The Big Picture

Can TIFF adapt when everything about the world of cinema is changing?

- Brian D. Johnson

EVERY SEPTEMBER, Toronto lives the dream. Red carpets are unrolled, fans stake out luxury hotels for a glimpse of a Hollywood star, and cinephiles line up around the block to watch movies from morning till midnight. In an annual ritual, the world’s film industry converges on the city for TIFF, an acronym so cemented into the media landscape it no longer needs spelling out. Full disclosure: I’ve been attending this festival forever. When I met my wife, in 1978, her close friends were running it. Soon, I worked the festival, loading a van with cans of celluloid and hauling them up to projection booths. Then I was reviewing the movies and covering the events, which I’ve done ever since. I also wrote a book about TIFF and directed three films that premiered there. So I’m hardly a neutral observer. But I do know this: at the age of forty-two, the Toronto International Film Festival is undergoing a mid-life crisis.

Cinema’s two solitudes — mainstream movies and serious films — have never been more estranged, which endangers the pedigree fare that keeps the festival alive. TIFF’s outgoing director and CeO, Piers Handling, says that the organization’s greatest challenge is the declining production of “the midbudget films which we rely on so much, especially star-driven vehicles for the galas and special presentations.” Less of that content is being made available as studios move increasingly toward tent-pole films, those blockbuster franchises that prop up entire seasons and studio budgets. Some of the biggest brands — Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars — sit under Disney’s ever expanding big top, and as the studio tries to acquire 21st Century Fox, it’s turning Hollywood into a mono culture. Blockbusters don’t need festival buzz. Their massive marketing campaigns do the job quite nicely.