From South Africa’s The Smell of Apples to Sweden’s Brace Your Heart to South Korea’s The World Before, here are the best acquisition titles (films still seeking distribution in Canada, the US, and/or the UK) at TIFF 2026.
Click here to find all of our TIFF 2025 coverage.
Discover one film you didn’t know you needed:
Not in the zeitgeist. Not pushed by streamers.
But still easy to find — and worth sitting with.
And a guide to help you do just that.
Every year at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), I go looking for the festival’s hidden gems — films that don’t necessarily have major stars and haven’t already made a big splash on the festival circuit.
Ten years ago, when I started writing this feature, so many wonderful films disappeared forever after their initial screenings on the festival circuit. Back in 2021, we published a “Where Are They Now?” piece about every film that made our list from 2016-2019 inclusive — many of which still don’t have distribution in 2026.
But things have fortunately changed. More and more films do get a distributor, and yet, many still don’t get seen outside their home countries. Without a distributor, the chances of seeing these films later — either theatrically or on VOD — are slim.
So this annual feature is my way of drawing attention to worthy films that you might not otherwise hear about that deserve to make it to audiences.
Our enthusiasm for films has landed films distribution deals in the past. For a sense of how well our picks have fared in the past, You can also check out our 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 lists — many films are still seeking distribution.
Below is our list of the best TIFF films still seeking distribution in Canada, the US, the UK, or all three. This list will be updated throughout the festival as I see more films and embargoes lift.
Brace Your Heart (Amanda Kernell, Sweden)
Amanda Kernell returns to TIFF ten years after her first feature, Sámi Blood, absolutely stunned me. In the intervening years, many more Sámi features have been made (including 2024’s My Father’s Daughter and Arrú earlier this year) meaning the burden no longer falls on Kernell to educate the public about Sámi history and issues.
Brace Your Heart is at once a tender love story and a heartbreaking story of recovering from trauma. When the film begins, Ejva is performing CPR on her father who will pass away, leaving her to care for the reindeer herd. It’s a job that almost always falls to men, leaving her the odd woman out. She’s also still young and inexperienced, which makes it hard to parse whether the men treat her as less than because she’s a woman, because she’s still green, or both.
It’s a dangerous business where you have to rely on the group to survive, and it’s clear to Ejva that she needs the favour of the man in charge. Only gaining it will have unexpected consequences that leave Ejva traumatized and unable to do the job at all. She must figure out how to move forward in a community she doesn’t want to leave and yet where she doesn’t totally feel safe either.
Brace Your Heart is still seeking distribution in Canada, the US, and the UK. Kernell’s second feature, Charter, still isn’t available in any of these territories.
Children Untold (Miwa Nishikawa, Japan)
Miwa Nishikawa’s thoughtful and heartrending World War II drama tells the untold story of the children who became unhoused orphans toward the end of the war in Japan. It is the story of 12-year-old Kotoko who, having lost her family, ends up on the streets of Tokyo fending for herself. When she sees the fate that befalls other young women — forced to become sex workers — she cuts off her hair and disguises herself as a boy, and falls into a gang of scamps.
Dickensian in its scope and sensitivity toward the welfare of children, but this is not a film of either caricatures nor even adults. For the most part, adults are absent, aside from Kotoko’s teacher, who will spend the film searching for her and a kindly fisherman and his wife, who offer Kotoko kindness that nobody else has.
Children Untold is the kind of old-fashioned filmmaking so rare these days where we constantly feel how easy it is for Kotoko to get lost in the crowds of the big city, just one of many children abandoned by the state during the war.
Children Untold is still seeking distribution in Canada, the US, and the UK.
Djinn Wedding (Ferit Karahan, Turkey)
Back in 2021, Ferit Karahan’s excellent My Brother’s Keeper screened in the Panorama section at the Berlinale. The Seventh Row team was so impressed we reviewed it, interviewed Karahan, and podcasted about it. His last film, The Death of Black Horses (2025), still isn’t available.
Karahan makes his TIFF debut in the festival’s Platform sidebar, which spotlights emerging international talent, with a story of family trauma and secrets told across three timelines. It’s the story of three siblings — two brothers and a sister — who, from childhood, understand the pecking order. The eldest son will be educated and inherit, but is so haunted by the knowledge that his mother died by suicide that he can’t enjoy anything. The youngest son will see to his controlling father and the family farm. The daughter will have no power at all.
With My Brother’s Keeper, Karahan showed a sensitivity to depicting systemic problems, and especially the patriarchal horrors of a rural boarding school. Patriarchy is also under scrutiny in this film, where the men all feel hard-done-by despite all their privileges. And the women don’t get any respect at all.
That all coalesces in the film’s middle timeline, when the sister is preparing for a wedding to a man she doesn’t love because she’s pregnant and needs a cover. An altercation between her brothers and her husband’s new family lands them in a police station, the officer talks to her father and brother as though she’s not even in the room. He is worried about her safety should he let her go with her family, and asks her father to promise to protect her. Things only get worse for her from there.
