My review of Guga Paes and Cainã Souza’s D’un autre monde: Moh Dafok, a colourful, funny, and beautifully produced portrait of a Brazilian drag queen who transforms Montréal into her personal stage. Dynamic images, animation, humour, and Moh Dafok’s extraordinary charisma make the short immediately engaging, even as its promise to reveal the person behind the extravagant persona remains tantalizingly unfulfilled.
My review of Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon’s Night Stage (Ato Noturno), a queer drama-thriller connecting acting and politics through ambition, masculinity, desire, and the dangerous need to be seen. Bold in its characters’ behaviour yet surprisingly conventional in its aesthetic choices, the film explores two men whose professions depend on carefully performing public identities while their desires continually threaten to destabilize them.
Explore my reviews from the Brazil Film Fest Toronto 2026, from contemporary Brazilian features to short films highlighting the growing cinematic connections between Brazil and Canada.
The King of the Internet becomes most compelling when Daniel Nascimento is understood not simply as a gifted hacker or a young criminal, but as a digital-age version of the Brazilian malandro. Fabrício Bittar transforms jeitinho into hacking and technological knowledge into power, creating an entertaining portrait of the early Brazilian Internet in which ingenuity, ambition, and playful transgression gradually give way to manipulation, exploitation, and crime.
Several films emerged as major highlights, particularly Fjord, Elsinore, On Behalf of My Son, Soumsoum, A Good Little Soldier, Minotaur, Coward, and Bitter Christmas. The festival’s audience awards also intersected closely with my coverage: La Bola Negra received the People’s Choice Award, while Elsinore won the International People’s Choice Award, with Possible Love and The Assassin(s) recognized as runners-up. The success of two films centred on gay lives and histories was particularly meaningful, reflecting the openness of Toronto audiences to queer stories told through very different cinematic and historical perspectives.
La Gradiva follows French high-school students in Pompeii as buried desires, family histories, sexual tensions, and questions of identity surface among the ruins. Marine Atlan transforms archaeology into a powerful metaphor for adolescence and repression.
Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend traces Gilles Villeneuve’s early years, from snowmobile racing and financial struggle to the threshold of Formula 1. Yan Lanouette Turgeon delivers a polished and accessible Quebec biopic, anchored by Rémy Goulet and Rosalie Bonenfant, even if its portrait remains more precise than psychologically adventurous.
Trees Are Watching is therefore most compelling when understood not simply as a horror film but as an environmental and cultural fable, one in which nature preserves what human beings would prefer to forget. Its supernatural dimension gives physical form to something much more disturbing: the possibility that destroying the natural world also means destroying part of our own memory, history, and humanity.
The Assassin(s) works so well because it remains both politically ser
ious and highly entertaining. It is at once a historical drama, investigative film, action thriller, and political conspiracy story. The constant accumulation of information, the newsroom battles, the censorship, the police investigation, and the uncertainty around the assassination attempt give the film an unusually strong rhythm.
The film clearly belongs to the tradition of Slow Cinema, and at times recalls the work of Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang and the broader aesthetic associated with Taiwan’s Second New Wave: long durations, sparse action, quiet spaces, and a focus on everyday gestures rather than conventional plot development. But unlike the strongest examples of that tradition, The World Before never develops a sufficiently distinctive visual or emotional point of view.
Written and directed by Stéphane Brizé, A Little Good Soldier (Un bon petit soldat) returns to the world of work that has defined several of his films, including The Measure of a Man (2015), At War (2018), and Another World (2021). Once again, Vincent Lindon inhabits that universe, here playing the company boss opposite Alba Rohrwacher as Carla, the film’s central character. This time, however, Brizé moves away from the serious, socially engaged realism of those earlier dramas toward something closer to dark comedy and scathing satire. The film remains concerned with work, hierarchy, pressure, and institutional violence, but irony and sarcasm create a more detached, psychologically charged, and sharply critical tone.
Djinn Wedding is an ambitious and visually striking film about family trauma, patriarchal customs, inherited responsibility, and the darkness created by what remains unspoken. Its use of Anatolian folk belief and magical realism gives it a distinctive atmosphere, and the wedding sequence provides a powerful centre. But the film’s excessive fragmentation, unresolved transitions, and lack of narrative clarity make it difficult to become fully involved in the characters’ lives.
