Dead Lover is the 2025 Midnight Madness at the Toronto International Film Festival closing film. The last midnight madness screening of the year is always a bittersweet night/morning. It is also a celebration of the programme and the filmmakers who premiered their films throughout the ten nights. Tonight Dead Lover directed by Grace Glowicki and co written by Grace and Ben Petrie has a new poster ahead of the closing night screening.
The Napa Boys arrived in style at the Royal Alexandria Theatre in downtown Toronto for their world premiere at the Midnight Madness selection at the 50th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival. Check out the awesomeness here:
There is nothing like Toronto in September. The Toronto International Film Festival arrives and brings such a great energy and vibe to Canada's largest metropolitan area.The energy of the city gets amped up even more than any regular day. The cinematic world descends upon the downtown streets. Red carpets are rolled out. Doors of tinted windows are opened. Actors and filmmakers from Argentina to Tokyo and everywhere else step onto the streets. Crowds gather eager for a glimpse, a selfie or a hastily scrawled signature on a blu-ray or a glossy photo or a restaurant receipt. There is nothing like Toronto in September. Except for me, all of the above is true, except there is nothing like a Midnight Madness premiere in Toronto in September.
Curator Peter Kuplowsky tirelessly searches for the ten films of cinematic genre note. The Midnight Madness programme has such a storied history. It is a film festival within a film festival. Many have noted the audiences of TIFF. Those audiences by 11:59 p.m. are still up, amped and ready. Beach balls are hit and smacked around the venue. Peter's selected playlist - curated for each of the ten movies - is playing loud.
As the Royal Alexandria aka The RAT fills up so to does the din of the buzz of the crowd anticipated what genre delights will soon unfold. Will it be an intense, look at the screen through fingers covering your eyes horror film. An action film where the sound of effects of bone-crunching kicks rattles the ear drums of the over thousand people in attendance, will the movie be a gross out funny genre destroying cinematic opus you may only see once?
I will preface the following with this...I am anticipated all of the 2025 Midnight Madness movies. If I had to pick three these are the three I will pick today...tomorrow, well that maybe a different story.
I have been following the movies of Matt Johnson and his motley crew of filmmakers since The Dirties (2013) This extremely talented group crosses genres, tones and film making techniques with ease. I cannot wait to see their latest film.
KARMADONNA
Just look at at just one of the publicity stills which was released to the media. I have been covering film festivals since 2007. I cannot recall such in your face publicity photos. This comes as no surprise as the director of Karmadonna Aleksander Radivojevic also directed a film entitled A Serbian Film by many accounts, mine included one of the most intense films ever made, I was at the international premiere of A Serbian Film at SXSW in 2010. That film still haunts me. Good luck Toronto.
THE FURIOUS
I cannot wait to see this movie! Kenji Tanigaki action choreographer SPL, Flash Point and Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In helms his own action movie. Get ye to the theater as fast as humanly possible!
At the genesis of SALOUM, there is the meeting of my partner in crime Jean-Luc Herbulot. We both had a visceral need to create works in Africa, filled with heroes and monsters. It was what we craved as kids to see coming from African film, so we created it ourselves. During a trip to the Saloum region of Senegal in 2018, we wrote the short story “The Twilight of the Hyenas” an African western... a horror film... a fantastic epic... an ode to the imaginary world in which we would like to stay and a furious artistic deliverance rather than a desire to fill an empty box.
The movie was filmed in nature, mostly in the mystical and wild region of Saloum, Senegal where my journalist father had filmed wrestling matches more than forty years ago and where my mother still lives; on an island without cars, far away from all levels of city life.
SALOUM is the first feature film from LACME STUDIOS, co-constructed with the actors and technicians, day-after-day for five straight weeks - the epic adventure of a group living outside the comfort of their respective homes, much like the hero-mercenaries of the film itself. The absence of a network, the random supply of water, the regular silting up of vehicles... blood was shed along with tears. SALOUM is the result of the talents we gathered who were kind enough to follow us on this adventure.
The production of SALOUM was a natural shifting of gears, the result of adrenaline rushes, soul encounters, inevitable pains, loves, the divine and fears of emptiness ... a birth of a bloody new-born already adored by its parents.
"When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe ..." Eric Thomas recounts in his motivational speech, explaining how an old man kept his student's head under water, thus demonstrating the true meaning of the word "motivation.” This best explains why I believed in this film, why I expected it and why I didn’t hesitate to take the risk.
It’s important for me to release African artistic madness, so universal and yet so rare on international screens.
What is your background as a filmmaker?
No film-school. No camera. Just an eight-year-old filled with feverish dreams. I am and always have been what I refer to as a hostage of creativity. As an adult, I finally found the outlet to release those dreams into visual stories.
What was your initial inspiration for making SALOUM?
