TIFF Takes Aim at Trump's 'Lake America' Came Change on Opening Night

Cameron Bailey, Anita Lee and Olivia Chow all took shots at the U.S. president’s controversial attempt to rename Toronto’s waterfront.

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has officially started, as some of the movie world's biggest stars descend upon the city's red carpets amid some strained relationships between Canada and the United States. Obviously, on the opening night of the festival, Trump was at the center of the conversation, specifically for his renaming of Lake Ontario to Lake America.

At Thursday night’s world premiere of Sian Heder’s Being Heumann, TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey, programmer Anita Lee and Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow each took pointed aim at U.S. President Donald Trump’s controversial attempt to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” Bailey drew the first laugh during his opening-night remarks at Roy Thomson Hall, referring to the body of water bordering Toronto by its longstanding Canadian name. The comment was met with sustained applause and laughter from the festival crowd.

Introducing Being Heumann, which was filmed in Toronto and tells the story of disability-rights activist Judy Heumann, Chow praised the film’s message about collective action and persistence.

“It shows us that when people come together and stay tenacious, they can move mountains — even against the might of the U.S. government,” she said, declaring that Toronto’s waterfront “will always be Lake Ontario.”

Trump’s renaming effort is part of a broader series of moves affecting how U.S. government agencies refer to geographic landmarks. While some major technology platforms have adopted “Lake America” for U.S. users, Canadians continue to see “Lake Ontario.”

Alec Baldwin in 'The Trial of Alec Baldwin.'

“When they told me she died, I was in shock,” Alec Baldwin says in the new trailer for the upcoming documentary, The Trial of Alec Baldwin. The film covers the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, whom Baldwin was accused of shooting accidentally in 2021 when a live bullet somehow wound up in what was supposed to be a prop gun during the making of the movie, Rust. Baldwin contended he never pulled the trigger. The clip shows the immediate aftermath of the shooting, as Baldwin and others brace for oncoming paparazzi. The film opens in select theaters in October before wide screenings begin Oct. 16.

The trailer also looks at Baldwin’s tetchy relationship with the tabloid press, looking back at past scuffles he had with paparazzi and the intense scrutiny on him following the shooting. “I want to be acquitted so I can just walk out the door and everyone just leave me alone,” he says in the trailer.

It also alleges that local authorities were looking to leverage an indictment of Baldwin for political gain. With what seems like unprecedented access to the actor, one scene supposedly shows the moment Baldwin found out he’d been indicted in a phone call. And in another scene, he posits, “They’d definitely put me in jail if they could.”

“If you said to me, ‘Hike up Mt. Everest, and she’ll come back,’ I’d be packed and ready to go,” Baldwin says in the clip. “Whatever I could do … but there’s nothing I could do.”

Filmmaker Rory Kennedy, who received an Oscar nomination in 2015 for the documentary Last Days in Vietnam, directed the picture. The preview shows the film touching on the trial of the Rust set’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, as well as the peculiarities of Baldwin’s trial, such as prosecutor Kari Morrissey taking the stand at her own trial. “How the hell did I end up in this vortex?” Baldwin asks in the trailer. Baldwin’s manslaughter case was ultimately dismissed.

‘South Park’ creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone shared an official apology for the delays around their forthcoming film collaboration with Kendrick Lamar. The musical, titled Whitney Springs, was originally announced in 2022.

“We take full responsibility for the schedule delay of this movie,” Parker and Stone said in a statement to The Ankler. “We apologize to our partners at pgLang and Paramount, and we appreciate their patience. South Park and life’s circumstances have gotten in the way, but we still believe in the project.”

Whitney Springs was written by Vernon Chatman, a longtime South Park writer, and set for release at Paramount. Lamar was originally announced as a producer on the film alongside Parker, Stone, and Dave Free. According to The Ankler, it features original and previously-unreleased music by Lamar.

The film was scheduled to premiere in 2025. At CinemaCon 2024, then-Paramount Pictures CEO Brian Robbins called it “one of the funniest and most original scripts we’ve ever read” and said that the film would be going into production that summer. Lamar was spotted filming in California later that year.

After apparently being filmed, Whitney Springs was pushed to 2026 prior to the closure of the Paramount-Skydance merger. The film was taken off the schedule completely last November.

The initial announcement described Whitney Springs as a film about the past and present coming to a head “when a young Black man who is interning as a slave re-enactor at a living history museum discovers that his white girlfriend’s ancestors once owned his.” The Ankler describes film as following the Black slave re-enactor as he clashes with the racist mayor of a Midwestern town, played by Parker.

