FINAL CREDITS
Piers Handling will remain as annual festival’s CEO until the end of 2018
Piers Handling stepping down as TIFF director at end of 2018,
The 42nd Toronto International Film Festival is days away, but it already has its first showstopper: Piers Handling is stepping down after nearly 25 years as head of the cinema giant that transformed both the city and its global image.
His departure will be a slow credits roll rather than a sudden fade to black. Handling will remain as TIFF’s director and CEO until the end of 2018.
This is to allow the TIFF board time to choose a successor and to get him or her up to speed on an organization that has grown from its 1970s spark as a week-long movie celebration running on brio and credit cards into one of the world’s top arts institutions, operating year-long in many guises with a $45-million annual budget that contributes an estimated $189 million per year to Toronto’s economy. The main event is still the annual 11-day fall festival, which this year runs from Sept. 7 to 17.
“The timing feels right for me, it really does,” Handling said Friday in an interview. “I did a lot of thinking over the course of this year . . . I’m excited about what’s going to be in the future for me.”
The urbane Handling, 68, has a lot planned for his post-TIFF life, including a book — something filmrelated but not personal memoirs — and more of the world travel and mountain climbing that have long been among his other passions. In all, the former film professor will have been at TIFF for 36 years, nearly half his life.
“I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish when I started with this organization. It’s constantly surprised me in terms of the potential that was here and what I was allowed to do and what we could do, which was to dream large and just do big things.”
Handling anticipates a “robust transition of power” and his most likely successor would seem to be Cameron Bailey, TIFF’s artistic director who was for several years in the past decade the co-director of the fest with Handling.
“He’d be more than an obvious candidate, but I certainly don’t want to comment because it’s not my job to actually choose my successor,” Handling said.
“It’s the board’s job, and I’m sure they’ll go through a very detailed and exhaustive process to make sure they end up with the right candidate.”
Whoever is chosen will have their work cut out for them. TIFF recently announced it is embarking on a fiveyear transformation plan called “Audience First,” in response to industry-wide drops in movie attendance, including a single-year drop of 49,000 people in 2016 over 2015 to showings on the five public screens at TIFF Bell Lightbox, the fest’s yearround headquarters at King and John Sts.
TIFF plans to move from simply showing films to offering “transformative experiences through film,” which would include more hands-on involvement with online services and through such popular attractions as the digi-Play-Space interactive children’s exhibit.
But Handling says he’s confident the organization can weather any storm, and he’s seen big ones in his time. They include the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which occurred midway through the 2001 festival and resulted in numerous red-carpet cancella- tions, although the films continued to screen.
The biggest challenge of all, Handling said, was the SARS epidemic of 2003, which spooked so many Hollywood denizens, it looked for a time that there wouldn’t be any celebrities on that year’s red carpet, and maybe not even a festival at all.
The logjam began to break when Canadian rocker Neil Young said he’d be coming to TIFF to premiere his film Greendale, SARS or no SARS.
“It’s just been so rich and rewarding and all driven by being a complete and passionate cinephile,” Handling said of his time with TIFF, which has brought him numerous global honours that include the Order of Canada and France’s Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. “So to be able to see film and to rub shoulders with all the creators and to think about it and curate it and bring it back to Toronto has been extraordinary.”