Toronto International Film Festival

From the Windsor Arms to King Street

The festival began in 1976 as the Festival of Festivals, put together by Bill Marshall, Dusty Cohl and Henk Van der Kolk out of the Windsor Arms Hotel. The premise was straightforward: gather the best films that had already played other festivals and bring them to Toronto. The first edition ran from 18 to 24 October 1976, screening 127 films from 30 countries in ten programmes to an audience of 35,000.

The pieces that define the modern event arrived over the following decades. Midnight Madness, the late-night genre strand, launched in 1988 and was shaped by programmer Colin Geddes between 1998 and 2016. In 1994 the organisation dropped the Festival of Festivals name and became the Toronto International Film Festival, the same year Piers Handling took charge as director, a post he held until 2009. In 2010 the festival opened TIFF Bell Lightbox on King Street West, a 181 million dollar building with five cinemas, gallery space, archives and film labs that gave it a year-round home. Cameron Bailey became artistic director in 2013 and was appointed chief executive in 2021.

By 2016 the scale was formidable: 397 films from 83 countries across 28 venues, roughly 480,000 attendees and more than 5,000 industry delegates. The organisation's annual economic impact was put at 67 million Canadian dollars in 2007 and 170 million by 2011. The 2020 edition ran as a hybrid of in-person and online screenings using the Shift72 platform, and a decision to make masks optional was reversed within 24 hours after criticism and rising case numbers in Ontario.

The award that reads the Oscars

Toronto has no competition jury for its main slate. Its central prize is the People's Choice Award, voted by paying audiences, and it has become the most watched barometer in the autumn awards calendar. Past winners that went on to Academy Awards include Chariots of Fire in 1981, American Beauty in 1999, Slumdog Millionaire in 2008 and The King's Speech in 2010. Screen Daily's tally in September 2025 was that over the previous 15 years all but two winners had earned a Best Picture nomination, and three had won outright: 12 Years a Slave in 2013, Green Book in 2018 and Nomadland in 2020.

On 14 September 2025 the award went to Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, with Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice took the international audience prize, Matt Johnson's Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie won Midnight Madness, and Barry Avrich's documentary The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue won the documentary vote. Among the juried prizes, Valentyn Vasyanovych's To the Victory! won the Platform competition and Zacharias Kunuk's Uiksaringitara was named best Canadian film.

Screen Daily's post-mortem was candid about where that leaves the festival. The fiftieth edition did not land world premieres of the season's biggest prestige titles, several of which had debuted at Venice, Telluride or Cannes weeks earlier. Toronto's role, the trade paper concluded, is now that of an endorser and amplifier of films that arrive with momentum. The acquisitions market was slow too: only two theatrical deals properly closed during the festival, including Row K's mid-seven-figure purchase of Gus Van Sant's Dead Man's Wire.

The fiftieth year

The 50th festival ran from 4 to 14 September 2025. It opened with Colin Hanks's documentary John Candy: I Like Me and closed with Anne Émond's Peak Everything. Across the summer the Lightbox ran The TIFF Story in 50 Films, a retrospective of one title from each year of the festival's history. Tribute Awards went to Guillermo del Toro, Jodie Foster, Catherine O'Hara, Nina Hoss, Channing Tatum, Idris Elba, Zacharias Kunuk and Jafar Panahi.

Windy City Times, reporting on 22 September 2025, counted more than 700,000 guests, 1,200 screenings and 110 red carpets, with King Street outside the Lightbox closed off as a cordoned street festival of sponsor pop-ups and premiere arrivals at Roy Thomson Hall and the Royal Alexandra Theatre.

The year was not without a public stumble. In August the festival withdrew The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, citing copyright concerns over footage originally shot by Hamas, then reinstated it on 14 August after a backlash. Bailey later acknowledged that pulling the film had been a mistake. It went on to win the documentary audience award a month later.

Money has been a live issue for several years. Bailey told Screen Daily in September 2024 that the departure of long-time lead sponsor Bell had left a hole of 3.7 million dollars in annual support, offset in part by rising membership, with Rogers stepping in as presenting sponsor. In the same interview he said actors were back in a big way after the 2023 strikes, and described first public screenings drawing upwards of 2,000 people, most of them followed by a director Q&A.

2026: a market and a new room

The 51st edition runs from 10 to 20 September 2026. It opens with Siân Heder's Being Heumann, an Apple film about the disability rights campaigner Judy Heumann, starring Ruth Madeley with Mark Ruffalo. It closes with Yan Lanouette Turgeon's documentary Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend. Early announcements in July included Susanna White's Prima Facie with Cynthia Erivo and Hur Jin-ho's South Korean political thriller The Assassin(s) with Lee Min-ho. NOW Toronto reported on 14 July 2026 that more than 200 international features would screen, with the complete schedule published on 11 August.

This year's Tribute Awards honour Rosalind Eleazar and Isabelle Huppert as performers, Lee Chang-dong as director, Heder with the Jeff Skoll Award, Penélope Cruz with a special tribute, Seth Rogen with the Norman Jewison Award, Helen Mirren with the Share Her Journey Groundbreaker Award and Fan Bingbing with a special tribute. A structural change also arrived: non-English-language winners of the Platform Prize are now automatically eligible for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.

The larger development is the market. The Canadian federal government first committed 17 million dollars over three years in 2024; by September 2025 Screen Daily was reporting the figure as 23 million Canadian dollars, with Charles Tremblay appointed to run it. The market operates at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre alongside the festival and covers film packages, co-productions, television and emerging formats. Bailey's stated ambition in 2024 was to more than double industry attendance. The Convention Centre's John Bassett Theatre, with more than 1,200 seats, joins the roster of public screening venues for the first time.

What it is like to go

Toronto remains a festival for the public rather than a closed industry event, and that shapes everything about attending it. Screenings are spread across a downtown cluster: the Princess of Wales Theatre, Roy Thomson Hall and the Royal Alexandra Theatre for galas and premieres, the Lightbox and the Scotiabank Theatre for the bulk of the programme, and now the John Bassett Theatre. Red carpets and the closed-off stretch of King Street give the first weekend the character of a street party, with 110 carpets logged in 2025.

Ticketing runs in tiers. For 2026, TIFF members bought first on 21 August, a Visa pre-sale ran from 28 to 30 August, and public sales opened on 31 August, each at noon Toronto time on the festival's website. Most first public screenings are followed by a Q&A with the director and often the cast, and premiere houses regularly fill to around 2,000. The Midnight Madness strand, now approaching four decades old, remains the rowdiest room in the schedule and produced the 2025 audience favourite in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.