so I'd highly recommend people to see this film.
CHRIS REED:
Excellent. What else you got?
CLARA CUCCARO:
So I'm going to go into Tender Loving Care next. It's Mike Leigh's last film. And just right off the bat, he's probably my favorite filmmaker. So I was totally biased going into this. I absolutely loved it. It was the first screening I saw at TIFF, so it really kicked the festival off in a great way.
It's like your classic Mike Leigh text, in a way. It's about two social workers. One of them, I think, works in foster care. The other one, I think, is just a regular social worker. That sounds bad to say it like that. But it's about their life, how they deal with their job. There's a lot of funding cuts that they mentioned. It's about their friendship.
And then it's about one of the actresses, Katie O'Flynn, who was actually just recently in that show Widow's Bay. She's having a lot of screen time right now, but I know her through Mike Leigh. And it's about her parents. And one of them, his health starts to decline.
But I absolutely loved this film. I think Mike Leigh always makes films about the social welfare state in Great Britain, and it's a really big part of his work. And he's mapped it throughout his career, the strengths and the weaknesses. And I think this is just a great coda film for him.
CHRIS REED:
Well, I'm going to say, and I apologize, that sometimes Mike Leigh is hit or miss for me, but his film Secrets and Lies is one of my favorite films, so this certainly sounds like it's up that particular alley, based on the story you described. So I'm down to give it a chance. But sometimes his films don't always work for me. That film about J.M.W. Turner.
CLARA CUCCARO:
Oh, I loved that. Wasn't your cup of tea?
CHRIS REED:
It was not my favorite. But again, Secrets and Lies, I just adore, so fingers crossed. Because especially since it's his last film, I will check it out.
CLARA CUCCARO:
I think you're going to like this one. It's definitely a lot different than the Turner film. And also, if you have seen a number of Mike Leigh's films, you're going to recognize a lot of the actors in this film, which I think is also a wonderful aspect of his filmmaking. He has sort of a repertory theater group that he works with, and all four of the leads have been in multiple of his films. So I think you're going to like this one. I know that he can be polarizing. I'm just a sucker for him in general.
CHRIS REED:
Well, again, I will give it a chance. So what's your final choice for this podcast?
CLARA CUCCARO:
My final choice is Trash Mountain. It's a film directed by Kris Rey, whose work I wasn't super familiar with, but I definitely have seen a number of her films before. But it's a film starring Caleb Hearon. He's playing a young man named Gavin. He's gay, he lives in Chicago, and he gets some news from his sister Abbi that their father, who they have a bad relationship with, has passed away. So he returns home to Missouri. And he's a hoarder. They have to just go through his stuff, and they both have a lot of baggage to their relationship.
For me, this film really worked, though, because of Zooey Deschanel, who's actually someone who was very important to my youth. I loved her in the band She & Him. And there's a karaoke scene. And I had this flashback moment to whenever I was young, of watching her perform. So this was really why I picked this film, is because I love Zooey Deschanel. And I forgot about her.
And honestly, it made me feel old. I was sitting with a lot of Gen Z critics who were there for Caleb Hearon, who I do really enjoy as well. I think he has excellent comedic timing. But I was really there for Zooey. So I just wanted to give that film a shout-out for her.
CHRIS REED:
Welcome to the crowd of feeling old, Clara. I thought you were going to mention Elf if you're a Zooey Deschanel fan.
CLARA CUCCARO:
I mean, I think that was probably my introduction to her. And I remember when she went brunette and got bangs, and then that's the Zooey we all know now. And it's funny, because I'm not even really a fan of New Girl. I like it, but I just never really kept up. So I feel like I'm at this in-between, She & Him, 500 Days of Summer. And now there's people who are being introduced to her for what seems like the first time. And I thought that was wild.
CHRIS REED:
Well, her father is, of course, famed cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who was in Baltimore this summer at an event that I attended. So that was kind of cool.
CLARA CUCCARO:
Oh, that is cool.
