TORONTO — Kicking off Thursday night, the Toronto International Film Festival marks its 50th edition this year, bringing together a heady combination of art, business and celebrity. The festival has become a reliable launching pad for films in North America, particularly those looking to enter the Oscar race. Though TIFF's status as an awards-season kingmaker has found fiercer competition in ...

Tessa Thompson stars in director Nia DaCosta’ s“ Hedda,” an adaptation of Ibsen’ s“ Hedda Gabler.” The movie will have its world premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

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TORONTO — Kicking off Thursday night, the Toronto International Film Festival marks its 50th edition this year, bringing together a heady combination of art, business and celebrity.

The festival has become a reliable launching pad for films in North America, particularly those looking to enter the Oscar race. Though TIFF's status as an awards-season kingmaker has found fiercer competition in recent years from adjacent events in Telluride and Venice, it unquestionably still matters, remaining an essential spot on the annual calendar of any movie year.

"I think TIFF is a really adaptable festival," said Robyn Citizen, the festival's director of programming, over Zoom this week. "We can't always tell where the industry's going, but we do want to be able to still serve our audiences and our industry the best we possibly can."

Here are just a handful of reasons why TIFF has maintained such a significant role for so long.

It's the ultimate one-stop shop

There will be more than 200 features screening at this year's festival. Among those having their world premieres are Aziz Ansari's wealth-inequality comedy "Good Fortune," Nia DaCosta's updated Ibsen adaptation "Hedda," Derek Cianfrance's true-crime caper "Roofman," Hikari's family drama "Rental Family," Nic Pizzollatto's Las Vegas-set "Easy's Waltz," David Michôd's Sydney Sweeney-starring boxing drama "Christy" and Rian Johnson's latest Benoit Blanc adventure "Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery." The festival will open with Colin Hanks' documentary "John Candy: I Like Me," also having its first screening ever.

TIFF remains valuable for more than just its world premieres, though. Among those titles playing at Toronto after having just bowed last week at Venice or Telluride (or even both) are Guillermo del Toro's "Frankenstein," Chloé Zhao's Shakespeare-inspired "Hamnet," Mona Fastvold's historical musical "The Testament of Ann Lee" and Edward Berger's gambling drama "Ballad of a Small Player."

Movies that played even earlier in the year at festivals such as Sundance, Berlin or Cannes are also featured in the lineup: Joachim Trier's "Sentimental Value," Mary Bronstein's "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You," Rebecca Zlotowski's "A Private Life," Jafar Panahi's Palme d'Or-winning "It Was Just an Accident" and Richard Linklater's "Blue Moon" and "Nouvelle Vague" will all be at TIFF.

It is exactly that combination of the best from different festivals and different parts of the calendar that makes TIFF unique. The event was originally known as the "Festival of Festivals," meaning that it has always been a part of its mission to present a curated selection of the year's best films. For better or worse, TIFF is often trying to be something for everyone.

"It's important to us to curate with an attention to films that we know our audience may want to see, but that also includes films that we think our audience needs to see," said Citizen. "We want to be that bridge between the filmmakers, the industry and the audience."

Journalists covering the event can catch up with films from earlier in the year, get a jump on awards-season titles just beginning to find their way to audiences and even see projects that may not be released until a year or more later.

Add to that spirit of efficiency the fact that for increasingly budget-conscious U.S. media outlets, sending reporters to Toronto can often be a more cost-effective choice than pricier destinations such as Cannes, Telluride or Venice.

These are the festival world's friendliest audiences

Toronto-born writer-director Chandler Levack will be world-premiering her "Mile End Kicks," which stars Barbie Ferreira in a story based on Levack's own experiences as a young music journalist. Levack said she is excited to see how a moment when Ferreira's character flips off Toronto's landmark CN Tower plays to a local audience.

Levack has experienced TIFF from multiple perspectives, first as a film student waiting in line for last-minute tickets, then as a journalist hustling for interviews, then working for the festival as a writer and now as a returning filmmaker.

"I think it still sets the tone for the cultural conversation in cinema," said Levack. "The ways that I've seen movies at TIFF with those audiences — the way those films hit me and affected me — they've been really the most profound cinematic experiences of my life."

TIFF is often referred to as an audience festival, meaning that the audiences there are particularly receptive, giving warmly enthusiastic responses. The area of the festival's downtown core around King Street where some of the key venues are located can often be jam-packed with fans trying to catch an autograph, a selfie or even just a glimpse of some of their favorite stars. The most significant prize given by the festival is its People's Choice audience award, which has often been a strong bellwather for its winner's chances at the Oscars.

The distributor Sony Pictures Classics has eight movies playing in this year's edition alone, including "Blue Moon," Haifaa Al Mansour's "Unidentified" and Scarlett Johansson's "Eleanor the Great." Over the years the company has brought more than 400 titles to TIFF.

"The audience is one of the most sophisticated in the world, for my money," said Tom Bernard, who along with Michael Barker is co-founder and co-president of Sony Pictures Classics. "They get every nuance of every tick in a film, be it a comedy, a drama, a gasp that happens where they gasp with it. When you go see a movie in Toronto, you have to be careful because the reaction is so enthusiastic that many times you say, 'Well, wow, that movie would be great.' But it might be a little more difficult than the way that it plays in that town."

