TIFF 2018 Day 5 round-up: Robert Redford bids farewell with Old Man & the Gun; Bulbul Can Sing premieres

Robert Redford  bowed out on Monday from a 50-year acting career, calling what he has said will be his final movie “a wonderful film to go out on.” With plenty of other interesting films premiering at  TIFF 2018 , here’s a round-up of all that caught our eye on Day 5.

Robert Redford bids farewell to acting with throwback crime caper

The Toronto Film Festival audience erupted with applause after the screening of comedy caper The Old Man & the Gun in which Redford, 81, plays a charming, real-life bank robber who was caught 17 times during the course of a 60 year crime career but who managed to escape from jail every time.

“I’ve always been attracted with the idea of outlaws since I was a kid and I played that out in my work a lot, so this just followed suit,” the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid star said.

“It’s just an upbeat film. It’s a true story. It’s a wonderful film to go out on,” he said.

Rima Das overwhelmed by response to her film in Toronto

National Award-winning filmmaker Rima Das’ film  Bulbul Can Sing  premiered at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2018. It was screened to a packed house of audience on Monday, and she is overwhelmed by people’s response to it.

Bulbul Can Sing is about a teenage girl, Bulbul, living in a village in Assam, fighting her way through love and loss as she figures out who she really is.

Das, writer-director-producer, made the film independently, in the same way as her earlier film, Village Rockstars.

Sharing her joy, Das said in a statement: “It’s a huge honour to present Bulbul Can Sing to such a lovely audience at TIFF, I am completely thrilled and overwhelmed by their response. Thank you, TIFF and my team back home. I missed my team a lot.”

Xavier Dolan slips in English language debut

Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan made his English-language debut on Monday, premiering The Death and Life of John F. Donovan at the Toronto film festival.

The much-anticipated film starring Susan Sarandon, Natalie Portman, and Kit Harington had been suddenly withdrawn from Cannes earlier this year and concerns were raised about the production after he later cut Jessica Chastain’s scenes.

On the red carpet in Toronto, Dolan did not speak to the media, leaving his cast to field questions in his stead.

“He wasn’t aiming to like have this big breakout, first English movie, it’s just (that) the movie he was making had to be in English,” said Harington. “It’s about the entertainment industry, it’s about Hollywood. And he wanted to work with some actors that didn’t speak French as well. So you know that leaves him with doing an English language movie.”

The film also stars Kathy Bates, Thandie Newton, Jacob Tremblay and Ben Schnetzer, also at TIFF this year in The Grizzlies.

In other news from TIFF 2018:

The Hate U Give puts Black Lives Matter on the screen

The short story that begat Angie Thomas’ breakthrough young adult novel  The Hate U Give  was inspired by the shooting of Oscar Grant III, the Oakland, California, African-American 22-year-old who was shot by a white transit police officer in 2009.

In the years that followed, more shootings followed and Thomas kept on writing. Now, a year and a half after The Hate U Give became a bestselling phenomenon, Thomas’ book has been adapted to the big screen by director George Tillman Jr. from a screenplay by Audrey Wells with just as much honesty and urgency as were in Thomas’ first pages. And the tale’s timeliness has painfully persisted.

“This film will empower a lot of people and give them hope,” said Thomas in an interview shortly after the film’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere. “It’s going to explain some things to people who don’t get it. I think it’s going to open a lot of eyes and change a lot of perspectives, and hopefully help people understand why we say ‘black lives matter’ so that eventually we won’t have to say it. It’ll be understood.”

Barry Jenkins premieres Beale Street to tears and applause

Of the many who were moved by Barry Jenkins’ James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk, none was more shaken than the actor Brian Tyree Henry. “Get it together, Brian,” he told himself on the stage of the Princess of Wales Theatre moments after the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival

“Black love is beautiful,” he said, adding an expletive, to loud applause. “I don’t think I have ever seen it like that. Barry, you have no idea how badly we needed and yearned for this.”

Jenkins’ follow-up to his best picture winning Moonlight was arguably the most anticipated film at Toronto. It’s the first big-screen adaptation of any novel by Baldwin and just the third film by 38-year-old filmmaker who was catapulted to larger renown by the astonishing Moonlight, a low-budget independent film that took center stage at last year’s Academy Awards.

(With inputs from agencies)