Avi Nesher's Our Loves premieres sold-out at Toronto amid boycott calls
Avi Nesher's Our Loves reached a sold-out audience at its world premiere on Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival after calls to boycott it.
The Israeli film is directed by Nesher and was shown to the public for the first time in Toronto, The Hollywood Reporter reported. The room was full. It is Nesher's fifth film to play the festival.
His earlier official selections were The Secrets in 2007, The Matchmaker in 2010, The Wonders in 2013 and Past Life in 2016. That history gives him one of the longer-running links between an Israeli director and Toronto.
Our Loves is a dramedy, a story that blends drama and comedy. It follows ordinary Israelis living through personal crises who find new meaning as they struggle to survive on 7 October. The plot includes the attacks at the Nova music festival and on kibbutzim, small farming communities, near the Gaza border.
The story draws on real-life accounts from survivors of 7 October. Nesher built his characters around those testimonies rather than around officials or soldiers. The focus stays on civilians caught in sudden violence.
At the centre is a tough community relations officer played by Magi Azarzar. She is in a same-sex relationship and tries to keep her sexuality and her lover Yaron hidden from her ageing mother. TIFF describes the film as a gracefully woven drama about love intensifying and second chances becoming possible in hardship.
The premiere followed weeks of dispute. Ahead of the festival, critics called for a boycott because the film received support from Israel's culture ministry. Pro-Palestine activist groups urged TIFF to pull the title from its line-up, The Hollywood Reporter reported.
Toronto faced a similar row last year. Organisers briefly removed Barry Avrich's 7 October documentary The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue from official selection, then reinstated it after public outcry. Earlier this summer, Our Loves was presented as a case study in overcoming the international boycott during a panel at the Jerusalem Film Festival, The Jerusalem Post reported.
In Toronto, Our Loves sits in the Centrepiece programme. Festival listings show a further screening on Thu 10 at 5:30 PM in TLB 3.
