Toronto Film Festival 2016: Leonardo DiCaprio documentary to screen

The 2016 Toronto Film Festival lineup continues to grow with Tuesday’s announcement of titles screening as part of this year’s Documentary, Vanguard, Midnight Madness, Cinematheque, and Short Cuts programs.

Leonardo DiCaprio is set to world-premiere his climate change documentary, The Turning Point, in Toronto this September. Made in collaboration with Oscar-winning filmmaker Fisher Stevens, the film will attempt to act as a call-to-action for society, highlighting ways in which humans can minimize their negative impact on the planet’s endangered species and ecosystems.

Also screening as part of the festival’s nonfiction lineup are films about African-American novelist James Baldwin (I Am Not Your Negro), an in-depth exploration of Amanda Knox’s two murder trials (Amanda Knox), Errol Morris’ documentary portrait of photographer Elsa Dorfman (The B-Side), a Jim Jarmusch-directed chronicle of The Stooges (Gimme Danger), and Werner Herzog’s deep-dive into the cultural and philosophical importance of volcanoes (Into the Inferno).

Knox and Inferno join The Ivory Game and The White Helmets as Netflix’s four documentary titles showing at the Canadian festival. TIFF, largely seen as a major launching pad for awards-bound films, hosted screenings of the Netflix documentary Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, which went on to receive an Oscar nomination in the Best Documentary category, last year.

TIFF’s popular Midnight Madness section returns with the world premiere of Ben Wheatley’s Brie Larson-starring thriller Free Fire, scheduled to open the program. Other Midnight Madness titles include the world premiere of Adam Wingard’s latest horror project, which EW previously exclusively revealed to be a secret sequel to The Blair Witch Project, Paul Schrader’s Cleveland-set crime thriller Dog Eat Dog, Morgan Spurlock’s horror documentary Rats, and Sadako vs. Kayako, a Japanese horror flick pitting iconic supernatural entities from The Ring and The Grudge against each other.

Ana Lily Amirpour’s sophomore directorial effort, The Bad Batch, will hold its North American premiere at TIFF as part of the festival’s Vanguard section, which hosts “dangerously dark and sophisticated” cinema from around the world. Nacho Vigalando’s long-awaited Kaiju actioner Colossal, starring Anne Hathaway, will have its world premiere in Toronto, as will Dash Shaw’s first animated feature, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea. The disaster film’s voice cast includes Lena Dunham, Maya Rudolph, John Cameron Mitchell, Reggie Watts, Susan Sarandon, Alex Karpovsky, and Jason Schwartzman.

The only film directed by actor Marlon Brando, One-Eyed Jacks, is set for a Cinematheque screening at the festival, as are Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and Agnès Varda’s One Sings, the Other Doesn’t are also playing as Cinematheque titles.

The Toronto Film Festival runs from Sept. 8-18. For a full list of titles screening as part of the aforementioned programs, visit the TIFF website.