Mia Hansen-Løve has quite the impressive ouevre for a director with only 3 feature films and 2 shorts to her name. But what she lacks in quantity she makes up for with a calm intensity and real knack for showcasing the emotional connection and tension in her characters.

Starting this week, TIFF Bell Lightbox will be showing a short series, Fathers and Daughters: The Films of Mia Hansen-Løve, dedicated to the emerging director, and featuring all three of her features and one classic piece of French cinema that inspires her work.

THURSDAY AUGUST 23 / TOUT EST PARDONNÉ / 6:30 PM
Hansen-Løve's first feature film is an interesting tale of pain, curiosity and forgiveness. It tells the story of Pamela, a teenager on the cusp of adulthood who decides to reconnect with her father. This would be a straightforward tale of revisiting an absentee parent but tie in an unfortunate portrait of drug addiction, and it complicates matters. Hansen-Løve manages to balance the story to emphasize the happier times between Pamela and her father, as a reminder that both good and bad times are always relivable.

FRIDAY AUGUST 24 / THE FATHER OF MY CHILDREN / 6:15 PM
While both of Hansen-Løve's first two films deal with the relationships between fathers and daughters, they both represent examples of parental disillusionment. In The Father of My Children, Hansen-Løve paints a complicated portrait of a loving father struggling to keep his professional and personal failures from affecting his interactions with his daughters. Obviously this doesn't last long, but there's a sweeping calm and charming humour surrounding the story--it only serves to make the fallout more stark and painful.

FRIDAY AUGUST 24 / UN ENFANT DANS LA FOULE / 9 PM
Hansen-Løve's Carte Blanche selection for the program is a post-war film by Gerard Blain, a French film actor and director, (you may recall him as Chips from Hatari!) about a young man struggling to find his way in a society that he rejects as heartily as it rejects him. A largely unscreened work, it was entered in the Cannes Film Festival in 1976.

SATURDAY AUGUST 25 / GOODBYE FIRST LOVE / 5 PM
Hansen-Løve's most recent work is a pseudo-autobiographical look at the pain that young love has on a psyche. In Goodbye First Love, our fifteen-year-old heroine Camille falls swiftly in love with Sullivan, an older boy who longs to travel. Once he leaves to explore the world, she falls into a depression that threatens to swallow her whole, and that's where the film truly begins. Self-discovery is the name of the game as Camille grows stronger and more independent, until Sullivan returns, that is.

Mia Hansen-Løve will be in attendance at every screening introducing her works. Fathers and Daughters: The Films of Mia Hansen-Løve runs from August 23 to August 25 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Tickets for each film are $12 and can be purchased at the cinema or online.

Film still from Goodbye First Love