By Renu Mehta
Toronto
The 51st Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) that runs from September 10 to September 20, 2026, will feature 293 films from several countries. The films will be showcased in various predetermined cinema houses including the TIFF Lightbox, Visa Screening Room at the Princess of Wales theatre, the Scotiabank theatre as well as the prestigious Roy Thomson Hall, amongst others. The opening night film will be Siân Heder’s Being Heumann directed by Siân Heder, and the closing night film has been selected as Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend directed by Yan Lanouette Turgeon
Amongst the South Asian offerings, will be a film called Phoolan by acclaimed director Richie Mehta whose repertoire includes, among others, Delhi Crime, Poacher and Amal.
PHOOLAN BY RICHIE MEHTA
In the heartland of India, a young Phoolan Devi becomes one of the most famous outlaws in Indian history and the target of 2,000 heavily armed men sent to kill her over a gruelling 48-hour siege.
A small village in the heartland of India forms the backdrop of a high-intensity 48-hour siege where a young Phoolan Devi and her group of outlaws must outsmart the Indian police. Richie Mehta’s interpretation of the life and legend of Devi centres on a pivotal moment in her life, contextualized by but never exploitative of her traumatic past. Though young, Devi is already mythologized widely and garners support across caste, class, and gender barriers, showcasing precisely why she was a force to be reckoned with.
Mehta (Amal, TIFF ’07) brings his restrained and realistic true-crime sensibilities from Delhi Crime to this biopic, heavily inspired by her 1996 autobiography, I, Phoolan Devi: The Autobiography of India’s Bandit Queen. In the book, Devi recounts the trauma of her child marriage, the caste discrimination she experienced, and her journey to becoming the Bandit Queen. Devi eventually surrendered, served a prison sentence, and ultimately grew to political power as a Member of Parliament before she was assassinated in 2001. Those familiar with her life story will appreciate this immersive, taut thriller that highlights her moment of becoming.
ANGH BY THEJA RIO
In a deserted Nagaland village in the early 1960s, a chief must choose between his family and a transforming world embodied by an incoming American missionary in filmmaker Theja Rio’s gripping feature-length adaptation of his award-winning 2021 short.
Set in the early 1960s in a remote jungle near the Indo-Burma border, Angh follows Anghba, the last surviving chief of a Nagaland village that has been deserted by its people. He remains behind with his ailing wife and non-speaking young son, holding on as the world around them shifts irrevocably.
The arrival of an American missionary (Douglas Henshall, Shetland) sets the region’s transformation in motion, leaving Anghba to guard the beliefs and customs that have been passed down through generations. What emerges is a haunting and intimate story of a father and son, the latter increasingly seduced by the comforts of the mission. The film avoids sentimentality, instead observing how conversion operates deliberately by offering gifts even as the local culture is reframed as deficient.
DOROTHY BY KARTHIK SUBBARAJ
Set in a world shaped by caste, violence, and toxic masculinity, two childhood friends grow up inseparable in rural Tamil Nadu. Their lives are transformed by the arrival of Dorothy, a woman whose compassion quietly challenges the world around them.
Set in the early 1990s, Dorothy follows Karthi and Subbu, two boys who grow up within an unforgiving landscape of rural Tamil Nadu. When a misfortune befalls Dorothy (Keerthy Suresh), a member of the household who always treated the childhood friends with gentleness, the story takes an unexpected turn, shifting from their mere survival into a harsh, scorched-earth reality shaped by rigid patriarchal hierarchies and everyday violence.
The loss profoundly affects Subbu (Sananth), who finds an unlikely community of people living outside society’s expectations, and vanishes. Karthi (Rishikanth) is sent on a mission across rural India to hunt Subbu, the person who once saved him from schoolyard fights. Conflicted and caught between the bonds of friendship and filial demands, the two embark on a journey of friendship, love, and the profound courage it takes to live honestly.
ELEPHANTS IN THE FOG BY ABINASH BIKRAM SHAH
A village matriarch (Puspa Thing Lama) must choose between her heart’s desires and her duty to her community when a young woman disappears into the forest in this delicate, riveting thriller.
In a Nepalese village surrounded by forests and wild elephants, Pirati (Puspa Thing Lama) is the matriarch of a Kinnar community, a guru-led society populated by third-gender individuals with their own rites and rituals. New members, or daughters, are initiated into their chosen families through a ceremony in which they take a vow of chastity and a commitment of care to each other. These rules, along with her obligations as a mother, complicate things for Pirati, who has fallen in love with a local man (Aashant Sharma) and wishes to run away to Delhi.
HALF BY SAMJAD
Twin half-blooded vampires (Ranjith Sajeev and Aiswarya Raj) wage war with desert highway hijackers in a gory martial arts curry western from writer-director Samjad and choreographer Very Tri Yulisman (The Raid 2, The Night Comes for Us).