CHRIS REED:
Well, thank you so much for sharing three of the films you saw and loved at Toronto. I've got my three, and I'll start with the film that won the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or this year, which is Fjord from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu. And this is a film that is designed to push a lot of people's buttons, and I think it does it in an interesting way. Particularly somebody as politically progressive as myself, I found the narrative interesting, because it is about a conservative religious family that is half Romanian, half Norwegian.
The parents are played by Sebastian Stan, whose native language is Romanian, even though we don't think of him as anything other than a Marvel superstar. But he is acting in his native language in this film, as the patriarch of a family whose mother is played by Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve. And the two of them move back to Norway with their five children, one of whom is an infant. And although they are very helpful in the community, they immediately start to raise some hackles because of their conservative religious views.
And then, one day, a teacher at the school sees some bruises on the daughter's neck. And this starts a cascade of events that involves Norway's Child Protective Services. And things just spiral out of control from there. And I thought it was a really very strong movie with terrific performances from everyone, particularly the children.
And it's been, obviously, very well-reviewed by many people. But what I particularly like about the film is how it's asking us what the limits of tolerance are in a progressive world. So Norway, at least for the moment, has been, for a while, quite progressive in its policies. And what happens when you are confronted with people who are less so? Does that test the limits of what tolerance means? So I found it interesting, because it was asking that question.
CLARA CUCCARO:
And I've actually heard a lot, or I've read a lot of polarizing criticism about it, so I'm interested in seeing it. But you said that you liked the two lead performances, but it was really the children that stuck out to you.
CHRIS REED:
Well, it's just because they're so young, and the fact that they're delivering such complex performances. But, I mean, you spend much more time with Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, and they are quite strong.
Now, speaking of children, the next film that I'm going to talk about is Josephine, which premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival, but has continued its festival run. It's from director Beth de Araujo, if I'm pronouncing her name correctly. And it stars Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan as the parents of an eight-year-old daughter, played by the exceptional Mason Reeves. So here, we spend much more time with the child actor, and she's amazing.
But it's a very difficult story to watch because Josephine, the girl, is, very early on, witness to a rape. She gets separated from her father. They get up every morning. She loves her father, Channing Tatum. They're both really athletic. And he takes his daughter to the park, runs with her, and they play soccer. And they get separated, and she witnesses this horrific crime. And then the film follows the fallout from that.
Each parent has different ideas about what is best for Josephine, and it gets further complicated because she is the only eyewitness. If there is to be justice, she's going to have to testify in court. And so you can just imagine all of the issues that that entails. But I thought she was amazing.
It was really fun to see her at the Q&A afterwards, after you watch this tense film, and then she's on stage, joking around with Channing Tatum. It was a very different vibe from the movie. But it's a very powerful movie, however difficult the subject matter.
CLARA CUCCARO:
This is a film that I know also premiered at the Berlinale. I was there this year. I didn't have a chance to see it, but I'm wondering, do you see these things happen on screen?
CHRIS REED:
So you do see, in a wide shot, the actual assault. And then you cut to the girl, Josephine, and her face as she's watching it. And a lot of the film is shown from her point of view. And quite literally, sometimes, the camera is her POV. I will say there's obviously a voyeuristic element to that horrific scene, but I feel narratively we need to understand what she is witnessing, but it doesn't feel gratuitously voyeuristic.
CLARA CUCCARO:
That's good. From what I've read of the film, I know that the young actress wasn't actually watching these things, so I think that's a smart way of preserving her, I don't want to say her innocence, but you know what I'm trying to say.
CHRIS REED:
It's definitely a challenging film, for lots of reasons, but I think a very good one.
So my final film is also difficult subject matter, but it's wrapped inside a thriller plot, and it's called Wild Wild East, from Polish director Jan Holoubek. And it is a mixture of a Western and a film noir set during World War II, where we also experience the horrors of the Holocaust.
