Entertainment

Toronto International Film Festival releases Top Ten lists for 2020

Features from Deepa Mehta, Tracey Deer, and Michelle Latimer are among those on the Toronto International Film Festival's best-of-the-year list.

Inconvenient Indian, Beans, Funny Boy among festival's best-of-the-year list

Organizers for the Toronto International Film Festival released their Top Ten list for 2020, including Beans, Inconvenient Indian and Deepa Mehta's Funny Boy. (Michael Wilson/CBC)

Features from Deepa Mehta, Tracey Deer, and Michelle Latimer are among those on the Toronto International Film Festival's best-of-the-year list.

The annual TIFF Canada's Top Ten list includes the Mehta-directed Funny Boy, which is Canada's submission to the Oscars for best international feature film and is streaming on CBC Gem.

Mehta also co-wrote the story with Shyam Selvadurai, who penned the novel that inspired the film, about a Tamil boy growing up gay during deadly conflict in Sri Lanka in the 1970s and '80s.

Deer is on the list with Beans, about a 12-year-old Mohawk girl coming of age during the 1990 Oka Crisis.

And Latimer made the cut with the documentary Inconvenient Indian, which is adapted from Thomas King's acclaimed 2012 non-fiction book and won two awards at TIFF in September.

Other films on the top 10 list include:

  • Fauna by Nicolas Pereda, a comical look at so-called "narco" violence in Mexico.
  • Mike Hoolboom's Judy Versus Capitalism, about Canadian feminist activist Judy Rebick.
  • The Kid Detective by Evan Morgan, a dark comedy releasing VOD/digital on Dec. 15.
  • The Olympic swimmer drama Nadia, Butterfly by Pascal Plante, which was chosen for the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and is now available on digital/VOD platforms.
  • Sean Durkin's family thriller The Nest, which stars Jude Law and Carrie Coon and is now available on digital/VOD platforms, including digital TIFF Bell Lightbox.
  • No Ordinary Man by Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt, about the life of jazz musician Billy Tipton, who was outed as a transgender man after his death in 1989.
  • Brandon Cronenberg's sci-fi horror Possessor, which is also now available on digital/VOD platforms, including digital TIFF Bell Lightbox.