Toronto Film Festival (TIFF) overview and Oscars impact

The Toronto International Film Festival (aka TIFF) has been around since 1976, and is one of the largest publicly attended film festivals in the world, when you consider how many movies premiere there each year, reportedly in the hundreds some years. Toronto is slightly more accessible to journalists from America, Canada and the rest of the world than Venice or Telluride, since Toronto is a major metropolis with plenty of hotels and theaters that can cater to such a vast attendance.

TIFF is famous for its lavish gala premieres that bring the stars out in their finest red carpet attire. Many studios not only regularly choose to premiere their fall releases at TIFF but will also junket those films there, which means that journalists attend from all over the world for interviews, which is not necessarily true of other September festivals. Studios like Sony, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Focus Features, Searchlight, and Sony Classics (who are famous for their annual Saturday night dinner) are frequent purveyors of cinema at TIFF.

TIFF’s galas are held at grand venues, such as the Roy Thomas Hall, Princess of Wales, the Elgin and Wintergarden Theaters, plus we can’t forget the glorious and relatively new TIFF Bell Lightbox that was built to help handle the number of international attendees, but has become a year-round arthouse venue for the city. This year, the fest is adding a newly-retrofitted 1,000 seat auditorium in the Royal Alexander Theater.

TIFF’s biggest get ever might come in the form of this year’s world premiere of Steven Spielberg‘s semi-autobiographical “The Fabelmans,” which will mark the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s first premiere at TIFF ever. Peter Farrelly‘s “The Greatest Beer Run Ever,” the filmmaker’s follow-up to the Oscar winner “Green Book” (which also premiered at TIFF), is also getting its world premiere, while Sony is staging world premieres of Viola Davis‘s “The Woman King” and JD Dillard‘s “Devotion.”  Stephen Williams‘s “Chevalier” could put Kelvin Harrison Jr. on the path towards his first Oscar nomination, and Stephen Frears re-teams with his “Philomena” collaborator, Steve Coogan, for “The Lost King.” Harry Styles will be at TIFF for the world premiere of his drama “My Policeman.” And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

The caliber of those movies gives you a sense of what TIFF brings to the awards circuit. And more importantly, TIFF is the home of the People’s Choice Award, which, as it sounds, is voted on by TIFF audiences who buy tickets to see the movies and the big name stars in attendance.

Winning the People’s Choice Award doesn’t always guarantee an Oscar Best Picture win, but as we’ve seen countless times, it can greatly help a film’s path to a nomination. The first movie to win both prizes was 1981’s “Chariots of Fire,” followed in 1999 by Sam Mendes’s “American Beauty.” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “The King’s Speech” won the People’s Choice after their TIFF premieres, and more recently “12 Years a Slave” (2013), “Green Book” (2018), and “Nomadland” (2020) played well for TIFF audiences before winning equal support from the academy by winning Best Picture.

In 2019 Taika Waititi’s “Jojo Rabbit” won the award with “Marriage Story” and eventual Best Picture winner “Parasite” as runners-up – all three were in the Oscars’ Best Picture race. Last year Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” received the award with Jane Campion‘s “Power of the Dog” as a runner-up, and both ended up with Best Picture noms. Other TIFF winners that went on to Oscar noms include “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, MIssouri” in 2017 and David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” in 2012. The runner-up in 2012 was “Argo,” and then Ben Affleck’s movie ended up winning the Oscar. “The Imitation Game,” “Room,” and “La La Land” are three other movies that received the People’s Choice Award and then were nominated for Best Picture.

On the other hand, immensely popular films like Baz Luhrmann’s debut “Strictly Ballroom” and “The Princess Bride” have won the People’s Choice Award without getting in the Oscar race. Probably the strangest win was Nadine Labecki’s Lebanese drama “Where Do We Go Now?” which won People’s Choice in 2011, but wasn’t even short-listed for the foreign language Oscar that year.

TIFF doesn’t do the customary competition and jury awards like other festivals, where prestigious filmmakers and studios can submit their wares. Instead, they have the FIPRESCI (Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique), an international critics’ prize for movies in the Special Presentation and Discovery sections, and the NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) jury for best film from Asia. TIFF’s newer Platform section (introduced in 2015) also has an award winner for world cinema. On top of that, TIFF gives out three awards specifically for Canadian films, but these movies tend to be non-players in the overall Oscar conversation, and the FIPRESCI has been on a break since 2019 but will return this year.

The festival also offers a number of honorary awards, including the Ebert Director Award, which was introduced fairly recently in 2019. This year it’s going to Sam Mendes, whose “Empire of Light” will have a special presentation at TIFF. Last year Denis Villeneuve received that honor and went on to earn a Best Picture bid for his sci-fi epic “Dune.” The Mary Pickford Award honors female filmmakers — Mati Diop was the first to receive that —  and since 2019 actors have also regularly been honored with the TIFF Tribute Actor Award with last year’s recipients being Jessica Chastain, who went on to win Best Actress at the Oscars for the TIFF-premiering “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” and Benedict Cumberbatch, who then received his second Oscar nomination for “Power of the Dog.” Brendan Fraser was just announced to receive the TIFF Tribute for his performance in Darren Aronofsky‘s “The Whale,” so yeah, good chance that he’s entering the Oscar race this season too.

That’s TIFF for you in a nutshell. Read my take on the Venice Film Festival here. The last festival I’m going to examine is the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, which is celebrating its 60th year starting in late September.

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