Written and directed by Andrew Haigh, A Long Winter follows films such as Weekend (2011), 45 Years (2015), Lean on Pete (2017), and All of Us Strangers (2023), all of which are marked by an interest in intimacy, loneliness, memory, and emotionally fragile relationships. Here, Haigh brings those concerns into a very different setting: a family drama shaped by absence, longing, and the search for someone who is no longer there. Set in the mountains of Colorado and filmed in the Canadian Rockies, the film follows Mike (Fred Hechinger), a young man whose mother disappears during the first blizzard of the season. Her absence gradually forces him to reconsider not only his relationship with his father, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, but also his own place within a family already fractured by distance, frustration, and loss.
Written and directed by Lee Chang-dong, Possible Love contains many of the elements of a potentially fascinating film: class, marriage, labour conflict, trauma, envy, grief, and the uneasy relationship between private pain and public representation. Its central setup is strong. Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) and Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) are trying to move on from the trauma of a disastrous labour dispute when they are approached by Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), an ambitious and rich documentary filmmaker whose project gradually draws them into the orbit of her and her wealthy husband, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung).
The film’s most interesting idea is the role of rehearsal itself. The actors repeat scenes, gestures, lines, and emotional beats, constantly trying to refine them and get closer to something more truthful. Outside the theatre, however, life offers no such possibility. It cannot be repeated, corrected, or perfected. That contrast becomes particularly powerful through the film’s main character, Jimmy George, played by Rami Malek, who is living with AIDS and for whom the play may represent one of his final experiences on stage. Rehearsal therefore acquires a different emotional weight: it is no longer simply about perfecting a performance, but about time, mortality, and the desire to hold on to something that is already slipping away.
by Hudson Moura TIFF’s Short Cuts 2026 Programme 01 brings together six films that are very different in tone and form, but…
Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, Bitter Christmas unfolds across two temporal planes, 2004 and 2026, and develops one of the filmmaker’s most self-reflexive ideas: the way writers and directors transform the lives of people around them into fiction. The film follows two filmmakers whose creative processes become entangled with grief, love, ambition, and the ethical dangers of artistic appropriation.
Written and directed by Gabriel Martins, On Behalf of My Son (Vicentina Pede Desculpas) begins with a deceptively simple gesture: Vicentina travels across the city, going from home to home to apologize to the families of people whose lives were destroyed by her son. From this premise, Martins constructs an extraordinarily dense drama about grief, responsibility, guilt, forgiveness, and the limits of human connection. The Portuguese title is particularly significant—Vicentina Pede Desculpas, literally “Vicentina apologizes”—because the act of asking forgiveness is not merely the narrative device that moves the film forward; it is its moral and emotional centre.
The film’s strongest decision is to remain almost completely attached to Stan’s point of view. Rather than approaching the hospital through doctors or medical staff, as so many medical dramas do, L’autre stays with the patient’s unstable perception, shaped by a confusing mixture of fear, pain, medication, vulnerability, and anxiety. Stan is immobilized, heavily medicated, struggling to adapt to his prosthesis, and gradually becoming less certain about what is happening around him. Morphine, nightmares, hallucinations, and physical suffering begin to distort his perception, making the hospital itself increasingly difficult to read.
Simon Stone’s Elsinore begins with material that could easily have produced another sombre biographical drama about the AIDS crisis. Its subject is the Scottish actor Ian Charleson, best remembered internationally for his performance as Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1990 at the age of 40. Shortly before his death, already gravely ill, Charleson undertook one of the most demanding roles in the theatrical repertoire: Hamlet at London’s National Theatre. Rather than allowing illness and death to define its protagonist, however, Elsinore makes an inspired decision. It becomes a film about living, acting, friendship, humour, and the stubborn need to create when time is running out.
Glaxo attempts to connect youth, friendship, desire, betrayal, revenge, and political violence across different periods of Argentine history. The problem is that these elements never completely cohere. The fragmentation that structures the film makes it difficult not only to follow certain motivations but also to understand exactly what kind of dramatic relationship the film wants to establish between its intimate story and its political background.