TIFF 2025 was a festival of eye-popping films and nerve-wracking tensions | Canada Voices

The triumphs and tensions of the Toronto International Film Festival’s 50th edition were crystallized with a startling, almost too-on-the-nose tidiness during the organization’s closing awards ceremony Sunday morning.

At the same time as TIFF honoured a solid slate of international cinema – with the top audience prizes going to such largely acclaimed titles as Chloé Zhao’s tear-jerking drama Hamnet, Matt Johnson’s sensational Canadian comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie and Park Chan-wook’s dark anti-capitalism satire No Other Choice – festival organizers could not help but continue to make the kind of unforced errors that have come to define, or at the very least pockmark, TIFF’s current reputation.

First: Someone in the marketing or loyalty and engagement offices, for some reason, emailed out the full list of award winners to 200,000-plus TIFF members and list subscribers at 10 a.m., a good half-hour before festival organizers started to hand out awards during the live ceremony inside the Lightbox cinema. Meanwhile, as word quickly spread on social media, spoiling the news for everyone in the audience and revealing a sizable crack in TIFF’s best-laid plans, Zhao’s heartfelt pre-recorded acceptance speech was projected upside-down.

That last bit might be a small technical error, but it echoed what felt like a consistent and embarrassing lack of attention to detail that permeated so much of the festival, from a dire and instantly repetitive slate of preshow sponsor ads to the cheesiness of encountering volunteers hawking 50/50 raffle tickets outside of screenings, as if TIFF were a local legion hall.

And just as everyone at the awards show was processing all of that, the existential tensions that have come to define this landmark edition of TIFF – questions of programming, politics, influence and organizational leadership – reared their head one more time, after director Barry Avrich’s The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue won the People’s Choice Documentary Award. (The film chronicles one Israeli family’s experience during the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and had been the subject of back-and-forth festival inclusion, finally receiving a single public screening.)

While polite applause greeted Avrich’s politics-free acceptance speech, it was difficult to ignore the unease in the room the moment the honour was announced, especially arriving after two earlier, separate on-stage moments that specifically decried the “genocide in Gaza” (from Helen Lee, jury member of the NETPAC Award, and Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari, whose feature-length debut Blue Heron won the Best Canadian Discovery Award).

Typically, TIFF’s awards ceremony acts as a collective sigh of relief for the festival faithful – a low-key, congratulatory acknowledgement that we all managed to come out the other end of 11 days of cinema, celebrity and streetcar-closures intact. Instead, we got mimosas with a side of over-easy anxiety, with everyone – from all possible perspectives – quietly marvelling to themselves at how TIFF managed to keep stepping on rake after rake it had itself laid down. But such was the overall vibe of this year’s festival – plenty to celebrate, just as much to worry about.

First, the good news: There were more than enough captivating, eye-opening, soul-stirring films to keep even the most ravenous moviegoer satiated.

While I remain skeptical of Zhao’s emotional agenda when it comes to Hamnet, I can happily bow down to star Jessie Buckley, who plays Agnes Shakespeare, wife of William, with profound sorrow. The Midnight Madness premiere of Johnson’s NTBTSTM might be one of the most seismic Toronto screenings in a generation. Clint Bentley’s drama Train Dreams left me a puddle of tears. Mary Bronstein’s nerve-wracking character study If I Had Legs I’d Kick You just about knocked my teeth out. And Mona Fastvold’s musical The Testament of Ann Lee is the kind of big-swing cinema that has all but disappeared from the landscape.

Sure, all the titles above came to Toronto only after screening at other festivals, robbing TIFF of any true bragging rights regarding exclusivity. But that doesn’t change the fact that local audiences eagerly devoured them, and so many other standout titles (Rose of Nevada, Tuner, It Was Just an Accident, Lucky Lu, Dead Lover, Sound of Falling, The Secret Agent, The President’s Cake, Sentimental Value, The Smashing Machine, and Romvari’s incredibly affecting Blue Heron) that just happened to debut elsewhere. In terms of pure Letterboxd metrics, there were far more four-star affairs on offer this year than TIFF’s 2024 edition.

Still, this is a festival playing 292 titles (216 features, 10 television series, 66 shorts), and by its midpoint, only the most starry-eyed cinephile would fail to feel the program’s crushing, middling bulk.

For too many years in a row now, the majority of the ostensibly high-profile world premieres that TIFF lured to its lineup have landed with polite thuds. (Remember these names now if you must, because you’ll never hear about them again: Adulthood, The Choral, Driver’s Ed, Eternity, Fuze, Charlie Harper, Glenrothan, Swiped, Bad Apples, Couture, Easy’s Waltz, Sacrifice).

Perhaps in TIFF’s quest to become so intimidatingly big – to mistake itself for an economy instead of a mere film festival, and thus expect ever-expanding growth – quantity is the only viable pursuit. But it didn’t take long – while waiting for Ticketmaster to reboot, or traipsing through an especially bland Festival Street, or passing through Roy Thomson Hall security tight enough for YYZ – for attendee grumpiness to surface. TIFF’s schedule should be an embarrassment of riches, not a minefield.

The programming dilemma will only feel more pronounced next year, when TIFF launches its official market – an industry hub for buying and selling films, TV series and interactive content, which organizers hope will become Toronto’s answer to Cannes’s Marché du Film or Berlin’s European Film Market. With a $23-million investment from the federal government for the initiative, TIFF is placing the second-biggest bet in its history, after the opening of the Lightbox building 15 years ago.

Yet the noticeable absence of high-profile deals coming out of this year’s festival – the largest to trickle out so far is Focus Features ponying up a reported US$15-million for the excellent Midnight Madness horror entry Obsession – doesn’t portend blockbuster market business. Despite TIFF populating more than half its 2025 slate with sales titles (ie., films that don’t already have distribution in place) – a deliberate uptick from previous years – many sellers have left Toronto without securing any U.S. and/or North American deals.

Not helping matters is TIFF’s curiously ho-hum sense of occasion when it comes to its rapidly approaching market launch. Just a few days before this year’s festival launched, organizers finally announced Canadian distribution vet Charles Tremblay as the head of the market. But TIFF’s pop-up space showcasing what attendees can expect from the endeavour – an exhibit that, according to industry delegates who were offered a peek, recalled the look and feel of a condo showroom festooned with buzzwords like “resonance,” “ease,” and “emotion” – didn’t boost confidence that this was the game-changer that TIFF needs.

And make no mistake, TIFF needs to change its game.

It can be easy to dismiss the festival as an annual exercise in Hollywood worship, or a civic annoyance. But over the past half-century, TIFF has become Canada’s main cultural touchstone – a remarkable achievement built through blood, sweat and a few million litres of mimosas. Anyone who cares about the future of Canadian culture should fight for not only TIFF’s survival but its prosperity. Here’s to the next 50 – or, if you must, “TIFFty” – years.

Barry Hertz’s Top 10 Films of TIFF 2025

10. Sound of Falling

9. Tuner

8. Blue Heron

7. Rose of Nevada

6. The Furious

5. The Testament of Ann Lee

4. No Other Choice

3. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

2. Train Dreams

1. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie