My Name Is Emily

"If you hide from death, you hide from life." Teenage Emily (Harry Potter's Evanna Lynch) inherits this mantra from her father Robert (Michael Smiley, also at this year's Festival in The Lobster), an author and philosopher of sorts, whose lectures and writings encourage others to live for the moment at the expense of social niceties. But following the tragic death of Emily's mother, Robert starts to change, and his visionary eccentricities now appear to be symptoms of mental illness. Robert is soon insti­tu­tion­al­ized, and Emily is sent away to live with foster parents and attend a school where everyone dismisses her as a weirdo - everyone, that is, except Arden (George Webster), an awkward but endearing classmate with family problems of his own.
When Emily suddenly decides to travel north to bust her father out of his psychiatric hospital, the hopelessly smitten Arden joins her on a renegade road trip that will give both youngsters their first taste of what it truly means to be alive. (Toronto International Film Festival)