More than two dozen leading film associations called early Friday for the immediate release of Syrian filmmaker and festival director Owra Nyrabia, who has been missing since Aug. 23.

The statement was signed by film organizations including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the International Documentary Association, representing tens of thousands of leading filmmakers working in the U.S. and abroad. 

Nyrabia (pictured with his wife Diana El-Jeiroudi at the Sarajevo film festival in July) was detained by authorities in Damascus on August 23rd -- his whereabouts remain unknown. He was believed to have been detained by Syrian security services as he prepared to board a...

The Toronto International Film Festival doesn't have the prestige of Cannes, the indie clout of Sundance, the beauty of Telluride or the careful curation of Venice.

But it has some of what all of those other festivals have -- and a lot more.

In many ways, Toronto is all about volume. It has more movies than most -- 289 features at last count. It is one-stop shopping (or viewing) for those who want to see Oscar hopefuls, or potential blockbusters, or provocative documentaries, or challenging foreign films from Cannes and elsewhere, or cinematic art projects or just about anything else that can be projected on a screen.

So the press will descend, the buyers will descend, the sellers will...

The Toronto Film Festival's People's Choice Award winner, Nadine Labaki's "Where Do We Go Now?," has found a place to go in the United States: Sony Pictures Classics, which on Wednesday announced that it had acquired all U.S. rights to the film about Lebanese women trying to defuse the tensions between Muslims and Christians in their small village.

The film has already been announced as Lebanon's entry into the Oscar Best Foreign-Language Film competition.

“Nadine Labacki has made a warm, human film that is both perfect for this moment in time and will satisfy audiences across the country," said SPC co-chiefs Michael Barker and Tom Bernard in a press release...

Nadine Labaki's "Where Do We Go Now?" has won the Cadillac People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF officials announced at an awards brunch on Sunday.

The film uses comedy and music to tell the story of a group of women in an isolated community in Lebanon who use a variety of schemes and ploys to distract their men from the outside tensions that threaten to disrupt the town's cordial relatioinships between its Christians and Muslims.

A surprising TIFF winner over such high-profile crowd-pleasers as "The Artist" and "The Descendants," the film was recently selected as Lebanon's official entry into the Academy's...