The road to the Oscars often goes through Toronto

Though none of them had their world premieres at the festival, last year's winners "Anora," The Brutalist," "Emilia Pérez," "Conclave," "Flow," "I'm Still Here," "The Substance" and "No Other Land" all played there. The Oscar nominated film "Sing Sing" had its world premiere at the 2023 edition of TIFF.

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Josh O'Connor, left, and Daniel Craig in "Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery."

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"Wake Up Dead Man" is the third film in director Rian Johnson's series of mysteries starring Daniel Craig; all three premiered at TIFF. This marks the fifth time producer Ram Berman and Johnson have premiered one of their films at the festival. Both previous "Knives Out" mysteries earned Oscar nominations for Johnson for original screenplay.

Their company, T-Street Productions, also produced "American Fiction," which premiered at the fest in 2023 and won the coveted People's Choice audience award (other recent winners include "The Fabelmans," "Belfast," "Nomadland" and "Jojo Rabbit"), beginning a wave that took the film all the way to five Academy Award nominations, including best picture and winning the Oscar for adapted screenplay.

Though the new "Knives Out" film has been finished for a few months, Bergman said the plan was always to premiere again in Toronto, even playing in the same theater on the same day at the same time as the previous two films.

"I like going to Toronto and premiering there because the audience is always great," said Bergman. "And really that's who we make the movies for. We are not in the game, we're not strategizing awards or anything, we just want people to have fun. We've always had a great time playing the movies in Toronto, so we should continue playing the movies in Toronto. It's really that simple."

Provocative documentaries often stir the pot

Nonfiction has always been a big part of Toronto's identity going back to its very beginnings, which saw the likes of "Harlan County, USA." and "Roger & Me" playing the festival.

Oscar-winner Laura Poitras returns to Toronto with "Cover-Up," a portrait of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that she co-directed with Mark Obenhaus. "Free Solo" directors Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin also return with "Love+War," a look at the life of photojournalist Lynsey Addario.

This year, Ben Proudfoot's "The Eyes of Ghana," a portrait of African cinematographer Chris Hesse, will have its world premiere. Proudfoot previously won two Oscars for the documentary shorts "The Queen of Basketball" and "The Last Repair Shop." (the latter a film that LA Times Studios co-distributed).

"Canceled: The Paula Deen Story," a look at the rise and fall of the food-world star, will have its world premiere, as will "EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert," Baz Luhrmann's documentary.

Documentaries that touch on hot button issues can raise problems for the festival as well. Last year Anastasia Trofimova's film "Russians at War," for which the filmmaker embedded herself with Russian soldiers to depict the war in Ukraine, sparked public outcry, threats of protest and safety concerns that caused the festival to ultimately show it after the main TIFF event had officially ended.

This year the festival initially invited the documentary "The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue," about a hostage rescue mission undertaken by a retired Israel Defense Forces officer following the Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The festival then withdrew the film, directed by Toronto filmmaker (and former TIFF board member) Barry Avrich, from the lineup and following public uproar subsequently rescheduled it for a single public showing.

"This is the world we live in," said Thom Powers, lead programmer of TIFF docs, about the way in which impassioned controversy erupts over films people have not even seen yet — the result of overly politicized environments and the short fuses of the social media era. "We can see this at many festivals."

A proven half-century track record

For the first four years that Sony Classics' Bernard brought films to Toronto, he would play then-festival chief Wayne Clarkson in tennis, with the loser paying for talent's travel expenses. (Bernard won most of the time.)

He also recalled the time that he was able to have the training staff of the NHL's Toronto Maple Leafs come right to the hotel room of Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar to reset his back.

But mainly there are memories of movies, times the festival's specific magic cast its spell.

"I remember sitting in the theater watching 'Il Postino' and the guy who's selling it is sitting next to me," said Bernard of the 1994 film that would go on to be nominated for five Oscars, winning one. "And as the movie continues, the guy's smile is getting bigger and bigger and bigger because he knows he's going to be able to jack the price up way beyond anything I could pay.

"On the other hand, I remember being at the end of the festival and sitting in 'Orlando' and nobody was there but me," he said of Sally Potter's 1992 film that was a breakthrough for performer Tilda Swinton. "And I sent it back to the office, everybody saw it and it's one of those all-time movies just because we were hanging around."

For Levack, the festival has already provided a launching pad. After her first feature "I Like Movies," premiered at the festival in 2022, it eventually made its way to the attention of Adam Sandler. Levack is currently finishing "Roommates" for Sandler's Happy Madison production company.

"TIFF was unbelievably instrumental in making our film not only exist but matter," said Levack of the response to her debut. "We really broke out and became sort of a viral unexpected hit at that festival and that really made my entire career from that point exist."

Even as Toronto has weathered the changing fortunes of the film business and grappled with competition from other festivals, there is still something unique that happens when some of the year's most anticipated new films meet these audiences.

"People say, 'We're going to put it in Toronto and then we're getting into the Oscar game,'" said Bernard. "But it's the audience [that decides]. You don't fool anybody in Toronto."