Toronto: Cillian Murphy’s ‘Steve’ to Open Platform Competition

The Cillian Murphy-starring drama Steve, from director Tim Mielants and Netflix, will open the 2025 Platform competition at the Toronto Film Festival, organizers said Tuesday.

Adapted by Max Porter from his novella Shy, Steve has Oscar winner Murphy playing a headteacher during a pivotal day for students at a last-chance reform school and in a world that has left them behind. As Steve deals with his own trauma, he meets Shy (Jay Lycurgo), a troubled teen also caught between a dark past and an uncertain future.   

Tracey Ullman, Simbi Ajikawo and Emily Watson also star in Steve, which will hit Netflix on Oct. 3. On Tuesday, Toronto unveiled in all 10 features for the festival section where international films outside of the Hollywood studio orbit compete.

There’s a rare international premiere in the section for Pauline Loquès Nino, which bowed in Cannes and has rising star Theodore Pellerin playing a young man whose life in Paris is shattered over three days by a sudden cancer diagnosis that he must come to grips with.

There’s also first looks for Yoon Ga-eun’s third feature, The World of Love, about a cheerful young woman (Seo Su-bin) on a curious quest for love thwarted by a fit of anger in class and an anonymous letter; and the animated pic Bouchra, helmed by 2 Lizards directors Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani and about a 35 year-old Moroccan coyote and filmmaker making a movie about her relationship with her mother.  

As well as for The Hen, a live-action film from director Gyorgy Palfi about a chicken desperate to raise a family in the face of life’s brutal pecking order; and director Kasia Adamik’s Winter of the Crow thriller, which stars Leslie Manville as a British professor caught up in a secret police conspiracy after witnessing a student’s murder in 1981 Warsaw as martial law is declared.

Adamik is the daughter of Polish writer and director Agnieszka Holland, whose new biographical film Franz, about author Franz Kafka, will also have a world premiere in Toronto this year. Holland and Adamik jointly directed the 2017 film Spoor and 1983, Netflix’s first Polish-language series. The mother and-daughter filmmakers also had Polish cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk behind the camera on their latest films headed to TIFF.

The Platform program has booked Milagros Mumenthaler’s debut feature The Currents, about a successful fashion designer from a wealthy Argentine family who develops a severe phobia of water on returning home after falling from a bridge and into freezing river water in Geneva; and Skite’kmujuekati’kw (At The Place of Ghosts), a supernatural indigenous thriller by Bretten Hannam and starring Blake Alec Miranda and Forrest Goodluck.

Also slotted into the Platform program is Valentyn Vasyanovych’s To The Victory!, a dystopian story set in post-war Ukraine where the director is also the lead character; and Farnoosh Samadi’s Between Dreams and Hope, a queer love story where Azad (Fereshteh Hosseini), a trans man, and Nora (Sadaf Asgari) are two young lovers toggling between tradition and modernity in their society and family.

The jury for the Platform competition this year is led by Spanish director and includes Canadian director Chloe Robichaud and Oscar-nominated actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Hard Truths).

The Toronto Film Festival is set to run from Sept. 4 to 14. More film lineup announcements will be made in the coming weeks.