And what happens is you have a lone stranger ride into town, this Polish town. He's a Nazi official who is looking for gold that was supposedly in the possession of a Jewish family that has now vanished. And everyone is after the gold. But what you learn about this Nazi official by the end completely changes the story that you're watching. But before we even get to that particular plot twist, we've seen backstabbings, all sorts of reversals, and the film keeps you guessing.
But I found it a thrill to watch, and in particular, because of the performance from lead actor Itay Tiran. Again, I may be mispronouncing his name. He just blew me away. And I can't recommend the film enough. We've seen so many stories about World War II, and it's always a wonder to me that there can be yet another twist on the conflict and an entry point that I hadn't seen before. So I definitely recommend Wild Wild East.
CLARA CUCCARO:
I'm curious, can you think of any other movies that it's comparable to?
CHRIS REED:
Well, the last time I was surprised by a film set during World War II was a film called The Counterfeiters, which was made about 20 years ago. And it was about Jewish prisoners captured by the Nazis early on, who are all themselves actual criminals, and that they would have been criminals under any system. And they're being drafted to counterfeit currency of the Allies so that the Germans can try to destabilize their economies. And that was a fascinating film.
CLARA CUCCARO:
I haven't seen that one, but I'm aware of it.
CHRIS REED:
So those are my three. We heard your three. From what you saw at the festival, for what you've heard, what do you think has a chance to make some kind of splash during the upcoming awards season?
CLARA CUCCARO:
Ooh, that's a good question. I mean, I would like to see Hamaguchi's new film All of a Sudden maybe win International Feature, although he did win for Drive My Car, so maybe I should give this to someone else. Oh, I did see Martin McDonagh's film Wild Horse Nine as well. I wasn't a huge fan of the film, but I did like John Malkovich's performance. I thought Steve Buscemi was really funny as well. So maybe a few of those. What about you?
CHRIS REED:
Well, I'm hoping that despite its challenging subject matter, that Josephine continues receiving good reviews, and perhaps winning some awards. My critics group, the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association, does include, in our end-of-year awards, something for Best Child Actor, and I'll certainly be nominating that actress for that particular award. I also saw the film Elsinore, starring Andrew Scott, at Toronto, and I'm hoping he gets some love. He's one of my favorite actors, so we'll see.
CLARA CUCCARO:
That'd be great. Oh, and I would like to say, if I could pick a film to win Best Picture, I would give it to Tender Loving Care.
CHRIS REED:
Well, there we go.
CLARA CUCCARO:
I'm going to stick with it.
CHRIS REED:
Well, maybe after I see it, I will agree with you. Well, thank you for being on the show and for sharing your thoughts about Toronto, Clara. It was great having you.
CLARA CUCCARO:
Thanks so much for having me. I love the title of the pod as well, CineManiax.
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CHRIS REED:
Next up, I'd like to share excerpts from interviews with the directors of three other Toronto films I enjoyed as much as the three I just mentioned. They are The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs, Re/Pair, written as Re slash Pair, and The Smell of Apples.
Let's start with The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs. Every artist who agrees to have a movie made about them should be so lucky as to have their work photographed in as exquisite a manner as that used by Elia Gasull Balada and Matteo Norzi for the canvases of Sara Flores.
In The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs, they craft a loving portrait of their septuagenarian subject, an Indigenous woman from Peru who adapts the kené designs of her Shipibo-Conibo people within carefully constructed frames, and has now, late in life, become something of an international sensation.
[music playing]
Thank you both for joining me on the CineManiax podcast.
MATTEO NORZI:
Thank you so much for having us.
ELIA GASULL BALADA:
Thank you, Chris, for hosting us today.
CHRIS REED:
So I'd like to start by asking you to explain how you came to be involved with the Shipibo people in the making of this documentary.
MATTEO NORZI:
Sometimes at life, you get lost with a midlife crisis, and you need to travel far away to find back yourself. And for me, that place was the Peruvian Amazon, the land of the great Shipibo-Conibo people. And that first journey happened 15 years ago. And one film before in the making, which is also the first collaboration that Elia and I did, it was called Icaros: A Vision.