Since its 1970s heyday, the “curry western” has been a popular genre style across the Indian film industry. Indebted to American and Italian varieties of the form, these epics remixed the iconography and style of filmmakers like John Ford and Sergio Leone with culturally specific ingredients to fit a rural Indian frontier beset by roving gangs of bandits known as dacoits. In Samjad’s HALF, the subgenre further mutates with the introduction of vampires, a hallowed horror archetype that has previously permeated neo-Westerns like From Dusk Till Dawn and Near Dark. In this context, it bears down on those aforementioned bandits with a righteous fury and insatiable thirst for vengeance.
Following a wintery prologue that establishes our vamps Ethan (Ranjith Sajeev) and Ivy (Aiswarya Raj), twin siblings whose interspecies parentage (human mother, revenant dad) grants them supernatural abilities and spares them from the usual inconveniences, we catch up with the pair as they are traversing the desolate roads of the Rajasthan desert. Suddenly ambushed by local marauders who brutalize their bodies with a viciousness that recalls Mario Bava’s Rabid Dogs, brother and sister soon recover under cover of darkness and set out to maul, maim, and murder everyone responsible for the offense.
REPORT TO MOTHER BY JOHN ABRAHAM (North American Premiere of 4K restoration!)
A daring clarion call and one of the most significant works of Indian political cinema, John Abraham’s extraordinary final film Amma Ariyan (Report to Mother) follows a young man in 1970s Kerala as he journeys with a progressive swell of companions to inform a mother of her son’s death, amid widespread unrest.
A legendary figure in Indian parallel cinema and protegé of Ritwik Ghatak, John Abraham (1937–1987) is known for his modest, yet visionary and iconoclastic body of work. His final film, the Malayalam cult classic Amma Ariyan (Report to Mother, 1986) — now resuscitated in this meticulous, handsome 4K restoration — is one of the most significant works of political cinema from the subcontinent.
In 1970s Kerala, Purushan is set to leave for Delhi. His trip is cut abruptly short, however, when he encounters the dead body of a young man who has tragically taken his own life. Investigating the dead man’s identity by way of his friends — including doctors, activists, and musicians — he learns that the deceased is Hari, a young tabla player and revolutionary. Purushan then journeys, initially travelling on foot with a small group that progressively swells, to inform Hari’s mother. Along the way, they traverse both the geography and social stratum of Kerala, mapping out the state’s political unrest in a form of collective ritual.
STRONG SON BY IAN BAWA
A bodybuilder struggles to keep it together as he cares for his elderly father in this perceptive and deeply felt drama by Winnipeg’s Ian Bawa.
For all the hours he spends in the gym pumping iron and working hard to transform his physical form into a well-honed ideal of power and masculinity, the bodybuilder hero of Ian Bawa’s Strong Son can never feel strong enough.
Instead, Harvinder “Harvey” Singh (Mandeep Sodhi) is trapped in a quagmire of anxiety and insecurity. Worse yet, this painful experience has intensified since he returned to his family home in Winnipeg to take care of his aging father, Jagdeep (Amrit Parbhakar).
Stressed out by his caregiver role and further undermined by Jagdeep’s very vocal opinions about what a man ought to do and be, Harvey is barely hanging on. If Harvey has any hope of decreasing the frequency of his teary public breakdowns, it may depend on his burgeoning connection to his co-worker Caitlin (Michaela Kurimsky of Sweet Angel Baby, TIFF ’24) and his promising foray into pro wrestling, Jagdeep’s favourite sport.
THE DIFFICULT BRIDE BY RUBAIYAT HOSSAIN
One of the most arresting voices in contemporary female-centred cinema, Bangladeshi filmmaker Rubaiyat Hossain (TIFF ’19’s Made in Bangladesh) possesses a unique gift for navigating the liminal spaces between the sacred and the sensual, the mythical and the mundane. Her latest examines the pressures applied to brides in a milieu where weddings demand a feminine ideal so rarified as to be asphyxiating.
“Happy?” a bridal consultant asks Zaineen as the pair gaze into a mirror at the bride-to-be’s immaculately made-up face, sculpted hair, and bejeweled body. The answer is complicated. In the weeks leading up to her wedding to the handsome, wealthy, “perfect” Aarman, Zaineen is overwhelmed by anxieties about her weight, her blemishes, and her insomnia.
All perfectly normal feelings, she’s told. But what about the dreams and visions that increasingly haunt her, of catfish, snakes, and bloodied bodies? What about the mysterious scratches she discovers on her belly, or the feeling of something moving under her skin? Zaineen is a modern woman, but it seems like some unseen, perhaps ancient force is trying to send her a message.