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Pensioners Nina (Barbara Sukowa) and Madeleine (Martine Chevallier) have hidden their deep and passionate love for many decades. From the point of view of those surrounding them, including Madeleine’s meddling daughter (Léa Drucker), they are simply two neighbours sharing a hallway during their sunset years. In reality, this landing is a bridge between two worlds: one belonging to a widowed, doting grandmother, the other to a free-spirited, fiercely independent woman who longs to spend her life with the person she loves. Clandestinely, Nina and Madeleine share a tender life, moving freely between their apartments until, one day, an unexpected event closes the portal. In this new reality, their secret cannot remain hidden if they are to stay together — and their unconditional love is put to the test.

France-based Italian director Filippo Meneghetti, along with writer Malysone Bovorasmy (in collaboration with Florence Vignon and Marion Vernoux), uses the utmost care and benevolence in crafting his bold, lustrous directorial debut. Sukowa, Chevallier, and Drucker are endlessly compelling in their performances of characters who are both sincere and flawed. Two of Us is a film of longing and revelatory beauty.

Content advisory: coarse language

Cinema is an art of sound and vision, but it’s the rare film that explores both with equal vitality. In a remarkably assured feature debut, Darius Marder finds a cinematic language that’s perfectly matched to this story of a man fighting to hold on to what defines him.

Riz Ahmed is a noise metal drummer. Shirtless and full of coiled intensity, he hammers out ferocious sets with his girlfriend and bandmate (Olivia Cooke). But with each show, a persistent ringing in his ears worsens until sound drops out altogether. For a deaf musician and his partner who’ve built their precarious existence doing what they know and love, what happens now? If he can’t recover his hearing, who will he become?

Marder, who co-wrote the screenplay for Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines (TIFF ’12), begins in similar territory here — characters living by their own rules. But this film moves in new directions, and according to its own beat. As this drummer explores medical interventions to restore his hearing and begins to learn about both the experience and the culture of deafness, he confronts the gap between external sounds and that tinny inner noise he can’t shake: the sound of metal. Marder and his team do groundbreaking work to convey that subjective sonic experience, while Ahmed is simply brilliant and fully immersed in his character. As the story takes one surprising turn and then another, it builds to a journey that looks — and sounds — like life.

“A picture which uses the medium of cinema to its fullest extent, both visually and aurally” –Wendy Ide, Screen Daily

Content advisories: coarse language

Directed by Kevin Macdonald and based on the NY Times best-selling memoir “Guantánamo Diary” by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, this is inspiring the true story of Slahi’s fight for freedom after being detained and imprisoned without charge by the U.S. Government for years. Alone and afraid, Slahi (Tahar Rahim) finds allies in defense attorney Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster) and her associate Teri Duncan (Shailene Woodley) who battle the U.S. government in a fight for justice that tests their commitment to the law and their client at every turn. Their controversial advocacy, along with evidence uncovered by a formidable military prosecutor, Lt. Colonel Stuart Couch (Benedict Cumberbatch), uncovers shocking truths and ultimately proves that the human spirit cannot be locked up.