The festival is a bellwether for what will happen at the movies for the next six months.
The world of film insiders is known for its tiffs — petty quarrels about whether a director’s work is pretentious or brilliant, tempests in teapots over editing choices and special effects. But every fall, right after Labor Day, a bigger TIFF takes over film conversation for a few weeks: the Toronto International Film Festival, which most people call by its acronym.
Since it launched in 1976, the 10-day festival has become one of the largest and most prestigious in the world, propelling emerging filmmakers onto the international scene and awards hopefuls toward the big fall movie season. But there’s plenty about it that an average movie fan might not know. So as the 2017 edition of the festival kicks off on September 7, here’s some of the biggest questions about TIFF — and some answers.
For your average moviegoer, there’s one big reason: The 10-day festival is the unofficial kick-off to the “prestige movie season” — which means keeping an eye on what’s buzzy at TIFF may tell you a lot about what performances and movies will be part of awards chatter later in the year.
The festival’s timing — right after Labor Day — positions it as the de facto opening of awards season, a marathon of mostly serious dramas that lasts about six months, until the Oscars finally wrap it all up in early March.
But is TIFF as important a festival as, say, Cannes, which happens in late May? That depends on who you ask. Cannes is the reigning title holder of “most prestigious festival, ” and most filmmakers aspire to have their work play in competition there someday. (Cannes also has more than 30 years of existence on TIFF.) But Cannes films often skew toward more rarefied and international films, while at Toronto — which programs many more movies — you can find bigger crowdpleasers that might also find more money at the box office and wind up bigger awards-season contenders. (American Beauty, Slumdog Millionaire, The King’s Speech, and Silver Linings Playbook, for instance, all premiered at TIFF.)
For people who love movies, or who follow awards keenly, that’s what makes TIFF interesting. Just because a film doesn’ t play at TIFF doesn’ t mean it won’ t win awards. (2014 Best Picture winner Birdman, for instance, didn’ t make an appearance in Toronto.) But Cannes winners are rarely Oscar winners, while TIFF sets the pace for the year’s awards chatter.
Filmmakers and critics also really like TIFF. Toronto sustains a vibrant film culture (partly thanks to the year-round programming that has sprung up around TIFF) , which means the hundreds of thousands of attendees at the festival are frequently film-literate and excited to see the wide variety of movies programmed there, not just to spot stars. Publicists for movies like this too, because it’s good for creating buzz among the kind of people who really care about movies.
And movie stars and directors reportedly like the festival’s relatively low-key vibe; though awards are given out to some films, the festival generally feels less overtly competitive than a fest like Cannes, Berlin, or Sundance. (It’s also quite a bit cheaper to enter and attend than any European festival.) After all, everyone’s thinking about how the big movies will fare in the big awards — and those are still six months away.
Unlike a festival like Cannes, which is only open to about 30,000 accredited film industry professionals, the general public can buy tickets to TIFF — and boy, do they ever. In 2016, an estimated 480,000 attendees showed up
, and only about 5,000 of those were in the industry (which includes filmmakers, distributors, publicists, and journalists) .
That is huge. Sundance, by contrast, drew 71,600 attendees in 2017. This year’s Berlin Film Festival, generally considered the world’s largest public festival, ended with 496,471 theater visits, which includes tickets sold to the public as well as the 20,000 film industry professionals in attendance, who carry badges instead of buying tickets. TIFF is one of the world’s most well-attended festivals — likely in part because of the reasonable cost of staying in Toronto and the favorable early-autumn weather.
The fact that so many members of the public attend TIFF bodes well for the movies there. If buzz builds around a TIFF movie, it’s not just because of the critics who are writing about it — hundreds of thousands of movie lovers may also be talking about the film in restaurants, bars, and cafes, and posting about them on social media. That means the barometer for a film’s popularity can be spread out more broadly — and filmmakers have the chance to gauge how the public, in addition to critics, will react when their film hits theaters later on.
In 2016, nearly 400 films screened at TIFF, picked by the festival’s well-respected programming staff. For contrast, Sundance screened 181 in 2017; the number of movies in the three official programs at Cannes was only 46, though many more played in parallel sections held alongside the official festival.
Those films are programmed by the festival’s staff in 14 sections, each of which has its own goals and flavor. Some of those include:
There are sections for short films, classics, TV episodes, documentaries, movies aimed at kids and teenagers, and experimental films as well.
That is a lot of movies, and obviously, it’s physically impossible for even the most sleepless of moviegoers to see more than a fraction of them. (I typically can cover about four per day; more ambitious and/or masochistic critics might be able to squeeze in six, which means over the full 10-day run a busy critic could see 40 to 60, and non-critic festivalgoers would see far fewer.)
For 2017, TIFF actually elected to cut its slate by 20 percent, partly by eliminating two of its programs. The festival had come under some fire for being too big and unwieldy for industry players to see all the major films, which can end up hurting those that are worthy of buzz but get lost in the sheer volume of also-worthy films.
Some festivals are very prize-focused — think Cannes’ Palme d’ Or, or the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival — but Toronto is generally less focused on festival-specific awards than on generating buzz. But one that augurs well for the recipient’s Oscar chances is the Grolsch People’s Choice Award, which filmgoers vote on. Some of the recent winners, like The King’s Speech, La Land, Room, and 12 Years a Slave, have gone on to clean up at year-end awards.
And this makes perfect sense. TIFF is a festival for the public, first and foremost. Its biggest focus is on films that will catch the eye of both critics and moviegoers — crowdpleasers with awards potential, which often play well with Oscar voters later on. So naturally, the award the ticket-holding public votes on — rather than a small number of famous people picked to sit on a jury — is the most important award of the festival.
There’s a clear tiered system of film festivals around the world. When TIFF started in 1976, its goal was to collect the best movies from those festivals and show them to eager Torontonians. In fact, back then, it was called the “Toronto Festival of Festivals.”
But along the way, Toronto has picked up steam, rocketing itself up the ladder to join the world’s premiere festivals, which includes prestigious fests like Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, Venice, and the New York Film Festival. These festivals gain their prestige mainly by being the first stop for buzzy movies aimed at garnering the year’s big awards. Festivals that premiere less highly anticipated films — or that mainly show films that have premiered elsewhere — are still often fantastic experiences for attendees and press, but don’ t have quite the prestige of the top tier. Seattle, San Francisco, SXSW, and the Tribeca Film Festival all fall into this category.
TIFF entered the top tier partly by beginning to premiere major films, or by giving them their first major public screening. For instance, Moonlight premiered at the Telluride Film Festival last fall, and after premiering at Venice, La Land had its first North American screenings at Telluride, too.
