There’s a familiar rhythm to the TIFF 2025 festival season. The flash of paparazzi bulbs, the rustle of gowns on the red carpet, the buzz around A-list auteurs. But for those of us who look for our own reflections in the stories told on the world’s biggest screens, the rhythm often misses a beat. Where are our stories? Where are our storytellers?
This year, at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival, that beat is stronger, more resonant. Beyond the glitz of the Galas and the star power of the Special Presentations, a powerful, undercurrent of change is being authored by a cohort of brilliant diaspora women directors. Their films, premiering on TIFF’s prestigious stages, aren’t just entries in a program; they are declarations of presence. They are the embodiment of our mantra: Stories from her lens.
For HerSide, this isn’t just a lineup; it’s a watershed moment. It’s the culmination of years of advocacy, of relentless creativity, and of a community insisting that its narratives are not niche—they are universal.
Let’s meet the architects of this shift:
🔥 Annemarie Jacir, Director of Palestine 36 (Gala Presentations)
A titan of Palestinian cinema, Jacir brings her profoundly humanist vision to the Gala program. Palestine 36 is a historical epic that promises to explore a pivotal moment in Palestinian history with intimacy and scale. For Arab women, and particularly Palestinian women in the diaspora, Jacir’s consistent presence on the international stage is more than success; it’s an act of cultural preservation and resistance. Her work validates our histories and insists on their complexity in spaces that often seek to simplify or erase them .
🎬 Maryam Touzani, Director of Calle Malaga (Special Presentations)
The Moroccan director’s latest film, described as a “joy” and a potential Oscar entry, is led by a powerhouse performance from veteran Spanish actor Carmen Maura . Touzani’s work often explores the intimate lives of women in Morocco, weaving tales of quiet strength and societal nuance. For Muslim women and Arab women viewers, her films offer a mirror to our own layered experiences—stories that are not about trauma alone, but about joy, community, and the subtle power dynamics within a family home. Her inclusion signals a growing appetite for nuanced stories from the Arab world that move beyond well-trodden stereotypes.
🎭 Nia DaCosta, Director of Hedda (Special Presentations)
While DaCosta is already known for her blockbuster work, her return to TIFF with Hedda is a full-circle moment. A “smoldering period romance” adapted from Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, the film sees DaCosta reuniting with Tessa Thompson and making a bold, queer-informed reinterpretation by gender-swapping a key character to be played by Nina Hoss . Early reviews call it a “gossipy, jazzy tension riddled pressure cooker chamber piece” and a “catty film about women by women in a man’s world” . DaCosta represents a specific brand of Black womanhood: unapologetically ambitious, genre-fluid, and intellectually rigorous. She claims her space in every room she enters, from indie darling to Marvel director to canonical re-interpreter, inspiring a generation of Black creatives to refuse being pigeonholed.
The HerSide Lens: Why This Moment Matters
This isn’t just about counting names in a program. It’s about the substance of the stories they’re telling. These directors are not asking for permission to exist; they are building their own tables. They are navigating an industry rife with systemic barriers, and their success paves a slightly easier path for those who follow.
Their films—whether historical epics, intimate character studies, or genre-bending thrillers—are all tied to a core tenet of our identity: lived experience. They ground vast historical events in personal emotion. They find the universal in the specific cultural nuance. They are the perfect echo of TIFF’s own Every Story Fund, which aims to “CHALLENGE the status quo” and “CELEBRATE diverse storytellers” .
As we celebrate these women, we must also ask the hard questions: Are their films receiving the same marketing budgets? The same awards campaign push? Are critics from their own communities being elevated to review their work?
The red carpet is a moment. But the real work is in the dark of the cinema, where a young Black or Arab girl sees a director on stage during a Q&A who looks like her, speaks like her, and shares her heritage. That moment tells her that her perspective is valuable. That her story is worth telling. That she, too, can hold the camera.
That is the power of this TIFF moment. It’s not just about the films we’ll see this September; it’s about the countless films we will see in the years to come, because these directors have boldly kicked the door open wider.
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