Lamar previously collaborated with Stone and Parker on his 2022 music video for “The Heart Part 5.” The video, directed by Dave Free, features Lamar morphing into various digitally produced celebrity “deep fakes,” from Kanye West to Will Smith to the late Nipsey Hussle.

Parker and Stone will debut South Park Season 29 on Sept. 16. The duo recently announced they were changing the same of the show in a dig at Donald Trump. “Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of South Park to South America,” the pair shared in a statement. “We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount — a Skydance Capitulation.”

Saturday Night Live will kick off its 52nd season with New York Knicks point guard and NBA Finals MVP Jalen Brunson and as many Katseye members are available on Sept. 26.

NBC has unveiled the first four weeks of shows for the upcoming season, which will also find musical guest Turnstile paired with host Dakota Johnson on Oct. 3; Rosalía paired with Shane Gillis on Oct. 10; and Gracie Abrams paired with Obsession star Inde Navarrette on Oct. 31.

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Katseye and Turnstile will make their SNL debut on their respective episodes, while Abrams will return for the first time since making her debut in December 2024. Rosalía last appeared as a musical guest on the series in March 2022, just before the release of her acclaimed third album, Motomami.

On the host side, Johnson and Gillis will both notch their third time leading the night, while Brunson and Navarrette will take the stage for the first time.

Season 52 will see the departure of longtime Saturday Night Live cast member Chloe Fineman, who leave the series after seven seasons. “It’s really hard to leave SNL but it does feel like the right time. I’m going to miss it a lot,” Fineman said earlier this year. “But the people who work there are my family and that place is my home, and I know I’ll never be too far away.”

The writers room has also lost Martin Herlihy, a member of the sketch comedy trio Please Don’t Destroy, who leaves the show after five seasons. Any new additions to the SNL crew have not yet been announced.

Sarah Polley’s long-awaited adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar has officially finished filming, Focus Features confirmed yesterday. The complete cast has also been formally revealed. Billie Eilish stars as Esther Greenwood in her feature-film acting debut, with Carey Mulligan playing her mother, Mrs. Greenwood.

The film also features Danielle Deadwyler as Dr. Nolan, Dylan Hawco as Buddy Willard, Lili Taylor as Jay Cee, Ella Beatty as Joan, Maggie Kuntz as Doreen and Ike Barinholtz as Lenny. Heated Rivalry breakout Connor Storrie has also officially been confirmed as Marco, following weeks of reports about his involvement.

The Bell Jar marks Polley’s return to feature directing after Women Talking, the 2022 drama that earned her the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. She wrote the new film herself, adapting Plath’s only novel for the screen.

Published in 1963, The Bell Jar follows Esther, a talented young writer whose promising summer in New York gives way to a devastating mental-health crisis. A semi-autobiography, the novel has remained one of the most influential works of 20th-century American literature.

Filming for the movie began in Ontario earlier this year, with Eilish photographed on location in Toronto in period costume. Focus Features has yet to announce a theatrical release date.

Since premiering less than a year ago on Crave, hockey romance series Heated Rivalry has become one of the most viral subjects in pop culture. From unauothorized off-Broadway parodies to a sea lion at Pacific Marine Mammal Center being named after Shane Hollander, the series has become seemingly inescapable. Now, the NSFW show, and the book series it was based on, is getting its place in academia.

Starting this fall, students at the University of Victoria in British-Columbia will be able to take two different classe centered around the series, the Times Colonist reports. Law professor Gillian Calder has taught her class ''Queering Law'' before, but will now use the series to push students to reflect how regulations affect queer lives, sports, gender, sexuality and masculinity in Canada. Guest speakers will be called upon to discuss different real-life events, such as the Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal that rocked the country. Her broader approach to legal education, she says, emphasizes creativity, empathy and the ability to understand experiences beyond one's own.

Across campus, English professor Janice Niemann is taking a different route into the phenomenon.

Her course, English 321: Authors on Screen: Rachel Reid's Heated Rivalry, will bring Reid's novels, the television adaptation and fan culture into the classroom. Students will read three books from the series, watch the show and examine fan fiction and fandom while considering what happens when a hugely popular romance moves from the page to the screen. Interest in the class is so strong, she says, that more seats needed to be added to accomodate students.

The course's aim, among other things, is to challenge the idea that media aimed toward women and queer people is not as valuable or culturally significant.

Production for the second season of the Crave series is currently underway, and is expected to release in April 2027.