The 51st edition of Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF, September 10-20) played out in mostly pleasing weather. Screen takes the temperature of the event itself.
Awards season jockeying
TIFF was the festival when Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti cemented their places in the Oscar race after Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut (A24 in the US) arrived from a strong reception at Telluride for its international premiere. Similarly, John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell and Martin McDonagh’s acclaimed Venice world premiere Wild Horse Nine (Searchlight Pictures) boosted their awards season prospects at a well-received Canadian premiere in Toronto. And Lee Chang-dong’s Venice premiere and South Korean Oscar submission Possible Love (Netflix) stunned the audience at its international premiere and firmly established itself as one to watch.
The TIFF world premiere of Chris Rock’s popular Misty Green (A24) anointed breakout Rosalind Eleazar and the UK actress from Slow Horses now has festival berths in New York and London, not to mention Los Angeles voter screenings, to build on sparkling word of mouth. Prior to the festival there was a ton of expectation around the world premieres of Siân Heder’s opening night selection Being Heumann (Apple) and Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky (Amazon MGM Studios in the US) and while it’s safe to say they played well, their distributors will need to work the circuit in the months ahead.
TIFF awards showcase strong prospects
Firstly, the oft-repeated truism: the TIFF People’s Choice Award is a reliable bellwether of a best picture Oscar nomination and 13 out of the last 15 winners have garnered one, with three winning the top Academy Award. Secondly, this year’s winner definitely has the goods and Netflix will be pushing its Cannes world premiere La Bola Negra all the way. Los Javis’ queer romantic saga played through the roof in Toronto. Already the official Spanish submission, it is starting to look like a heavyweight best picture contender.
Elsinore won the International TIFF People’s Choice Award and stars Adam Scott as the late British actor Ian Charleson, who stepped in for Daniel Day-Lewis as Hamlet on the London stage in 1989 shortly before dying of AIDS. Focus Features are high on Simon Stone’s film and will look to parlay Telluride and Toronto acclaim into a rousing screening at BFI London Film Festival next month. Both Elsinore and La Bola Negra received their Canadian premieres in Toronto.
The Academy tinkered with its rules this year and the outcome is that Angh, the Indian winner of TIFF’s Platform section, now becomes eligible for the international feature film Oscar category. The father-son story plays out in 1960s India and could yet be selected as India’s official submission. Either way, earning recognition from Pablo Trapero and his Platform jurors is an enviable career start for feature debutant Theja Rio.
The public is the festival’s superpower
The streets were alive with the sound of screaming, in a good way. Not for the first time, TIFF welcomed a knowledgeable and good-humoured public audience with a voracious appetite for cinema. It helps enormously that the section of King Street that houses Princess Of Wales, Roy Thomson Hall, and TIFF Lightbox is pedestrianised over opening weekend, and ‘Festival Street’ accommodated hordes of fans. They cheered and waved when stars alighted from limousines almost within touching distance; they lined around the block outside the Princess Of Wales at all times of the day; waited for autographs outside Mortons steakhouse during Sony Pictures Classics’ annual TIFF dinner; and generally reminded everybody how thrilling this whole film business lark can be. At the nearby Screen offices the hullabaloo served as a reliable timepiece: whenever the cheers rang out we knew it was time for a 6pm or 8pm red carpet.
Slow sales, as with everywhere else
It almost goes without saying that such is the languid cadence of deal-making these days that it is rare to see more than a handful of major sales by the end of a festival. That said, buyers reported that this year’s crop of available films seemed less commercial than in the past. However they acknowledged that these things are cyclical and the deals will trickle in, as they tend to do after the first weekend in TIFF. At time of writing Sony had just acquired North America and select territories on the Michelle Yeoh action thriller The Surgeon, which had a few outstanding territories available after Patrick Wachsberger’s 193 pre-sold widely in Cannes 2025. The film was directed by Canadian Roshan Sethi, who also earns his living as… a radiation oncologist.
The big sale during the festival was on River and it was an unusual one. Universal and Blumhouse Atomic Monster paid more than $10m for US and select territory rights for Josh Giuliano’s Midnight Madness horror, despite the fact that the film was already spoken for. Yet Independent Film Group and Shudder, who arrived at TIFF with US rights, ran the numbers and responded to the offer on the table. All the buyers made a beeline for the Midnight Madness selections after Focus Features swooped on Obsession in 2025 and watched it soar to become one of this year’s biggest hits on more than $516m at the global box office. At time of writing offers were understood to be in for Werner Herzog’s Venice world premiere Bucking Fastard, which got its Canadian premiere at TIFF, and Bafta nominee Chase Infiniti from One Battle After Another as a maths prodigy in Niki Byrne’s TIFF world premiere The Julia Set.
TIFF: The Market’s big coming out
The inaugural event finally arrived and there were growing pains thanks to long lines at badge pick-up (which to be fair improved after the first day) and a lack of consistent foot traffic around the stalls and booths upstairs at Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Will the 200-or-so buyers (out of roughly 800) whom TIFF: The Market flew into Toronto either for the first time or the first time in some years be willing to make the annual trip at their own expense? And will the majority of top-tier US and European sales agents who stayed off site pay extra in the coming years to transact within the official market footprint? Market head Charles Tremblay and his team will be doing their level best to ensure they do as they ponder the lessons of this first edition.
That said, the Canadian hub at the convention centre was always jam-packed; the International Financing & Project Market, a decades-long Ontario Creates initiative that now resides within the official market, brought world-class participants and projects; and the Summit of talks and panels was as good as one will find anywhere. Canadian national treasure Seth Rogen, Gary Oldman, Warner Bros film group co-heads Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca, and Killer Films duo Christine Vachon and Pam Koffler regaled audiences, while the smaller sessions brought insights from Academy executives, and experts in packaging and distribution, microdramas, AI, and Indigenous storytelling.
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