TIFF Wavelengths 2026, Toronto
By Mike Hoolboom
The internet, along with its mobile portals, has secured the archive at the centre of global attention cultures. TIFF’s Wavelengths programs – four series of shorts, nine features – offer reflections on the cost of looking and remembering. Here are a few of the jewels on offer…
Yuula Benivolski, The Black Box is Orange, 2026
Yuula Benivolski’s The Black Box is Orange is a lifetime’s quest squeezed into feature format, a Middle East homecoming where nothing is as it appears to be. In ten chapters she peels away the comforting lies of state and brings forward stunning sequences of never-before-seen photos.
John Smith is the elder statesman of a jocular avant-garde. He has somehow turned the formalisms of past generations into a harvest of deadpan humour and sharp framings. His short Two Pids opens the Wavelengths 1: House and Home program by turning a lens onto his last Toronto visit.
In Rita Ferrando’s miniature epic Fire Flies, lyric moments of the everyday produce a quietly stunning time travel where death and beauty are never far. One of the richest, most perfect films I’ve seen in the past decade. If only we could see it six times in a row.
Jiaqi Yu, Moon Palace, 2026
In Jiaqi Yu’s Moon Palace, everyone’s face is only the beginning, the pedestal even, for someone else’s face. How do we produce frames that will ensure our own innocence? Domestic settings carve up the bodies that pass through them, lying flat whenever state tyrannies are reproduced as family inheritance and common sense.
Simon Liu returns to his beloved Hong Kong with his wind-up Bolex camera, determined to externalize his nervous system as he gathers evidence of the city’s once flourishing underground in Splits in Two. In brief lyrical passages he finds a citizenry frozen in mirrors, split between their old lives under British occupation and their new Chinese rulers. The streets are a chase scene, funeral pyres burn, boats depart. Mourning and celebration swell in equal measure.
Maryam Tafakory’s Ghazal-e Sorkh is avant agit-prop, repurposing carefully researched news fragments and archival footage to offer a capsule history of cultural repression in the Shah’s Iran.
Vika Kirchenbauer, This Suffocating Now, 2026
Vika Kirchenbauer’s personal essay short This Suffocating Now takes on the struggle of Palestinian solidarity in Germany, a country that has gone to great lengths, like a handful of others in the global north, to support apartheid and genocide. Vika’s surprise university employment requires a signed loyalty oath, and her fractured wrist is echoed in neighbourhood demonstrations where the police wear special gloves. The problem of the bystander: what to do with all this looking? How to continue making art, even this kind of protest art, knowing it will not fill the belly of a single hungry child in Gaza or spare a single prisoner from the regime of state-sponsored sexual assault?
For veteran filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, the archive is not a Twitter feed or YouTube channel. Instead, this pair of inveterate anti-colonial seekers have combed through film archives across Europe for decades in search of those who have been left behind. Understanding that simply re-presenting their finds is not enough, they slow down certain moments, adding tints and spare moments of sound. In Electric Fragments No. 1 – Rom (Men), they revisit northern Italy after the second world war, where gypsies are beginning to appear again, after the slaughter of their families in German concentration camps. The emphasis is on bodily gestures, how history speaks through a child struggling to stand, how a young boy finds escape in the joy of running while his family squats in the roadside rubble. Together these faces, and the delicate and sensitive way they are treated by this artist duo, produce a moving portrait of an unwanted gypsy underclass.
Beatrice Gibson, At Night, 2026
At Night is acclaimed shorts maker Beatrice Gibson’s first foray into the feature format. She sets six women (including herself) into motion, though makes sure to leave the plotless middle blank so that they can keep talking about their bodies and relations across nighttime Paris. Handsomely lensed by star filmmaker Ben Rivers, languorous cafes, alley strolls, trains and streetcars accompany monologues of loss and someone else’s laughter. Filmmaking is a persistent theme, and feels like what happens instead of life. Trapped inside someone else’s dreams without knowing how they got there. The framings are often faraway and cool, as if the observer had not quite landed. Here but not here. Here but anywhere. In this nighttime vigil, every face-to-face is revelation, while the moments between are punctuated by a deep digital melancholy.
The Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 10 to 20.
Toronto International Film Festival: https://www.tiff.net/
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Mike Hoolboom used to write and make films.