“Mad” Mary McArdle returns to Drogheda after a short spell in prison for something she’d rather forget. Back home, everything and everyone has changed. Her best friend, Charlene, is about to get married and Mary is maid of honor. When Charlene refuses Mary a ‘plus one’ on the grounds that she probably couldn’t find a date, Mary becomes determined to prove her wrong.

The years-long friendship between two pre-teen boys in a small Icelandic village is threatened when they strike up romantic relationships with a pair of local girls, in the affecting and beautifully crafted debut feature from Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson. In a small village in rural Iceland, Thor and Christian are best friends whose home lives are unsatisfactory, to say the least. Thor is ruthlessly mocked by his elder sisters, while his mother can't be bothered to hide her frustration at having to sacrifice her pleasure for the sake of her children. While Thor suffers from absentee parenting, Christian's drunken and abusive father is, unfortunately for him, all too present. When the two friends strike up romantic relationships with a pair of girls, the events that follow threaten to destroy the longest and most meaningful relationship either has ever had. Evincing a real feeling for how kids relate to one another, Heartstone also offers a powerful portrait of the limits of small-town life. While Thor and Christian's relationship takes centre stage, Guðmundsson also skillfully integrates a wide range of supporting characters (from a possibly psychotic local bully to the seedy clerk at the local diner/ bar, whose crass insensitivity reaches epic levels) and casts a cold eye on the boys' parents, whose privation and boredom have left them ill-equipped to fulfill their roles as protectors and nurturers. Well-crafted and very affecting, Heartstone is the finest debut by an Icelandic director since Rúnar Rúnarsson's Volcano. Desc. courtesy of the Toronto International Film Festival.

In an annual ceremony, the men of a small Xhosa community in South Africa encamp in the mountains of the Eastern Cape to initiate a group of teenage boys into manhood. Following a painful ritual circumcision, the young initiates spend two weeks healing and laboring under the alternately aggressive and mentoring care of their male elders. Xolani, a factory worker by day and former initiate himself, returns to the mountain each year as one of those elders. This time, he is entrusted with a teenager named Kwanda, the arrogant and disinterested son of a wealthy villager — a Johannesburg kid whom most of the other rural boys consider to be spoiled. This is an environment wholly dedicated to the traditional mores of patriarchal power and swaggering heterosexuality, where Xolani’s gentle and introverted nature is an aberration — and his attraction to men is a desperately held secret. Xolani’s clandestine love affair with a fellow caregiver adds further dramatic tension and a swirl of competing emotions to this beautifully acted story — well received at its 2017 Sundance Film Festival debut — in which an ancient and accepted culture collides with secret and sometimes dangerous passions. Director John Trengove, working with a Xhosa producer and co-writer, exposes more than one type of wound in his feature film debut (his short film Ibhokhwe also explored male circumcision), as Kwanda actively defies the fraternal code forced upon him, and Xolani struggles to reconcile the traditions of his people with his own desires and identity. Every moment of The Wound evokes the question, “What defines manhood?”