Movie Freaks, Producers and Hope: Postcards From TIFF

I’ve been going to festivals longer than some Ankler employees have been alive (and yes, this time, the cliché is actually true).

From the first one I went to in the 1990s to my visit this week to the Toronto International Film Festival, I’m instantly struck by the same question every time: 

Who the hell are all these people?

If anything, that question has been ringing in my head even louder lately — given that everything I’ve read for a decade now tells me the movie industry is dead or dying, barely on life support; the whole business is organized around desperately fighting off this imminent demise.

So given that: What are all these thousands and thousands of people doing here? How are so many people still working in this supposedly dead business — making, buying and selling films and doing a million things in between to service the people who do all that?

These are questions that I’ve asked hundreds of times at festivals — and answers that have been given to me many times more — but the cognitive dissonance between an industry enveloped in a thick cloud of gloom and a major city filled with happy, even ecstatic, moviemakers and moviegoers throws me for a loop every time.

I love coming to TIFF because it sits right in the heart of this paradox — living somewhere between Important Industry Event and local celebration of cinema. Which one is it: an excuse for glitzy red carpets and Oscar season launches? A chance for Canadian audiences to get their own peek at what’s out there? A filmsnob/Letterboxd hive or the most populist, unpretentious of festivals?

It’s all of those, and somehow they co-exist, mashed together in Toronto — and it all kind of works brilliantly.

In Toronto, I love standing in line for a premiere — maybe for a film no audience has ever seen before — because you’re lined up between critics and retirees, goth kids in T-shirts and high tops, local socialites in gowns and tuxes, publicists and producers. Indie icon Sarah Polley showed up for so many screenings, lined up with the fans — at least once with Stranger Things superstar Finn Wolfhard — as they filed in together for crowd-pleasing Oscar hopefuls and moody imports from abroad.

And in that chaos lies the answer to the riddle of the film industry — undead and still proudly on display here in Toronto — in a way that really, no other medium on Earth can compete with.

So all that established — here are some postcards from my week north of the border, as I searched for the truth of cinema circa 2026.