MUBI is a streaming platform, production company, and film distributor whose focus is on emerging and established filmmakers in the industry, providing viewers with harder-to-find films through their platform. MUBI focuses on events and exhibits where films shown may not be available to everyone else, and this year it is creating the Festival Focus: TIFF.
This focus highlights standout feature films and shorts from last year’s TIFF that will be joining the platform on September 7. Viewers can access these films with a subscription to MUBI, and with a total of eight films being added to the platform, subscribers are given an incredible at-home viewing experience.
Due to the pandemic, TIFF was closed to the public in both 2020 and 2021, making the 2022 festival its official return to in-person attendance. With a large turnout, the films of 2022 made a statement as the first back to the festival, living up to the expectations held from the previous years. ~Ireland Fidale
Festival Focus: TIFF
Untold Hours (2022) — Daniel Warth, Canada
Visual artist Alicia Nauta embarks on a new project, in which she is both the creator and the canvas. In her apartment-studio, the artist silently works away at her latest showstopping creation, from conceptualization to public display.
It’s What Each Person Needs (2022) — Sophy Romvari, Canada
Artist Becca Willow engages in a series of phone calls with two very different sets of clients. There are lonely men who crave female companionship, and there are the elderly who require kindness and sometimes a nostalgic old song.
I Thought The World Of You (2022) — Kurt Walker, Canada
The elusive Canadian outsider-artist musician Lewis’ landmark album L’Amour was recorded in 1983 but lay in obscurity until later discovered in 2008. In between speculative episodes from Lewis’ life and career, fans discuss the myths surrounding him on an online forum.
Available now:
Decision to Leave (2022) — Park Chan-Wook, South Korea
In this seductively twisted modern romantic thriller, obsession is taken to wondrous and vertiginous extremes. Without a doubt one of the most electrifying minds working in cinema today, Park Chan-wook won the Best Director award at Cannes for his sumptuous, Hitchcockian masterwork.
Pacifiction (2022) — Albert Serra, France, Spain
Topping Cahiers du cinéma’s list of the best films from last year, Albert Serra’s mesmerizing epic conjures up the malaise and paranoia poisoning the Edenic calm of sun-soaked Tahiti. Steeped in moral ambiguity, Benoît Magimel’s stunning performance embodies the corruptive power of the imperial state.
Saint Omer (2022) — Alice Diop, France
One of France’s best directors, documentarian Alice Diop, reimagines the real-life trial of a Senegalese woman accused of infanticide in her award-winning fiction debut. In a riveting interplay between legal facts and Greek mythology, Saint Omer powerfully grapples with the deified figure of the mother.
De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022) — Verena Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, France, United States
Plunging into the viscera of human bodies, the directorial duo behind Leviathan opens up glistening worlds of ecstatic abstraction. Never shrinking from grit or guts, this fascinating documentary surfaces in underfunded Parisian hospitals, where doctors inject a good dose of humor into disrepair.
The Kingdom Exodus (2022) — Lars von Trier, Denmark
As characters old and new settle into a familiar groove of petty workplace squabbles, Kafka-esque administrative wrangles, and ghost-hunting adventures, von Trier wields nostalgia like a matador, luring us with its comforts before pulling them away to confront the moral—and mortal—quandaries on which the Kingdom Hospital shakily stands. Christmas is approaching, and the ultimate battle between the forces of good and evil looms.