Djinn Wedding is a bold and challenging film, visually sumptuous and full of anger at systemic injustice. I had to watch it twice to fully catch the connections between the timelines, but once I had, it was a hugely rewarding film.
Djinn Wedding is still seeking distribution in Canada, US, and UK.
Trash Mountain (Kris Rey, United States)
If you’ve been sleeping on American indie director Kris Rey’s body of work — comfort films about women having existential crises — go seek out Unexpected and I Used to Go Here now. (We talked about both on the podcast here.) Trash Mountain is her first film which she did not pen. The screenplay by Caleb Hearon, who also stars, is based on his own experiences coping with the loss of his hoarder father, and feels like something written for Sundance. It is at its best when depicting the sibling relationship between Gavin (Hearon) and Abbi (Zooey Deschanel), who is ten years his senior but intimately understands the challenges of growing up with their father. There is also wonderful supporting work from Kyle Marvin as Abbi’s warm and supportive husband.
Whatever the screenplay’s weaknesses, the film is elevated by Kris Rey’s exquisite direction. When most films find their comedy these days through cutting, Rey lets scenes play out in two shots or even wides, letting the rhythms of the performances dictate the comedy. Who pops into the frame and when or who is visible at the back of the frame is also a source of many laughs.
But my goodness, this film is full of wonderful two-shots, especially between Gavin and Abby, which lets Deschanel especially remind us of why she can be such a compelling performer when asked to do something other than a quirky MPDG.
It’s a film that feels like a warm embrace, that has a lovely little romantic subplot, but is, at its heart about family.
Trash Mountain is still seeking distribution in Canada, the US, and the UK.
Stuffed (Theo Rhys, United Kingdom)
With Jodie Comer and Harry Melling in the leading roles, it’s only a matter of time before Theo Rhys’s taxidermy musical romance, Stuffed, gets picked up for distribution. The two-hour runtime is trying, but it is the rare modern musical (with original music) where the musical isn’t just apart of the film’s whacky premise. There’s actually a reason these two characters have to break out into song, and those reasons shift across the film.
Listen to the podcast about the film here.
Stuffed is still seeking distribution in Canada, the US and the UK.
The Smell of Apples (John Trengove, South Africa)
You would be hard-pressed to find a better film this year than John Trengove’s The Smell of Apples. It is in the same leagu as Mike Leigh’s exquisite Tender Loving Care and Andrew Haigh’s quiet stunner A Long Winter.
Set in the early 1990s during one life-changing week at the beginning of the summer holidays, The Smell of Apples is the story of 11-year-old Magnus’s transformation from someone already somewhat unknowingly participating in Apartheid to becoming fully complicit with his eyes wide open.
When his father’s fishing rod goes missing, he lays the blame on their Black maid Doreen’s nephew. And it sets into motion a series of horrifying events that he could not have fully anticipated. Trengove describes the film as being about the closed system of a family, where white supremacy is taught and upheld even before children fully understand it, and where its values are inseparable from patriarchy.
The film hews closely to Magnus’s limited perspective, where he’s always overhearing snippets of conversations he doesn’t quite understand and adult things are implied without being made explicit. But it keeps us at a slight remove, too, not only because we understand what Magnus does not, but to let us feel for Magnus’s feeling of his own powerlessness within his family without excusing his behaviour. He is not a complete innocent.
The Smell of Apples is still seeking distribution in Canada, the US, and the UK.
The World Before (Yoon Dan-bi, South Korea)
Yoon Dan-bi’s second feature, The World Before, tells the story of two childhood friends who meet again as teenagers and perhaps move toward first love. Set during one summer on a remote Korean island, Jin spends the summer discovering tender and sexual feelings for her Dujae, who is grieving his grandmother and waiting around for his mother who abandoned him. As it goes with teenagers, they don’t quite know how to communicate what they’re feeling, and they’re not quite sure what they want from each other.
We spend most of the film at Jin’s side as she looks longingly at Dujae and tries to get up her courage to make a move. But for him, things are more complicated: he’s not planning on staying, and he’s coping with an overwhelming amount of family difficulties of which Jin is mostly unaware. Still, they find comfort in one another. And when the summer is over, Dan-bi leaves us wondering, much as the characters do, if it was all a fever dream.
Dan-bi makes this story feel close to the skin and intimate, whether through the sight of barefoot feet pattering down a hallway, or Jin sitting outside the bathroom door where Dujae is showering as the patter of water envelopes her.
The World Before is still seeking distribution in the US and the UK.
Discover one film you didn’t know you needed:
Not in the zeitgeist. Not pushed by streamers.
But still easy to find — and worth sitting with.
And a guide to help you do just that.
