TIFF 2015: Lena Dunham, Norman Reedus films added in new program

TIFF's new competitive film program will feature projects from TV stars Elisabeth Moss, Lena Dunham and Norman Reedus.

The Toronto International Film Festival has announced 12 films for its inaugural Platform program, featuring artistically ambitious films from directors around the world.

They include the London-set High-Rise from Ben Wheatley, about a doctor who can't escape the neighbours in his new apartment building. It features Moss along with Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons and Sienna Miller.

Dunham and Reedus star alongside Diane Kruger in the French/German film Sky, directed by Fabienne Berthaud. It's about a woman who splits from her French husband while on holiday in the United States.

And Canadian doc-maker Alan Zweig makes the cut with Hurt, a portrait of one-legged cancer survivor Steve Fonyo, who raised millions with a cross-Canada run, only to succumb to crime and addiction over the following 30 years.

An international jury will award a $25,000 prize on Sept. 20. The festival kicks off Sept. 10.

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Other filmmakers in the program include Sue Brooks, Diasteme, Eva Husson, Joaquim Lafosse, Gabriel Mascaro, He Ping, Pablo Trapero, David Verbeek, and Martin Zandvliet.

"They are major creative forces: the next generation of masters whose personal vision will captivate audiences, industry members and media from around the world," festival director Piers Handling said Thursday in a release.

Several films take inspiration from actual events.

Trapero's abduction thriller The Clan recounts a spate of brutal kidnappings in Buenos Aires during the 1980s. Argentine comedian Guillermo Francella (The Secret of Their Eyes) stars as the head of a well-heeled family behind the crimes.

Lafosse's The White Knights examines the Zoe's Ark controversy, in which a French charity embarked on a mission to bring orphans from war-torn Darfur to adoptive families in France. Charity workers ended up being jailed for the scheme, which turned out to involve many children who were not orphans and came from Chad.

And Zandvliet's Land of Mine is the Second World War tale of a group of German POWs captured by the Danish army and forced into a new kind of service under the command of a brusque Danish sergeant.