And then, as the afterlife of that film, we started to become aware of the social and economical reality of the Indigenous communities of that area. And we wanted to establish an organization that could somehow get involved and help. Since we received so much, we wanted to give back.
ELIA GASULL BALADA:
And then, in my case, I was introduced to the Shipibo community while editing one of my first movies in New York. I met them through the screen. And a few years after, in 2019, I did my first trip in the Amazon, in Pucallpa, where Sara lives. It was coming out of a search and a curiosity to find other societies that were less individualistic-driven.
So I started making a project as a visual artist with a group of Shipibo women that had been forcefully sterilized during the Fujimori government. And in 2023, Matteo told me what was happening with Sara, and we realized that there was a film to be made. And because we already had a deep bond and involvement with the community, we just dropped everything, and went and made the movie for the past three years.
CHRIS REED:
So Sara Flores, the subject of The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs, she paints in the kené designs of her people. Could you explain the principles behind this design? Define kené.
MATTEO NORZI:
Kené is the design system that the Shipibo adopt to distinguish themselves from everybody else. So it's kind of their flag. And it can be understood with three levels of meaning. So it's an expression of beauty. So there is an aesthetic value that matches the energy of life growing.
There is a synesthetic dimension in which there is a crossover of the senses. This is the space of ayahuasca and shamanism, in which sound can generate a visual render in the night of the journey of the psychedelic plant ayahuasca. And then there is an ethical component. It's a kind of a visual manifesto in which the order of this geometric designs, it's a way to impose over the disorder of violence, of wilderness. So it's like a visual manifesto for life in balance.
ELIA GASULL BALADA:
We knew that we were going to capture an ancestral practice. Of course, Sara has been the most inventive kené painter in her community, and has pushed the form forward in ways that no one did before. Sara tackles the fabric from the center, with no guides, no rulers, only the marks that are left from the folds of the fabric being folded. And then she develops the design from the center, perfectly, up until the corners. And everything matches exactly geometrically. And she has it all in her head. The work speaks for itself.
[music playing]
CHRIS REED:
And now Re/Pair. I was unaware of a serious rift between Black and Jewish Americans until reading the description for the new documentary Re/Pair. But based on the conversations showcased within, it's clear that what the two groups have in common should far outweigh their differences.
Both have suffered intense discrimination and both share a strong history of working together. In this day and age, we would all do better to focus on that which unites us rather than divides us. Given that director Lacey Schwartz Delgado is both Black and Jewish, she would appear the perfect candidate to tell the story, and she does not disappoint.
[music playing]
Thank you so much for joining me on the CineManiax podcast, Lacey.
LACEY SCHWARTZ DELGADO:
Thank you so much for having me.
CHRIS REED:
So to start, you are African-American and Jewish, and this dual identity informs this latest work of yours. I haven't seen your documentary A Little White Lie, but I was wondering if you could talk about the journey from that personal documentary in 2015 to this new film.
LACEY SCHWARTZ DELGADO:
So Little White Lie follows my story of growing up in a white Jewish family in Upstate New York, and finding out at the age of 18 that my biological father was Black. My mother had an affair, and no one talked about it. And so the film is really about dual identity and family secrets. Themes in the film are denial, and also about the power of having tough conversations, and why we need to have conversations.
So I think for me, that theme, that has been a big part of my work, is a huge theme, also, in my latest film, Re/Pair, that we are premiering. It sits down 19 pairs of Black, Jewish individuals, some of whom are also Black and Jewish, to have real conversations about their own experiences and their own communities, and to talk about how these communities have come together and apart throughout modern history.
But really, on a larger level, what this film is about, power, once again, of difficult conversations. About people being able to speak their own truths, but also listen to each other, and how those conversations can help to rebuild trust.
