Eighteen Black Films Go to Toronto

Every September the movie business goes to Toronto to find out what it made. The festival runs September 10 to 20 this year, and if you only read the big headlines you would think it was about superhero sequels. It is not. Read the program closely and you find at least eighteen films by or about Black people, from every corner of the diaspora, and a few of them are going to be the movies we argue about all winter.

Here is the list, in plain words, so you know what to look for when they leave Toronto and come to you.

Chris Rock wrote and directed Misty Green, a sharp Hollywood satire about racism, class, and what it costs to survive the business. Rosalind Eleazar leads, with Daniel Kaluuya, Adam Driver, and Anna Kendrick. Rock has been telling this joke on stage for thirty years. Now he gets to show it.

Mahershala Ali stars in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, from director Bassam Tariq. He plays a deeply religious contract killer in Texas who has to protect his children after his wife dies. Two Oscars, and he still picks the strange, quiet roles. That is why the Oscars.

Cynthia Erivo carries Prima Facie, the story of a barrister whose view of the law flips when she becomes a survivor herself. And The Julia Set puts Chase Infiniti, who broke out last year, on a campus where a brilliant student keeps getting overlooked. Chloe Bailey is in it too.

Ben'Imana, by Rwandan director Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo, is about forgiveness and justice after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. It won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes this spring, the prize for the best first feature in the whole festival. Soumsoum, The Night of the Stars, from Chad's Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, won the critics' prize at the Berlin festival.

“The diaspora is not one story. It is eighteen of them, playing in the same building, in the same week.”

Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a project the great William Greaves started in 1972, candid conversations among the Harlem Renaissance's own people, finished by his son David. Darlene Love: I Know Where I've Been gives the voice behind a hundred hits her name back. Re/Pair puts Black and Jewish thinkers in nineteen paired conversations.

You will not see these in Toronto. Almost nobody does. But festivals are where distributors buy, and what they buy this month is what lands in theaters and on your apps over the next year. So here is the practical version.

And meet the actors before the press tour does. Seven Names to Know This Fall is the companion list. Sixty years after Sidney Poitier had to choose every role like a statement, this is what the program looks like when nobody has to.