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Willem Dafoe, co-star of the critically lauded and Nova Scotia-shot movie The Lighthouse, and Halifax native Ellen Page are set to attend the FIN Atlantic International Film Festival.

The Lighthouse director and writer Robert Eggers is also to attend the film’s Closing Night Gala Presentation on Sept. 19 at Cineplex Cinemas Park Lane.

Shot in the spring of 2018 on sets and locations around Yarmouth, including scenic Cape Forchu, Eggers’s psychological thriller about a pair of Maine lighthouse keepers reduced to savagery by their isolation screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday. It was warmly received at TIFF with positive reviews like Exclaim!’s description of “a gripping, smartly stylized descent into madness.”

Accompanied at the TIFF premiere by both Dafoe and his co-star Robert Pattinson, Eggers spoke fondly of their experience of filming in Yarmouth, and said, “Our thoughts are with Nova Scotia right now,” while post-tropical storm Dorian left much of the province in darkness.

Page, an internationally known actor, is co-director and co-producer of the documentary There’s Something in the Water. It screens Sept. 14 at Park Lane. The film is based on the book of the same name by Dalhousie University’s Dr. Ingrid Waldron, and had its Canadian premiere on Sunday night at TIFF.

Page and Dal Health senior researcher Waldron connected via social media, after the former’s interest in the Joan Baxter book The Mill: Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest led her to the latter’s examination of environmental racism affecting Indigenous and black communities in Nova Scotia and across Canada.

After further conversation with the author, Page and her Gaycation co-producer Ian Daniel began interviewing the women featured in Waldron’s book, with a goal to galvanize the public and politicians toward acting on environmental and social injustice at home and around the world.

Also among the guests announced Monday by the festival are longtime Toronto director Atom Egoyan. The director-writer-producer of Guest of Honour will present the film Sept. 15 at Park Lane. It’s his first feature since 2015’s acclaimed drama Remember, about a holocaust survivor played by Christopher Plummer, and Guest of Honour also concerns secrets from the past as a restaurant health inspector (Fargo’s David Thewlis) trying to reconnect with his daughter Veronica, a former high school band conductor (Laysla De Oliveira) serving time in prison on a sexual assault charge for which she was wrongly indicted.

Add an attractive priest played by Luke Wilson hearing Veronica’s confessions to the mix, and you’ve got an appropriately Egoyan-esque mix of repression, regrets, grief, longing and private history coming back to haunt his characters.

Professional hockey pioneer Willie O’Ree is to attend the screening of the documentary Willie on Sept. 18 at Park Lane. The Fredericton-born Boston Bruins player made history as the first black man to play in the NHL in 1958, and the film features never-before-seen home movie footage, archival interviews and first-person accounts of his life from growing up the youngest of 13 children to becoming a hockey trailblazer and the NHL’s Diversity Ambassador.

The festival begins with a gala opening night presentation of Murmur by local filmmaker Heather Young at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium. Young — who wrote, directed and produced the Dartmouth-shot film — will be on hand for the intimate portrait of a woman whose loneliness leads to animal hoarding while doing community service shifts at a local shelter. Also on hand will be her co-producer Martha Cooley and the film’s star Shan MacDonald, who plays the central character Donna.

FIN runs from Sept. 12-19 in Halifax. For details, visit finfestival.ca.

Tickets for screenings and special events, along with passes, are available through the website and at the festival box office in Park Lane, 5657 Spring Garden Rd.

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