The physical meets the virtual at TIFF this year

The film festival, counted among the top 3, opens this week in a toned-down avatar

Cannes cancelled its film festival this year, while Venice went ahead with its event earlier this month with red carpets, photo calls, water taxi runs and the works. The Toronto International Film Festival, or TIFF, which along with Cannes and Venice rounds off the Top 3 major global film festivals, is trying to take the middle path. Running September 10-19, TIFF will offer a mix of physical, drive-in and digital screenings and host virtual red carpets, industry conferences and special events.

The festival’s public offering of about 60 feature films is down sharply to a quarter of last year’s slate, but according to Cameron Bailey, artistic director and cohead of TIFF, the number of submissions stayed at the same levels, making for a tougher selection process. A section called TIFF Industry Selects was added exclusively for industry delegates and the press. “These are films that we really admired and are not in the official selection but would have been in a normal year, and we want to make sure that buyers and media who would have attended the festival get a chance to see them,” Bailey explained.

Among the most visible tableaus missing this year will be the screaming fans lining up at red carpet premieres to gawk at Hollywood and other film superstars. TIFF is one of the world’s biggest public film festivals, with annual attendance running into the hundreds of thousands. But Canada’s borders are still largely closed, and attending TIFF from abroad would have meant a mandatory twoweek quarantine. Instead, TIFF enlisted 50 film artists as ambassadors — including Martin Scorsese, Nicole Kidman, Priyanka Chopra and Anurag Kashyap — to engage with fans online.

Others missing behind the scenes will be nearly a fifth of TIFF’S staff, let go earlier this year as the changes due to Covid-19 became clear. Also hit will be several local businesses like hotels, florists and restaurants that depend on TIFF to add to their revenues and raise their profiles. Every September buzz builds around various eateries and bars that publicly urge visiting stars to drop by, often successfully. The owner of a downtown café that has played host to Kidman, George Clooney and Hugh Jackman among others, has lamented that the number of parties at his hot spot was “down to zero” this year. According to TIFF, the festival generates over $200 million in revenues for the city of Toronto and the province of Ontario, and anchors the city’s $2-billion film industry.

Cannes’s experiment with a digital marketplace was keenly observed here, and TIFF is doing the same this year. According to Bailey, this could actually be a bright spot of the festival. “What we heard from Cannes was that business was booming,” he said. “People still need to buy films, if you’re running a distribution company or a streaming platform, you still need that content to deliver to your audience, and markets and festivals are the best way to get that. We’ve had thousands of people sign up for accreditation on the Industry side and we’re expecting business to be quite active again here.”

TIFF is widely regarded as the unofficial kickoff and reliable tastemaker for the awards season. Several films premiering at TIFF and winning its People’s Choice Award have gone on to win Oscars for Best Picture, including American Beauty and Slumdog

Millionaire. This year too, TIFF viewers will vote for the People’s Choice Award and Bailey is confident that even in this extended awards season — the Oscars have already been pushed back to April next year — films picked for TIFF will be strong contenders.

With a number of projects stopping midway due to Covid-19, Bailey expects an even bigger pool of films to choose from next year. He’s actually worried about 2022. “The lockdown has meant that many films that were meant to go into production just can’t right now,” he noted.

The 45th edition of TIFF opens with Spike Lee’s documentary, American Utopia, about Britishamerican musician David Byrne’s 2019 Broadway show, and closes with Mira Nair’s adaptation of Vikram Seth’s epic novel, A Suitable Boy, as a six-part series for the BBC. The lone Indian film is Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple, playing at both Venice and Toronto this year. “It’s exactly the kind of film we’re always looking for; we don’t see it every year and I think it will represent India very, very well,” Bailey said.