43rd Toronto International Film Festival Coverage: Day Nine

Friday, September 14th, 2018 by Ian Evans

A Private War courtesy of TIFF.

Tonight’s first gala was to be Melanie Laurent’s English-language directorial debut Galveston, but that film was dropped from the Festival’s lineup just prior to the first day when it was announced that the director and cast were unavailable to walk the red carpet, which is one of the prerequisites to be a gala. In its place, the gala slot was given to Matthew Heineman’s A Private War. Rosamund Pike plays legendary war correspondent Marie Colvin, who died while covering the conflict in Syria in 2012. Jamie Dornan plays Paul Conroy, a photojournalist who survived. It’s documentarian Heineman’s debut as a narrative feature director.

Up next was Jiang Wen’s Hidden Man, the final film in Jiang’s trilogy that started with Let the Bullets Fly and Gone With the Bullets. In Hidden Man, a spy, Li Tianran (Eddie Peng), returns to China on the cusp of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Raised in San Francisco and trained in U.S. spycraft, he returns home on a mission but also seeks revenge for the killing of his master. Director Jiang also appears in the film as a businessman with questionable motives. Western audiences may recognize him for his role as Baze Malbus in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.