TIFF's Wavelengths at the Edge of the Multiplex: Lisandro Alonso and the Persistence of Slow Cinema

The Toronto International Film Festival’s 51st edition runs 10 to 20 September 2026, and its most interesting programming decision this year is not in the Gala slate. It is in Wavelengths, the sidebar TIFF has run for cinema that does not fit the multiplex — feature-length and short, narrative and non-narrative, films whose audience is measured in hundreds rather than thousands. This year’s Wavelengths, curated by TIFF senior curator Andréa Picard with Jesse Cumming, centres on Lisandro Alonso’s Double Freedom, a film that does something festival sidebars almost never get to do: return, twenty-five years later, to a character nobody expected to see again.

What Wavelengths is for

Wavelengths takes its name from Michael Snow’s 1967 film Wavelength, a continuous, room-spanning zoom frequently cited as one of the foundational works of North American experimental cinema — the kind of film that tests what “watching a movie” even means before it asks what the movie is about. TIFF built the section to hold work in that lineage inside a festival otherwise organized around premieres, red carpets, and awards-season positioning. That juxtaposition is the whole point. A festival large enough to launch studio prestige pictures can also afford, in one corner of its program, to show films that most multiplexes will never book and most streaming platforms will bury in a library nobody browses. Wavelengths exists because someone has to keep making that space, on purpose, inside an institution large enough to protect it.

This year’s lineup runs to eleven features, including Angela Schanelec’s My Wife Cries, Denis Côté’s Nobody’s Violence, Radu Jude’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, Mariano Llinás’s Life of Jorge Luis Borges, and Sebastian Brameshuber’s London, reportedly shot using vintage rear-projection technology. Several are having their North American premieres at TIFF after debuting at Cannes, Locarno, or Berlin — festivals with their own durational-cinema sidebars, which is itself a sign of how small and interconnected this circuit actually is.

The section also does double duty as an archive and a launch pad, which is easy to miss amid the premieres. Once Upon a Time in Harlem, begun by the documentarian William Greaves and completed after his death by his son David Greaves, receives its Canadian premiere at TIFF after already showing in the United States — the kind of posthumous, decades-spanning completion that a conventional festival slot rarely has patience for. At the other end of the same program, Yuula Benivolski’s The Black Box Is Orange has its world premiere as a Canadian production, giving Wavelengths a role its glossier counterparts across the festival mostly don’t share: first exposure for new domestic work, in the same rooms as a finished filmmaker’s unfinished last project and a twenty-five-year callback from Argentina.

The unlikely sequel

Alonso’s Double Freedom is the section’s clearest event, and the reason is specific rather than reputational. In 2001, Alonso’s first feature, La Libertad, followed a single day in the life of a woodcutter named Misael Saavedra — a nonprofessional performer playing something close to a version of himself — shot with a patience that became one of the founding texts of what critics later grouped, not always usefully, as slow cinema. Double Freedom, a Cannes standout now making its North American premiere at TIFF, returns to Misael Saavedra twenty-five years on, still working the same land, on Alonso’s own father’s estate. It also introduces a sister, Misaela, played by the Chilean actor Catalina Saavedra, familiar from The Maid, in what amounts to a small Borgesian joke: the two performers share a surname and appear on screen as siblings while being, in fact, unrelated. Alonso is not hiding the fabrication. He is placing a documentary-adjacent method next to an invented family relationship and daring the audience to decide where the line actually falls — close to what La Libertad was doing with Misael’s original performance twenty-five years earlier, just made explicit this time.

That gap of twenty-five years is not a marketing hook; it is the substance of the film. Slow cinema’s defenders have always argued that its patience is not an aesthetic affectation but a way of representing duration honestly — a scene lasts as long as the thing it depicts, not as long as convention allows. Returning to the same man’s daily labour after a quarter-century takes that argument to its logical endpoint: the patience is no longer confined inside one film, it spans two of them.

At Night, and the rest of the frame

Beatrice Gibson’s At Night, the British artist’s first feature, sits at the other end of the section’s range. Shot on 16mm by the filmmaker Ben Rivers, it is described as a work of choral autofiction that moves between narrative, documentary, and dream across a single night in Paris, working through womanhood, privilege, and solidarity among its circle of characters. Where Double Freedom extends a quarter-century-old observational method, At Night compresses its material into one night and refuses to settle into any single mode of address. The two films make an argument together that this year’s Wavelengths program seems to have been built around: durational cinema does not mean one thing. It can mean returning patiently to the same subject over decades, or it can mean refusing, within a single night, to let the audience know whether what they are watching actually happened.

What this is actually for

None of this plays especially well as a marketing pitch, which is precisely why a section like Wavelengths has to exist inside a festival with the resources to protect programming that will never fill a thousand-seat house. Readers who make it to Toronto this September without a Wavelengths ticket already booked are missing the part of the festival least replicated anywhere else — Gala premieres eventually reach streaming platforms and awards-season coverage regardless of when a person sees them; a film like Double Freedom, playing to a smaller house on the strength of a twenty-five-year-old character study, may not get another North American booking quite this way again.

Sources: The Film Stage, “TIFF 2026 Unveils Centerpiece, Wavelengths, and Classic Lineups” · POV Magazine, “TIFF Announces Wavelengths Titles for 2026 Festival” · TIFF, “Programmer — Andréa Picard”