Sandwiched in the middle of the late-summer/early-autumn run of major international film festivals, coming on the heels of Locarno, Venice, and Telluride and immediately before San Sebastián, NYFF, and BFI London, the Toronto International Film Festival has grown from passionate upstart in the late ’70s to one of the largest in the world, with attendance numbers regularly approach half a million (pre-Covid, of course). It’s also a festival that seems to constantly reinvent itself, adding initiatives, shifting programming philosophies, and sliding into more prestige event territory over the past decade or so, for better and worse. But what hasn’t much changed in the past 20 years is the sheer behemoth size of TIFF’s slate, segmented into a diverse spate of programs (even if this year’s film count is only half of what it was in 2016, 200+ is still a haul). This means peppered in amidst the red carpet galas are gems ripe for discovery and an amalgam of the year’s festival mainstays. Which, of course, means we’re typically already waist-deep in recommendations and warnings headed into TIFF’s opening days, and that’s no different this year. Linked below are a 18 films we’ve already caught up with and written on, distributed across four different TIFF sections, to kick things off. We’ll be back over the next couple weeks with a handful+ of dispatches of new TIFF content.
Credit: TIFF
by InRO Staff• Featured• Festival Coverage• Film
