Cillian Murphy plays a schoolteacher for troubled boys in Tim Mielants’s Netflix-distributed drama called Steve.tiff/Supplied
When the Toronto International Film Festival launched its Platform program 10 years ago, the unmentioned but clearly understood goal was to play in the sandboxes of competing film organizations.
Like Cannes’s vaunted “In Competition” slate, Platform would be a juried program designed to trumpet “artistically ambitious” international cinema, although in this case at a festival that had never handed out awards based on the whims of a private panel. And like the official markets in Berlin, Cannes and even the American Film Market, Platform was designed to showcase films that had no distribution attached – to “put the media and buyers in the room with the public,” as Cameron Bailey, then TIFF’s artistic director and now its chief executive, said at the time.
The aims and whims of Platform have changed over the ensuing decade – what was once a program restricted to world premieres is now also open to international premieres (a.k.a. films that are screening outside their country of origin for the first time), while plenty of movies have been invited with distributors attached, even as TIFF aims to launch its own official buying-and-selling market next year – but the “artistically ambitious” element has been kept in place.
While Platform’s batting average is wobbly when it comes to TIFF’s favourite metric of success – launching Oscar contenders – each year has reliably delivered at least one or two contemporary classics: Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth, Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama – and those were all just in 2016.
Barry Hertz: On the beaches of Cannes, TIFF maps outs its ambitious future
This year’s Platform promises more of that same adventurous spirit, featuring bold voices – both emerging and veteran – from across the globe.
Top of the list should be The World of Love from South Korean director Yoon Ga-eun, who has been lauded the world over for her work exploring the lives of children and youth (2016’s The World of Us). But other potential conversation-starters include the Iranian trans drama Between Dreams and Hope, directed by Farnoosh Samadi; the Ukrainian political drama To the Victory! from Valentyn Vasyanovych; Skite’kmujue’katik (At the Place of Ghosts) from Canada’s Bretten Hannam, which TIFF’s director of programming, Robyn Citizen, calls an “extremely beautiful film with elements of magical realism;” and Gyorgy Palfi’s The Hen, an unorthodox live-action drama that follows one chicken as it escapes a grisly fate.
Polish period drama Winter of the Crow starring Lesley Manville and directed by Kasia Adamik is one of many films Platform is showing that balances high art with high-wattage names.tiff/Supplied
For festival-goers looking to balance high art with high-wattage names, Platform has that angle covered, too, with the Polish period drama Winter of the Crow starring Lesley Manville and directed by Kasia Adamik, daughter of Agnieszka Holland (who will also be at TIFF with her new Kafka biopic); Pauline Loquès’s French drama Nino, featuring Canada’s hottest young actor, Théodore Pellerin; and Tim Mielants’s Netflix-distributed drama Steve, starring Oppenheimer’s Cillian Murphy as a schoolteacher for troubled boys.
Meanwhile, this year’s Platform jury continues the program’s tradition of mixing international auteurs with familiar faces. Chairing the 2025 jury is Spanish filmmaker Carlos Marques-Marcet, whose 2024 drama They Will Be Dust won last year’s Platform Prize. He’ll be joined by Canadian director Chloé Robichaud (2023’s Days of Happiness) and British actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste, whose latest collaboration with director Mike Leigh, Hard Truths, premiered at TIFF last year.
When Platform made its debut in 2015, then-TIFF chief executive Piers Handling noted that the program exemplified “our ongoing commitment to showcase artistic and inventive directors that fearlessly push boundaries.”
As much as things have changed for the world of film and TIFF itself – including the amount of the Platform Prize, which has been lowered from its initial $25,000 purse to $20,000 – some things thankfully remain the same.
TIFF’s 50th edition runs Sept. 4 through 14.
