THE TIFF EVOLUTION
Iconic film fest turns 41
Nobody throws a big bash for their 41st birthday. When the Toronto International Film Festival hit the big four-oh last year, there was soulsearching and reflection, most of it positive. A year later, it’s merely another chapter in the life of one of the world’s most prominent fests.
“I was thinking about that the other day,” muses Cameron Bailey, TIFF’s artistic director and a festival programmer since 1990.
“It feels like it’s the next chapter. We’ve been through four decades of building the festival and, buoyed on the enthusiasm of the audiences here in Toronto, have become what we are. And now we’re evolving into something new and something different.” But evolution is a tricky process. In 2014, longtime festival goer and Time movie critic Richard Corliss decided to give TIFF a miss, citing competition from other fall festivals — notably Venice and Telluride — and sniffing that the opening weekend featured “upmarket but seemingly ordinary Hollywood movies … three of them starring Adam Sandler.”
TIFF has grown hugely — some say unmanageably — since its 1976 debut as the Festival of Festivals. In those days, it played second-run best-ofs from other fests. This year, almost half its 296 features will be world premieres, beginning with the opening night gala, Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven.
Those numbers hide the fact that Toronto is frequently in intense competition with Telluride (Sept. 2-5 this year), Venice (Aug. 31-Sept. 10) and sometimes New York (Sept. 30-Oct. 16), for world-premiere bragging rights.
Premieres of first features or African co-productions don’t carry the same cachet as, say, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in La La Land, Venice’s opening-night film.
This year, half of Venice’s 56-film lineup overlaps with Toronto, but the Italian festival will get the first screenings. The only exception is The Magnificent Seven, which opens TIFF on Thursday and closes Venice two days later.
But at least there won’t be any surprises. In 2013, Telluride — which doesn’t announce its programming in advance — screened 12 Years a Slave and Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners, both of which had been touted as TIFF world premieres. The next year, Toronto announced that gala screenings over its first four days had to be North American or world premieres.
But the tactic may have hurt Toronto more than it helped. In 2014, Birdman bowed at Telluride, skipped TIFF completely and went on to win the best-picture Oscar, the first time in eight years that an Academy Award winner hadn’t played the Toronto fest.
This year, Villeneuve’s newest, Arrival, will have its world premiere at Venice and then play TIFF on Day 5. And the list of high-profile films not even coming to Toronto from Venice includes Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge and the latest from Stephane Brize, Une Vie.
Then there’s the Platform prize. Toronto had long been anti-jury; Cannes might award the Golden Palm and Venice the Golden Lion, but TIFF’s biggest accolade was the People’s Choice Award, which, in every year but one since 2008, has gone to an eventual Oscar bestpicture nominee or winner.
Last year, TIFF added the $25,000 Platform Prize, named for Jia Zhangke’s 2000 film and decided by a jury troika. A dozen films are in competition, although given the size of the Toronto festival they could be lost among the glitzier galas and special presentations.
“Some European festivals were founded on the central core films being part of the competition,” Bailey says. “We’re not like that — we never have been. We’ve incorporated Platform as one element of the existing festival; it’s not going to take over.”
But world premiere rules, jury prizes and new programming streams feel like more of a rearguard action than a festival boldly pushing into the future. To the jaded journalist, it can even seem as though TIFF’s best days are behind it.
Take 2008 as a snapshot moment. The lineup included the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading, Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, Michael McGowan’s One Week, Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, and not one, but two best-picture Oscar winners: Slumdog Millionaire, which won in 2009, and The Hurt Locker, 2010.
But that was also the year when all anyone could talk about was the rapturous reaction received by Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, which won the Golden Bear in Venice before coming to Toronto the following day. Audiences at TIFF were already craning their necks to see what was happening elsewhere.
Obviously, no festival can have everything; if you did, where would you screen it? In a recent BBC poll of the best movies of the 21st century, 14 of them premiered at Venice versus just three at TIFF, but a whopping 45 came from Cannes.
And if the Toronto lineup feels a little lightweight this year, well, that’s the way 2016 is shaping up as a whole for cinema.
“There will always be an ebb and flow in terms of the relevant prominence of any one given festival,” says Bailey. “That changes from year to year. I think we’re in an enviable position.
“No other festival has the combination of the enthusiastic audiences, the industry presence and the media influence that Toronto has.”
It feels like it’s the next chapter ... Now we’re evolving into something new and something different.