2025 TIFF: Nadia Latif, Lucía Aleñar Iglesias & Zamo Mkhwanazi Selected for Discovery Programme

Eric Lavallée

3 months ago

2025 tiff nadia latif lucia alenar iglesias zamo mkhwanazi

The section dedicated to dedicated to works by first and second-time filmmakers, Toronto International Film Festival have announced the twenty-three films in the Discovery Programme. The section will open with John Early‘s Maddie’s Secret (featuring Early alongside Kate Berlant, Vanessa Bayer, Eric Rahill, Claudia O’Doherty, Chris Bauer, Kristen Johnston, and Conner O’Malley). Among the film items we’ve been tracking we find the likes of Lucía Alenar Iglesias‘ Forastera – a project that was part of the 2021 Cannes Cinéfondation Residence and was the winner of the Prix ARTE Kino Intl prize, this is set during holidays in Majorca de Cata, this is about a woman whose vacation is dramatically disrupted by the death of her grandmother. Willem Dafoe will be in Venice for a pair of titles, but he could be Toronto-bound with Nadia Latif‘s debut. The Man in My Basement is set in Sag Harbor, New York, where Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins) is out of work, out of luck and on the verge of foreclosure on his ancestral home. A knock on the door from a mysterious businessman, Anniston Bennet (Dafoe), brings a bizarre and lucrative proposition; rent his dusty stand-up basement out for the summer and receive enough money to clear his debts for good. Johannesburg-based filmmaker Zamo Mkhwanazi‘s Laundry is set in South Africa 1968. Khuthala hates the family-owned laundry. But as the apartheid government cracks down on Black business ownership, Khuthala is torn between chasing his music dreams and fighting the injustice that threatens the business that is the sole means of support and glue of his family. All films selected are world premiere status –

2025 Discovery Program (in alphabetical order):