I promised to report back from the Toronto Film Festival. Actually, I’m still reeling from the 27 films I watched last week.

I looked in on the latest work by some of my favorite directors, and am happy to report that the Coen Brothers (No Country for Old Men), Ken Loach (It’s a Free World), Werner Herzog (Encounters at the End of the World), and Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg), delivered films that are among their very strongest. Meanwhile, Guy Maddin’s previous film, Brand Upon the Brain, shares with My Winnipeg an autobiographical take on Maddin’s strange family history. Along with the OFFScreen film series (check out their new season here), we’ll be bringing Brand Upon the Brain to the Film Festival on November 4.

At least three of the best films I caught in Toronto are showing up in our program. I’ll give away one of the titles—Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.. It’s about the French editor of Elle, Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, paralyzed by a stroke except for one eye, used the blinks of that eye to write his memoir. Schnabel conveys Bauby’s perceptions and memories with great cinematic imagination, and I found the film exhilarating and deeply moving.

I’m also happy to report that the film that impressed me most at the Tribeca Film Festival, Autism: The Musical, which I wrote about here, will be one of our festival’s main events. Director Tricia Regan and producer Perrin Chiles will accompany the film, which the distributor has allowed very few festivals to screen. We previewed the film this week for several people involved with the Virginia Institute of Autism, and they responded very strongly. This is a film that, like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, confronts disability and affirms the power of art and the caregiving of family without sentimentalizing the experience of the disabled.