Few films capture the difficulties of navigating the patriarchy like MOUTHPIECE

This year, the Toronto International Film Festival is asking what we can do for women. In light of the Weinstein allegations and the stories of the #MeToo, #AfterMeToo and #TimesUp movements, the question of how to support women behind and in front of the camera is of paramount concern.

Aside from the aptly-titled First Man, a majority of the festival's buzziest titles (Claire Denis' High Life, Karyn Kusama's Destroyer, Marielle Heller's Can You Ever Forgive Me?) come directly from female creators, or place female protagonists at their core (there's Sebastian Leilo's Gloria Bell, Bradley Cooper's A Star is Born and Barry Jenkins' If Beale Street Could Talk, but also Sam Levinson's tritely calculated Assassination Nation). This also includes the branded Share Her Journey campaign, which aims to raise awareness and support for female filmmakers, culminating in a rally on the first Saturday of the festival with keynote speaker Geena Davis. But after the hashtags and the glitter fades, one fact remains: it's really hard to tell your story when you've grown up believing that no one wants to hear you speak.

Two creators who understand this intimately are the Toronto theatre makers Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken, who are the stars and co-writers of MOUTHPIECE, a filmic adaptation of their hit 2015 play. Made in collaboration with legendary Canadian director Patricia Rozema, the film is a magnificent, multivalent journey inside one young woman's mind, following her on the day of her mother's death. It stars both actors, who — in an unique and effective performance — play the same person, trading off on dialogue while inhabiting the same scenes, sometimes with one in observation of the other.

Strikingly filmed by cinematographer Catherine Lutes (who also shot Jasmin Mozaffari's Firecrackers and Claire Edmondson's short film EXIT, both at TIFF) with a majority female crew, it's one of the few festival titles that captures how deeply fucked it feels to navigate the patriarchy on a daily basis. I spoke to MOUTHPIECE's stars and director hours before their world premiere at the Winter Garden Theatre (they received a standing ovation!) and you only have to watch Rozema, offering a bite of kale salad to her two collaborators, to see how powerful their connection is. ("Mommy, feeding her baby birds!" jokes Nostbakken.)

One weekend, while her friend Jodie Foster was vacationing in Toronto, Rozema suggested they catch a final performance of MOUTHPIECE the play. This led to Foster flying the creators to Los Angeles to stage a remount at the Odyssey Theatre in 2017 attended by Helen Hunt, Phyllis Nagy and Sandra Oh. When Rozema proposed that MOUTHPIECE could be a film, the three women hunkered down in the director's cabin to expand upon the story. Their intimate collaboration is all over the final product, including an original score made from the thrumming harmonization of their voices.

"We were just so playful; we were up for anything," says Nostbakken. "But I can't stress enough how much our trust [in Rozema] allowed us that freedom."

"I couldn't imagine something worse than seeing something you love, taking it away from the creators and making something they hated — it would be the worst possible artistic crime," adds Rozema.

I couldn't imagine something worse than seeing something you love, taking it away from the creators and making something they hated — it would be the worst possible artistic crime.- Patricia Rozema, filmmaker

"We were involved in the editing, the mastering of the sound," says Sadava. "We were spoiled making this film because we got to work with such incredible collaborators and we were listened to. That feels like that might be rare."

"It is," confirms Rozema, who worked with Harvey Weinstein on a number of occasions in Hollywood.

There's a lot of talk at TIFF 18 about how the future is female, but MOUTHPIECE puts its money where its, um, mouth is. In her landmark essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," film scholar Laura Mulvey wrote about how the essence of a female identity on screen is a "to-be-looked-at-ness." In her Masterclass "The Female Gaze" — presented at TIFF's Industry Conference in 2016 — Transparent showrunner Jill Soloway expanded upon Mulvey's essay, explaining that feminist cinema takes "to-be-looked-at-ness" and "returns the gaze...so it becomes, 'I see you, seeing me.'" This is aptly demonstrated in MOUTHPIECE, often in scenes when the character is in public. For example, hen the lead character gets catcalled on a Toronto side street, Nostbakken smiles and says thank you, while Sadava screams, "Fuck off!"

"To act clearly and strongly [as a woman] is a very hard thing to do, especially if you're listening to all the different parts that are ricocheting around you," says Rozema. "We found a filmic relative — wordplay intended — that was as explosive, multifaceted, prismatic and collage-like as the play was."

Adds Sadava: "That was a real drive — it should feel like how I think."

The emotional core of MOUTHPIECE reflects a devastating truth I've never seen in a movie before: no matter how hard all good feminists try to escape the cultural baggage we've inherited from our mothers, we will always be a product of everything they've ever experienced and internalized. Grieving and coping with a complicated to-do list the day before her mother's funeral, our protagonist shops for nylons, telling herself, "Mom would've wanted you to wear nylons." Her deceased mother (played by Toronto theatre actor Maev Beaty) is remembered in fitful flashbacks where she is summed up by her inability to rise above her great potential. She's both a brilliant editor and a pitiful doormat, forever telling her daughter what to wear and how to behave.

When asked if their mothers have seen the film, Sadava and Nostbakken say tonight's premiere is the first time their entire families (plus an audience of a thousand strangers) will watch it together.

"All three of our mothers are in this film verbatim," says Nostbakken. "There's memories and scenes that are exact replicas of our lives."

"It's complicated for them to watch and respond to something that is so personal and autobiographical in some ways, and in others, a massive amount of fiction," says Sadava. "I had a really long discussion with my mom when I was home recently about how she can identify what parts of [the character] are her. She has to own the parts that are and disown the parts that are not."

"Amy's mother introduces herself by going, 'Hi, I'm Amy's mother and I'm not a doormat!'" adds Rozema.

Nostbakken acknowledges this fact, then adds a beautiful anecdote.

"When I was 21 and in theatre school, my mother told me, 'Don't wait until I'm dead to make whatever you need to make.' I know a lot of men and women who are still waiting — they're waiting to be themselves because of the pressures of the generation before them. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but that was a gift."

MOUTHPIECE screens one more time at TIFF on September 16 at Jackman Hall.