TRUE THINGS Q&A | TIFF 2021

The team behind TRUE THINGS in conversation with TIFF in advance of its premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. A woman’s dreary life is forever changed after a risky sexual encounter in the latest from Harry Wootliff, starring Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke.

The 46th Toronto International Film Festival runs September 9 to 18, 2021. For more, visit http://tiff.net.

In the sleepy seaside town of Ramsgate, benefit claims worker Kate (Ruth Wilson) has her world upended by a chance glance and a grin from the cheeky man with dyed-blond hair (Tom Burke) seated across from her in the office. Fresh from a prison stint for minor delinquencies, the man swiftly seduces Kate in a parking lot with his confidence and charm, and though his clumsiness leaves Kate with a knocked head, the encounter enlivens her spirit.

Kate loses all commitment to her quotidian life, allowing her thoughts and attention to be invaded by this intoxicating infatuation despite pressure and judgement from friends and family to find some stability instead. Diving headfirst into lust with the hopes of encountering intimacy, Kate finds herself unmoored when her lover begins rationing affection and receding from view. But still, his smell, his touch... they linger.

In her faithful adaptation of Deborah Kay Davies’ novel, True Things About Me, co-writer and director Harry Wootliff deftly composes the sensual experience of being consumed, mind, body, and soul, by the ideal of an absent lover. The dizzying highs and the depressive lows constitute a familiar landscape in the archetypal interaction with the “bad boy.” Wilson’s convincingly relatable Kate captures a singular affair of undeniable, self-destructive magnetism that reverberates to the collective. In TRUE THINGS, Wootliff and Wilson have partnered to produce an authentic, cinematic vulnerability that will stir memories of devotion, desperation, and desire in us all.


Harry Wootliff is an English film and television director and screenwriter. Her many credits include the BAFTA-nominated short Nits (04) and the feature Only You (18). True Things (21) is her latest film.