North Bay-shot Foreign Tongue returns to Northern Ontario for Cinéfest Sudbury
A promotional montage from Foreign Tongue, which filmed in North Bay and screens at Cinéfest Sudbury on Sept. 26.
Photo credit: Foreign Tongue / official promotional image.
Boris Mojsovski’s Foreign Tongue spent three weeks filming in North Bay early last year. On Sept. 26, the finished Canadian feature will screen in Sudbury as part of the 2026 Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival, bringing the production back to Northern Ontario after festival stops in Europe.
Ontario Creates listed Foreign Tongue among the theatrical features shooting in the province from Jan. 27 to Feb. 14, 2025, with North Bay as its production location. Toronto Metropolitan University has also identified North Bay as the filming location, while Cultural Industries Ontario North marks Foreign Tongue among the Cinéfest selections shot in Northern Ontario. The film screens Saturday at 12:15 p.m. and runs 104 minutes.
Foreign Tongue centres on Kathy Woodrow, played by Kimberly-Sue Murray, whose life changes after an accident leaves her in a coma. When she wakes, she speaks English with a Bosnian accent. The film uses foreign accent syndrome as the starting point for Kathy’s changing experience of how other people hear and perceive her.
Mojsovski and Cynthia Ashperger share screenplay credit, with the story credited to Ashperger. Munire Armstrong, Felipe Rodriguez and Mojsovski are credited as producers on the film’s current website, with Fraser Brown as cinematographer and Julia Blua as editor.
The feature grew from a stage project Ashperger had been developing for years under her writing name, Lola Xenos. Her musical Foreign Tongue, for which she wrote the book and lyrics, went through workshop performances at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Performance in 2013, 2017 and 2018 before receiving its professional premiere at Toronto’s Next Stage Theatre Festival at Factory Theatre in 2019. The work was also published that year in Scripting (Im)migration: New Canadian Plays.
The screen version retained the original project’s interest in language and immigration while developing a substantially different narrative. Mojsovski has said Ashperger and Armstrong approached him about the adaptation in part because his Bosnian background connected with the material. He kept the foreign-accent-syndrome premise and an ESL-school element from the stage work while developing the feature around Kathy and introducing magical realism.
Ashperger remains closely tied to the film. Along with originating the story and sharing screenplay credit, she plays Visnja. Born in Croatia, she relocated with her family to Toronto in 1991 during the war in Croatia and later built a long career as an actor, writer and educator, including more than three decades teaching at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Mojsovski came to the project with his own experience of displacement and a long career behind Canadian and international cameras. Born in Sarajevo, he lived through the war in Bosnia before coming to Toronto as a refugee, where he continued studying film and later completed a master’s degree in production and film theory. His directing work includes the features Three and a Half and Neil, while his cinematography and television directing credits include 12 Monkeys, Taken, Between, Knightfall, Titans and The Lost Symbol. He received an American Society of Cinematographers award for his cinematography on the 12 Monkeys episode “Thief.”
On the film’s official site, Mojsovski connects Foreign Tongue with his own experiences of language barriers, cultural misreadings and isolation after immigrating, experiences that informed his approach to Kathy’s sudden change in how she is heard by the people around her.
The ensemble includes a substantial group of ACTRA Toronto performers. Murray leads alongside Steve Byers and Ashperger, with Rachael Ancheril, Janet Porter, Jasmin Geljo, Paulino Nunes, Greg Bryk, Lara Arabian, Johnathan Sousa, Aharon Jinjihashvili and Mladen Obradovic among the cast.
The production records also reflect how a film’s credits can change between preparation and completion. Ontario Creates’ January 2025 listing named Foreign Tongue Productions Inc. as the production entity, with Armstrong as producer and Borga Dorter, Mojsovski and Rodriguez as executive producers. The finished film’s current website credits Armstrong, Rodriguez and Mojsovski as producers.
By the time Foreign Tongue reaches Sudbury, it will already have travelled through several international festivals. Toronto Metropolitan University announced an Aug. 16 screening at the Sarajevo Film Festival as the film’s premiere, and Sarajevo festival records confirm that screening date.
The film then screened Sept. 18 and 19 at Germany’s Oldenburg International Film Festival, where the festival’s current film page identifies the engagement as its German premiere. An earlier Oldenburg release had described Foreign Tongue as a world premiere, wording that conflicts with the documented Sarajevo screening a month earlier.
On Sept. 20, Foreign Tongue received Oldenburg’s German Independence Award – Spirit of Cinema, an audience-selected prize. It is also scheduled to screen at the Manaki Brothers festival in North Macedonia on Sept. 22 before arriving at Cinéfest four days later.
Cinéfest has not publicly identified the Sept. 26 screening as a Canadian premiere, so the Sudbury engagement is best described through what can be firmly established: the film is returning to Northern Ontario, where its feature production took place.
That return coincides with CION’s Cinema Summit, which brings regional filmmakers together with industry representatives for sessions on production, crews and screen-sector development in Northern Ontario. CION’s festival material marks Foreign Tongue alongside other titles shot in the region, tying the Cinéfest screening directly back to the North Bay production that began in January 2025.
