Ben Stiller greets fans before a TIFF screening of Nutcrackers, in Toronto, on Sept. 5.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
If the industrial-sized, 10-day-long Toronto International Film Festival likes to think of itself as having something for everyone, then the opening night of this year’s edition delivered. Just not in ways organizers might have completely appreciated.
On Thursday evening, TIFF kicked off its 49th annual festival with a crush of A-list events, most of which provided a much-needed return to red-carpet glamour for a festival that struggled to burnish its high-wattage brand during last year’s strike-plagued edition.
Just a few hours after members of The Tragically Hip gathered to celebrate the world premiere of the docuseries No Dress Rehearsal – a screening that featured a surprise appearance by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and was capped by a giant outdoor singalong by Choir! Choir! Choir! – Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry walked the red carpet for the dark new boxing drama The Cut. A block away, indie-film royalty Chloe Sevigny was on hand for Canadian director Durga Chew-Bose’s feature debut, Bonjour Tristesse. Demi Moore received a grand reception for the midnight debut of her intense new body-horror thriller, The Substance.
Hundreds joined a Choir! Choir! Choir! sing-a-long of Tragically Hip tunes following the screening of a docu-series about the band at the opening night of TIFF.
The Globe and Mail
And Ben Stiller, the evening’s star VIP, was on hand for the debut of his charming holiday comedy Nutcrackers, the festival’s official opening-night selection. Which is where things got complicated.
As TIFF’s chief executive Cameron Bailey and chief programming officer Anita Lee were introducing Nutcrackers to the crowd inside the Princess of Wales Theatre, four protesters rose up in the audience chanting “RBC funds genocide!” while also accusing the bank – a long-time major sponsor of the festival – of “funding the climate crisis and violating Indigenous sovereignty,” allegations that also arose during TIFF’s 2023 edition.
Bailey and Lee mostly talked over the demonstration, which lasted five minutes before security escorted the protesters away, with some members of the audience oscillating between loudly booing the group – including counter-chanting “Get them out!” – and applauding the TIFF leaders. “We appreciate freedom of speech, but we are here to start the festival,” Bailey said, before continuing on with the film’s introduction.
Yet TIFF, and festival-goers, had to know that such a disruption might happen. Similar instances occurred during last fall’s Giller awards and this past spring’s Hot Docs film festival, with the temperature in this country’s arts scene at a resting boiling point since. Indeed, in an interview last month with The Globe and Mail, Bailey noted that security was a priority in planning this year’s festival: “I can say that we are prepared and have made sure to prepare our staff to have everything that they might need.” (A second gala screening of Nutcrackers at the larger Roy Thomson Hall venue, where Stiller and director David Gordon Green participated in a post-show Q&A session with Bailey onstage, went off without incident two hours later.)
While the moment – both the protest and the reaction from those in the room – still landed as an uncomfortable surprise to some, it also crystallized some complex realities. Ones that every cultural organization, and in turn every protest movement targeting arts institutions, will inevitably have to reckon with.
Although this past May’s Cannes Film Festival practically declared itself a politics-free zone – “It’s not polemics that actually spring from the festival, that’s something we want to avoid,” director Thierry Frémaux said at the time – TIFF itself has gone the opposite route, leaning into the intense political debate surrounding the war in Gaza, at least from a programming perspective.
Over the next week, the festival will screen four Palestinian films, including one – the anthology documentary From Ground Zero – that directly looks at the Israel-Hamas war from the views of filmmakers living inside Gaza. And three days before the festival launched, TIFF announced that a work-in-progress version of The Bibi Files, a portrait of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that features leaked footage of police interrogation of the politician from 2016 and 2018, would join the festival’s official lineup.
“In many ways, our programming decisions that you’re seeing are less about individual films and more about aligning to our programming statement,” TIFF’s Lee said in an interview last month, referencing the “programming statement for peace” released in April, which called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the safe return of Israeli hostages taken Oct. 7. “We are constantly referring back to that statement in terms of the decisions we’re making on the merit of a film and its social relevance.”
Added Bailey in a separate interview ahead of the festival, “Our aim is to select what we think are the best films, ones at the highest artistic quality that also illuminate what we’re experiencing in the world and can generate conversations. That’s what we’re going for.”
Which is inarguably what TIFF and its audiences received Thursday night. And what the festival might very well witness again – whether on the closed-to-traffic pedestrian zone of Festival Street, during postscreening Q&A sessions, or at the next buzzy world premiere – as the rest of this edition unfolds.