A lucid dream and an experience of drowning. When I was a kid, 5 or 6 years old, in Congo, I was alone on the seashore, and I suddenly got sucked into the water. I fought my way back but remember losing it and just letting go... But then, I finally came out of it, like somebody pushed me back to shore. I remember being helped by an adult that was guarding me. This guardian said I had disappeared for more than five minutes. And she was not joking, she was crying and scared to death. That experience made me question about the unknown and perceptions. Later on, some years ago, I was in Dakar. I was pretty sick, feverish, but I won my battle against insomnia that night. I slept and had this weird dream of floating and being a camera in the middle of a gunfight, more precisely an execution. I witnessed a military kid going forward, gun pointed to his destiny/enemy? Who was that kid morphing into an adult? The rest is in the movie.
The performances in the film are exceptional– what was your casting and rehearsal process?
I don’t go through a traditional casting process I spend time choosing people I want to work with. We all lived together in the camp that you see in the film, so the tenderness and the tensions were based on reality. The performances in SALOUM are what happens when you isolate thirty people with a thirst for creativity in a contained desert camp, in a spiritually overloaded environment.
What are your cinematic and creative influences, and how did they influence the making of SALOUM?
Red Dead Redemption 2, the ancestral spirits of Saloum and “The Strummer’s law” – the idea that a constant flow of creative inspiration into one's life is as important as breathing.
Good morning, as I write this, in “normal” years I would be sitting in my second airport waiting room heading to Toronto. I spent many years living and surviving in this city.
My first tiff experience was way back in 2002. I was working nights in a grocery store in the Toronto neighborhood the annex. Tiff always falls on my birthday, which happens to be this year, tomorrow. My friend Alex who was the night cashier and a gregarious dude who chatted with everyone who was buying groceries in the middle of the night was talking to two guys who happened to work for the film festival. Alex knew I always wanted to attend the festival but had no idea how. In talking with the guys checking out they said they would come back with a couple of tickets for us. They did. That first movie I saw was a big red carpet world premiere movie of hometown film hero David Cronenberg’s Spider. I remember Gabriel Byrne walking on the stage in an extremely ill fitting suit and was wearing tennis shoes. The hypnotic, slow-moving maze like film and me working nights was a deadly combination. My first tiff movie and I fell asleep. Loudly.
In 2003 I bought a ten-ticket package and took the week off of work. It was intoxicating. This was also my first time seeing a midnight madness movie. The movie was Ong-Bak and it was an amazing tiff experience. That midnight screening was was life-changing on so many levels for me. That too is a long and great story, which much like Blanche DuBois was I being rewarded by, “the kindness of strangers.” You can read about that here.
With Ong-Bak director Prachya Pinkaew (2003)
In 2004 I went crazy and bought a fifty-ticket package. That nearly killed me so that was a lesson learned. In 2007 my friend and I went and started shooting the Q&As and uploading them to the very new website, YouTube. The third film, George Romero’s Diary of the Dead we were accused of “pirating” the movie, even though the movie was not even playing. Suffice to say we did not get much footage that night. We did get enough of zombies on the red carpet and me complaining about the subway we turned into a music video featuring the Sprites song, George Romero. That video got seen a lot, very quickly.
The Sprites saw it and loved it and the then midnight madness programmer Colin Geddes also saw it and dug it and helped my friend and I get more footage as the week went on. This opened a lot of doors for us. That November we applied for and received our first media accreditation for the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival and my first official interview was with actor Dustin Nguyen and his role in Finishing the Game. In 2008 we received our first midnight madness badge. I also started contributing to the Midnight Madness blog doing interviews and videos.
In 2009 a brief introduction prior to the world premiere of Jennifer’s Body would change my life. My
friend and long-time midnight madness attendee Bernadine introduced me to a
woman by the name of Sarah who was living in Indiana and writing her dissertation
about the film festival. Sarah and I would connect once again in 2011 and we
started dating. The following year, we were married. She would also be the camera operator on many red carpet interviews.
In 2008 and 2009 I was earnestly doing some red carpet interviews, by 2010 I was on every single one of them. In turn I became an unofficial video archivists of the programme. I had a ton of footage, from every introduction, post-screening Q&A, special events. The George Romero Canadian citizenship welcome ceremony in Dundas Square comes to mind as well as all of my interviews. Which as of right now have wound up over fifty different film releases from around the world. I have been subtitled in German, French, Spanish and Japanese.
Here we are two years into this world wide pandemic. This is the second year I will be “attending” tiff online. For this I am grateful and yet I am also missing the travel, the whirlwind nights, red carpets but most importantly I am missing all of my friends terribly.
I am embarking on this festival by just waking up and
watching whatever I can with no previous research and seeing what world cinema
is doing this year in the midst of another year dominated by Covid. I am
ambitiously going to see as much as I can and write as much as I can because as
long as I am typing it will alleviate some of the sadness of missing my friends
and the crazy energy of the Toronto International Film Festival. Toronto in
September is my favorite time to be in the city, not least of which is it’s
also my birthday. This year, like last year, I'll be down here in South Texas watching as much cinema as humanly possible!
Have a great tiff,
Robert Mitchell
