This party’s just getting started
Despite its challenges, festival says now’s the time to celebrate
It wouldn’t ordinarily be unusual to have a party with actors Meryl Streep and Joaquin Phoenix, actor/director Taika Waititi, Cannes star Mati Diop and cinematographer Roger Deakins in attendance.
Not during the Toronto International Film Festival, when hundreds of celebrities flock to Toronto to make Hollywood North a visible reality.
This year is different, though. There’s a new party in town.
It’s the TIFF Tribute Gala, happening Monday at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel. If TIFF realizes its ambitions, this will become the party to beat all parties at a festival known almost as much for the grandness of its gatherings as for the quality of its films.
The gala is first and foremost a fundraiser to fuel the many enterprises of TIFF, a not-forprofit organization which has grown in its 44 years from an 11-day film festival into a yearround arts institution, including such initiatives as TIFF Writers Studio, TIFF Filmmakers Lab and TIFF Rising Stars.
With tickets going for $2,500 apiece and more than 500 people expected — pulling in north of $1.25 million in ticket sales alone — the financial aspects look promising.
The gala is also intended to burnish TIFF’s international reputation as an awards-season launchpad, by showcasing and saluting talent expected to go on in the weeks and months ahead to garner consideration for Oscars, Golden Globes and other film world prizes. The most recent Oscar winner for Best Picture, Green
Book, had its world premiere at TIFF. “It’s one tribute gala, integrated with the festival,” says Joana Vicente, TIFF’s new executive director and co-head. “It will help highlight talent that will be in the awards conversation.”
For this inaugural Tribute Gala, which will follow an awards show format with prize-giving
and acceptance speeches, TIFF has assembled a strong slate of honourees, all of whom have films at the current fest, which runs through Sept. 15:
Meryl Streep, a three-time Oscar winner and perennial awards heatseeker who stars in The Laundromat, Steven Soderbergh’s new drama themed on the Panama Papers financial scandal;
Joaquin Phoenix, a threetime Oscar nominee, whose star turn in Joker, a film winning raves from Venice for its dramatic rethinking of comicbook movies, has him hotly tipped for Best Actor glory;
Taika Waititi, the New Zealand actor/director, much lauded for his Marvel Comics change-up Thor: Ragnarok, whose latest is the audacious anti-hate satire Jojo Rabbit, one of TIFF’s most-buzzed world premieres;
Mati Diop, one of the stars of the most recent Cannes Film Festival, whose feature directing debut, Atlantics: A Ghost Love Story, took the Grand Prix at the May fest, which also saw her become the first Black female director in the Palme d’Or competition. She’s the first recipient of TIFF’s Mary Pickford Award, honouring emerging female film talent;
Roger Deakins, the Oscarwinning cinematographer and industry legend, who is again behind the camera for The Goldfinch, a drama — starring Ansel Elgort and Nicole Kidman, based on a Pulitzer Prizewinning novel — that’s expected to attract much attention in the season of gold;
Participant Media, represented by founder/chairman Jeff Skoll and CEO David Linde, celebrating its 15th anniversary as a company dedicated to entertainment that inspires and drives social change. Participant will be the first recipient of the new TIFF Impact Award.
Vicente pushed for the creation of the TIFF Tribute Gala, along with Cameron Bailey, TIFF’s artistic director and co-head, to try to do for Toronto what Vicente did for New York. She came to TIFF after a decade as head of the Independent Filmmaker Project in New York, during which she revamped IFP’s Gotham Awards gala in late November, turning it into an award-season platform.
Vicente says she knew that TIFF could handle something like this, because it did a smaller version of it last year. It was a gala honouring her predecessor, Piers Handling, as he prepared to step down as executive director and CEO after more than 30 years at the festival.
Glitter is a given at an event like this, but how important is the fundraising aspect?
It’s “critically important,” Bailey says, because the money generated will fund the entire year’s worth of activities that TIFF runs in and through its TIFF Bell Lightbox headquarters, now nearly a decade old, at King and John Sts.
Previous TIFF fundraisers have been held on a Wednesday, the night before the festival’s Thursday start, but Vicente and Bailey opted to put the new Tribute Gala on a Monday, midway through the fest.
“It just felt like the right date,” Bailey says.
“This is something that Joana and I talked a lot about. We wanted it to be at a time when it was right in the heart of the festival, and there were still a lot of people in town. The night before (TIFF begins) was a little bit of a challenge sometimes, just because we didn’t have the same number of people in town. We feel that on the Monday night at the festival, it really will be one of the high points.”
A lucrative event could take some pressure off of TIFF, whose Lightbox offerings have sometimes struggled to find an audience and whose festival must find a way to thrive amid the rise of streaming services, a distinct threat to the cinemagoing habit.
Barry Avrich, a filmmaker, advertising executive and producer of hundreds of gala events, says he has every expectation that TIFF has assembled the “perfect storm” of talent, audience and expertise to pull off a magnificent first Tribute Gala.
“I have full faith that TIFF will do it well, because they’ve been rehearsing to do this for quite a while,” said Avrich, who has a film premiering at the fest, the documentary David Foster: Off the Record.
“They finally have a big Oscar-calibre gala that will take place. I was on the TIFF board for 15 years and I’d been advocating for a gala like this for as long as I was there. I think that they have one of the most powerful film brands. They’ve got a captive audience and a world that loves celebrities and loves rubbing shoulders. They’ve got the perfect storm to do this really well.”
But he cautions that the event should be carefully paced and executed — and also wrap up early enough so attendees don’t feel as if they’re glued to their chairs.
“It should be like a great movie. There has to be great moments off the top, great moments in the middle and then you need a finale,” he says.
“But the most important thing is, that people have to be in their cars going home at a reasonable hour. If a gala gets taken over by the gala itself — if everybody demands to speak, everybody demands to have their five minutes and uses the gala as a political campaign — then you run the risk of this thing ending too late. Half the room is gone, and people really miss the whole point of the evening.”
Avrich knows from experience, having produced sold-out galas for the Stratford Festival saluting such talent as Maggie Smith and Christopher Plummer. He also produced many editions of the long-running charity fundraisers OneXOne and Best Buddies, raising money by way of gala tributes to such Hollywood stars as Brad Pitt, Lauren Bacall, Burt Reynolds, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
No name is big enough to hold the entire room if the show runs too late, Avrich warns: “I went to a gala some time back where Stevie Wonder was the main act. By the time he came on, it was 11:30 at night and a third of the room had left. I see this happen too often.”
Avrich knows he’s succeeded with a gala if people want to return the following year. TIFF hopes to do the same.
“My trick has always been, if you have a great night, then you’re setting yourself up for next year. People go, ‘Oh, I had such a great time, I’ll come back. I’m there.’ ”