CHRIS REED:
Speaking of material that's in the film, you do take what is essentially a series of these interviews and make it quite cinematic, but you also have some really great B-roll. And so I'm just wondering what the process of gathering that supportive material was like.
LACEY SCHWARTZ DELGADO:
We wanted those moments that didn't just feel like the same moments you've seen over and over again, that they felt a little bit more interesting or unexpected. One of the things we also did is we showed a bunch of that archival in the actual interviews, so that in real time, our participants would take part of the interview to be actually watching it. And you see, there's a few moments where we're actually shooting through it onto them or shooting them watching that footage.
And so we wanted a way to make it feel like the archival wasn't just going to be placed on top of the film, as it frequently is, but it was actually more of an immersive experience. So even though you don't always see them watching it, the reaction you get to them is very in real time of them actually consuming that.
[music playing]
CHRIS REED:
And finally, The Smell of Apples. It is an indisputable fact that apartheid, South Africa's official doctrine from 1948 to 1994, was a racist, white supremacist system of oppression that made life miserable for those living under its ugly framework.
In The Smell of Apples, director John Trengove's adaptation of novelist Mark Behr's eponymous 1993 book, we see the corruption from within. Our guide, an 11-year-old boy, who journeys from blind acceptance to dawning horror. The film delivers stunning visuals and great performances in a sharp dissection of the festering disease in the heart of all tyrants. [music playing]
Thank you so much for joining me on the CineManiax podcast, John.
JOHN TRENGOVE:
Lovely to be here. Thank you.
CHRIS REED:
So please tell me about Mark Behr's 1993 book from which this movie is adapted. When did you first encounter it and what made you want to adapt it?
JOHN TRENGOVE:
Well, it was the mid-'90s, and Mark Behr published this book. And it created quite a sensation when it first came out. A lot was being said and written about apartheid, and this was the first book that attempted to describe the strangeness of the inside of the so-called white utopian bubble.
And it's a very, very compelling, very beautifully written story, an account of a young 11-year-old boy growing up in False Bay in Cape Town, and his growing awareness and unease with what is going on in his country that's not visible to him. He's living in a kind of idyllic world. It's summer 1974. So there's something sunkissed and glorious about this boy's experience. And then, slowly, the cracks begin to appear in the walls of this world.
And I think I was about 15 when I read it. It was just something that always resonated with me so powerfully. I grew up in the last 10 years of apartheid, not really understanding what's going on, but from an early age, knowing that there was something wrong in the country. There were dangers out there. There were unrests in the township and naive concepts of something, but none of it manifesting where you are. So it always remained in the abstract.
What I loved about it, and what I really wanted to try and capture, was that feeling, that unease, that comes from the tension between what you can see and what you know to be true.
CHRIS REED:
And how authoritarian systems or oppressive systems poison everybody, not just the people being oppressed. It eats away at the center.
JOHN TRENGOVE:
Absolutely. And not to take away the true suffering of the oppressed, the bigger picture is an incredibly disturbing one, and it's essentially an image of white supremacy. But what the story does is it shows us-- this is what I wanted to focus on in the film-- is in order for a system like apartheid to exist and to be sustained, it requires the beneficiaries of that system to adopt a kind of willful blindness. And to teach their children the rules of what can be spoken about, what needs to be ignored, to dismiss the humanity of people that are different.
And so it's a kind of rule book for how to protect our own and how to protect the system. Often, people aren't even doing it consciously, but through demonstration and constant reinforcement, kids learn how to uphold and participate in a system of white supremacy.
[music playing]
CHRIS REED:
The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs, Re/Pair, and The Smell of Apples are all definitely worth watching. You can read the full transcripts of these interviews at both Film Festival Today and Hammer to Nail. If you're curious about any of the films discussed on today's show, be sure to look for them in theaters or via streamers. You can check out my film reviews at both Film Festival Today and Hammer to Nail. For the CineManiax podcast, I'm Chris Reed. Thanks for joining me, and I'll see you at the movies.
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Outro
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Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2026