Photo Coverage: THE FIFTH ESTATE's TIFF Stage Presentation

The Toronto International Film Festival just kicked off in Toronto, Ontario, where it runs through September 15. Check out photos from the stage presentation for The Fifth Estate below!

You don't disclose three-quarters of a million classified documents without making a few enemies. So discovers WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Bill Condon's The Fifth Estate, a mesmerizing, complex portrait of an embattled new-media luminary. The Fifth Estate details WikiLeaks's rise to international notoriety and the subsequent souring of relations between Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch, also appearing at the Festival in 12 Years a Slave and August: Osage County) and his most trusted lieutenant, Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl, also at the Festival in Ron Howard's Rush).

Drawing on Domscheit-Berg's memoir, Inside WikiLeaks, as well as a 2011 exposé by British journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding, screenwriter Josh Singer chronicles the friendship that underpinned the whistleblower organization's formative feats of information activism (targeting entities including Swiss private bank Julius Baer, the Church of Scientology, and the British National Party), and would end in acrimonious estrangement following WikiLeaks's un-redacted publication of nearly 750,000 United States military logs and diplomatic cables - the largest leak of official secrets in American history.

The Toronto International Film Festival is a publicly attended film festival held each September in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In 2012, 372 films from 72 countries were screened at 34 screens in downtown Toronto venues, welcoming an estimated 400,000 attendees, over 4000 of whom were industry professionals. The Festival traditionally kicks off the Thursday night after Labour Day (the first Monday in September in Canada), lasting for eleven days.

Founded in 1976, the Festival is now one of the most prestigious events of its kind in the world. In 1998, Variety magazine acknowledged that "the Festival is second only to Cannes in terms of high-profile pics, stars and market activity." In 2007, Time noted that the Festival had "grown from its place as the most influential fall film festival to the most influential film festival, period." This is partially the result of the Festival's reputation and ability to generate "Oscar buzz".

Photo Credit: Walter McBride

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