For Cameron Bailey, CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival, things are looking up. The 2023 event is in-person doing what it does best: accessible, open, public-facing, audience-friendly programming. “Our brand is audience and has been that since the beginning,” said Bailey in a phone interview, alongside programming director Anita Lee.
They spoke with IndieWire ahead of their first teaser programming announcement on June 28, to be followed by the release of the TIFF gala and special presentations selections on July 19.
Screening attendance last year topped out at 275,000, one of TIFF’s highest numbers since pre-pandemic 2018 and 2019. In 2021, the festival was still coping with border restrictions, but in 2022 “people came back,” said Bailey. Left behind are the pandemic-bred online screenings. “We’ve built our reputation on the in-person experience,” said Bailey. “We have films from big stakeholders, streamers, and studios.”
TIFF exhibition space TIFF Bell Lightbox is doing business when it can get more commercial titles such as local hero Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking” and fellow Oscar contender “Triangle of Sadness.” “We made some strategic shifts, focusing on the younger audience,” said Lee. Celine Song’s Sundance hit “Past Lives” is also performing well with younger cinephiles.
For decades, TIFF was known as the studio’s fall launchpad. Today, Bailey said, the programming has evolved. “It’s a nice balance between films from the traditional studios and streamers,” he said. “Last year we had Paramount+ and Hulu along with the bigger traditional streamers. All are on the table now.”
While the festival grew to a sprawling 260 films in the mid-2010s, Bailey said “it became unwieldy for both press and film stakeholders.” Today, TIFF aims for 200 features, more or less.
Bailey, who said he is in touch with sellers on a daily basis, said top Hollywood agencies “are back in a major way. The business wants to do business in person again.”
Industry buyers will screen acquisition prospects in Industry Selects market screenings, which are not open to the public but to some invited TIFF members. Last year, Focus Features bought Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers” (November 22, 2023), a Christmas story starring Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, out of Industry Selects.
The festival continues to function as an Oscar launchpad. Its tribute awards gala last year went to Michelle Yeoh and Brendan Fraser, who both took home acting Oscars. And some 50 TIFF titles were nominated or won Oscars, said Bailey, including the People’s Choice Award winner, Steven Spielberg’s personal “The Fabelmans.”
Of course, Toronto still competes for World Premieres with the Telluride, Venice, London, and New York festivals. “We are all in it for the same reasons,” said Bailey, who thinks that talking each other through the pandemic made his rivals more collegial. “Their elbows are not as sharp.”
