Two Australian films, The Sapphires and Lore, will have their North American premieres at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.
The Sapphires, a musical starring Chris O'Dowd, Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Shari Sebbens and Miranda Tapsell, had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where it received a positive response and was picked up by the Weinstein Co. The film tells the true story of an Aborginal girl group in the '60s during the Vietnam War. The Sapphires will have its Australian premiere at the State Theatre in Sydney on August 8.
Lore, an Australia/United Kingdom/German co-production, will also have its North American premiere at the festival. The film follows Lore, who leads her younger siblings across a war-torn Germany in 1945 after her Nazi parents are imprisoned. The film, directed by Cate Shortland, will be released in Australia on September 20.
Meanwhile, New Zealand film Mr. Pip will have its world premiere at the festival. The film, directed by Andrew Adamson, is set in 1991 when a war over a copper mine in the South Pacific tore the island of Bougainville apart. The reclusive “Popeye” (played by Hugh Laurie) offers the children in fourteen-year-old Matilda’s tiny village an escape with Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.
Meanwhile, the festival also announced that TIFF 2012 opens on September 6 with the world premiere of sci-fi action film Looper. The film depicts a world in which time travel is invented, but illegal and only available on the black market. When the mob wants to get rid of someone, they send their target 30 years into the past, where a “looper” – a hired gun, like Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) – is waiting to mop up. However, the mob decides to “close the loop,” sending back Joe's future self (Bruce Willis) for assassination. Looper will be released by Roadshow in Australia on October 11.
Check out the latest list of films screening at the festival at the TIFF site.