Toronto International Film Festival Unveils Jury for 2019 Platform Programme

The Toronto International Film Festival is very pleased and honoured to announce that award-winning filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari, newly appointed Berlinale Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian, and Variety International Film Critic Jessica Kiang will serve as the jury for the 2019 Toronto Platform Prize, an award of $20,000 CAD presented to the best film in the Festival's Platform programme.

Named after Jia Zhang-ke's trailblazing second feature, Platform is the Toronto International Film Festival's competitive programme championing bold directorial visions. The programme includes up to 12 films and aims to spotlight these outstanding works within the Festival.

"We have been honoured to have had a remarkable list of distinguished filmmakers be a part of Platform's jury over the past four years," said TIFF Artistic Director and Co-Head Cameron Bailey. "As we continue to evolve and shape the future of this young programme, we feel incorporating established industry professionals into its jury is the natural progression. We are very fortunate to have Carlo, Jessica, and Athina join us as we make this transition."

"We have decided to expand the range of perspectives and forms of expertise included in the jury for this year," said Platform Co-Curator Andre?a Picard. "We expect that moving away from exclusively inviting filmmakers will shift the focus of the jury discussions, a change that will be exciting to observe given the makeup of our exceptional jurors this year."

Now in its fifth year, Platform is curated by Bailey and Picard, who is also Lead Curator for the Wavelengths programme. TIFF Cinematheque Director Brad Deane, Senior Manager of Theatrical Programming at TIFF Bell Lightbox Ming-Jenn Lim, and TIFF Cinematheque Programmer Lydia Ogwang are part of Platform's selection committee.

Previous Platform selections include Alex Ross Perry's Her Smell (2018), Karyn Kusama's Destroyer (2018), Clio Barnard's Dark River (2017), Kamila Andini's The Seen and Unseen (2017), Bertrand Bonello's Nocturama (2016), Barry Jenkins' Moonlight (2016), and Gabriel Mascaro's Neon Bull (2015).

The 44th Toronto International Film Festival runs September 5-15, 2019. THE LINEUP for this year's Platform programme will be announced in August.

Athina Rachel Tsangari has served as a jury member at the Cine?fondation, the Berlinale, and Locarno, and has led juries at Venice, Go?teborg, and BFI London. For the last 10 years she has operated Athens-based production company Haos Film, whose credits include Yorgos Lanthimos' Kinetta (2005), Dogtooth (2009), and Alps (2011), and Richard Linklater's Before Midnight (2013). Tsangari's second feature, Attenberg (2010), premiered at Venice, where it won the Coppa Volpi for Best Actress, and screened at TIFF. Her latest feature, Chevalier (2016), won Best Film at BFI London. Both films were Greece's submissions to the Academy Awards. She has been a filmmaker-in-residence at Film Society of Lincoln Center, and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, where she also taught as a visiting professor. Tsangari is currently the lead director of the upcoming TV drama Trigonometry, and in development for her fourth feature, White Knuckles.

Carlo Chatrian is the newly appointed Artistic Director of the Berlinale. Previously, he served as Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival for six years. He has been a programmer for Alba Film Festival, Florence's Festival dei Popoli, and Visions du Re?el. As a journalist, author, and programmer, he has worked on several magazines, and collaborated on published essays and monographs on filmmakers such as Nanni Moretti, Errol Morris, and Frederick Wiseman. Chatrian has served as a juror for BAFICI, Cine?ma du Re?el, Sundance, the Jeonju International Film Festival, and the Morelia International Film Festival.

Jessica Kiang is Variety's Europe-based International Film Critic, which takes her to film festivals on almost every continent, and her fingers remain crossed for Antarctica. For five years she was Features Editor at The Playlist, to which she still contributes, and she previously wrote for outlets such as Sight & Sound and BBC Culture.