By Brendan Kelly. Photo: Kayla Rocca. Source: montrealgazette.com

Two of Quebec’s hottest filmmakers – Jean-Marc Vallée and Philippe Falardeau – are headed to the Toronto International Film Festival but they’re going to the Big Smoke with two American movies. Both of which – in an odd twist of film fate – happen to star Reese Witherspoon!

Vallée is bringing Wild, which is adapted by British novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity) from Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. After years of dysfunction, Strayed decides to hike over a thousand miles on the Pacific Crest Trail on her own. It is set to be released by Fox Searchlight Pictures in early December.

Wild will be given a Gala screening at TIFF, which is the fest’s most prestigious slot.

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By George Duffield. Photo: Nicolas Ruel. Source: bostonglobe.com

The job of the sort of IMAX documentary that screens at museums is simple: fascinate, educate, and visually wow an audience of both school field-trippers and their chaperones, and get off the stage in about three-quarters of an hour. With this as its tricky and sometimes contradictory criterion, “Jerusalem” succeeds rather nicely.

“Jerusalem is the crucible of coexistence,” said writer, producer, and first-time director Daniel Ferguson, on hand at the recent world premiere of the film at the Museum of Science’s Mugar Omni Theater. “Why are people fighting over this little city on a hill?”

He and his coproducers admitted “there was nothing that was not complicated” when it came to filming. At the crossroads and flashpoint of three major religions — Christianity, Judaism, and Islam — Jerusalem is “the most contested piece of real estate on earth,” intones narrator Benedict Cumberbatch (PBS’s “Sherlock”).

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