Toronto CEO Cameron Bailey on the return of actors and plans for the 2026 market

On the eve of Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), CEO Cameron Bailey talks to Screen Internationalabout welcoming back stars and filmmakers after last year’s Hollywood strikes, the arrival of the official market in 2026, the festival’s awards season profile and the value of the public audience.

Bailey also namechecks titles to look out for. Among the roster of around 270 films in official selection are world premieres for Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, RJ Cutler and David Furnish’s Elton John: Never Too Late, Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, Ron Howard’s Eden and Sophie Deraspe’s Shepherds, alongside Pedro Almo­dovar’s The Room Next Door and Luca Guadagnino’s Queer.

There is a new deal with presenting sponsor Rogers, which lends its name to this year’s People’s Choice Award. Nutcrackers, starring Ben Stiller, was the opening-night selection and most first public screenings of festival titles will feature director Q&As. TIFF runs September 5-15.

What is your overview of this year’s official selection?

This is an exceptional year for music films. We saw documentary Elton John: Never Too Late early on and loved that, and we’re thrilled to have the premiere and to have Sir Elton coming along with David Furnish, his husband, who’s a local Torontonian and co-director of the film with RJ Cutler. We loved the Springsteen doc [Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band], we have a Tragically Hip series about those homegrown Canadian rock heroes, and the magnificent Pharrell Williams biopic Piece By Piece. The Robbie Williams biopic [Better Man] is wild and puts the music biopic genre onto another level.

We have Marielle Heller back with Nightbitch and an outstanding performance by Amy Adams, whom we’re honouring at the tribute awards. Pedro Almodovar’s film The Room Next Door is magnificent, and we have the premiere of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, told very much from the perspective of Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s character. Having been born in England and grown up as part of the Windrush generation, it really hit home.

Was Megalopolis straightforward to select, given the lively press around the film leading up to its Cannes premiere?

We premiered [Francis Ford] Coppola’s film Twixt over a decade ago [TIFF 2011] and I remember going down to see it in his home editing suite. You develop a relationship with the work over time and so, with filmmakers like that, you’re going to have a richer conversation because you’re talking not just about the film in front of you but also about where it fits in their overall filmography.

Will you reveal more details at TIFF about the official market coming in 2026?

We’ve been doing a lot of work ever since we got news from our federal government that they were coming forward with this investment over three years [$17m (c$23m) has been allocated]. We’re still figuring out what, if anything, we want to publicly announce in September. Certainly by next year you’ll begin to see the groundwork in terms of what the market in 2026 will look like.

What response have you had from the industry?

It’s been really positive. There is no large market in North America that is attached to a film festival, as you have with the Marché du Film in Cannes and the European Film Market in Berlin. In Toronto you also have the public audience, so [industry] can test out finished films and, maybe eventually, works-in-progress in front of a North American audience.

Will we see a ramping up of market activities this year?

Over the past few years, pandemic notwithstanding, we have gradually ramped up. We used to have a policy against private screenings but this year we have over 100 — those will soon probably be called market screenings, although not necessarily a part of official selection. We’ve got 144 sales titles broadly available to different territories around the world this year. That’s an increase.

Can you guide us on official market revenue projections?

We don’t quite have that ready to share but you’ll see it become a significant new entity for us.

A successful TIFF market will impact the viability of AFM two months later. Is the goal to knock AFM off the calendar?

Not at all, that’s not it. We’re not thinking so much about other initiatives and events in North America; rather, we think here’s something unique that we can build here.

How do you choose the 10-strong Industry Selects roster when many other titles are available for sale?

Some films end up in official selection, some are just not right for our festival, and there are the ones that, if we had room, we would invite where we can see the potential — for buyers in particular. Those end up in Industry Selects.

How do you characterise the competition with Venice and Telluride to launch the biggest awards contenders? Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera told Vanity Fair last month that the Lido offers a strong platform, claiming: “There is almost no press in Toronto, apart from the trades.”

One of the unfortunate things about the festivals in the fall season is that we never get to go to each other’s events. I don’t know what happens at other festivals around the same time as ours, but I can tell you that in Toronto we have thousands of media that come every year to cover the festival. All the major US entertainment press are here — they don’t all travel overseas — and that’s worth remembering.

During the pandemic there was a clear effort to behave in a more collegial manner — in 2020, TIFF and Venice, alongside Telluride, hosted simultaneous world premieres of Nomadland. Are we going back to a more competitive mindset now?

It’s probably like any industry where you’re doing the same thing and you’re not just colleagues, but competitors. When we run into each other at different events, we are collegial and share a love of film. However, each one of us is going to advocate very strongly for our own festival and that makes sense as well.

Venice premiered Joker: Folie à Deux, Maria and Queer. TIFF offers plenty of world premieres. Is the festival where you want it to be in terms of being an awards launchpad?

We have a multi-pronged approach. It’s important to have some of the top films from Cannes, for instance, like Emilia Perez and Anora. It’s also important to have films that come from festivals immediately before us like the Pedro Almodovar film. At the same time, it’s exciting when the documentary Elton John: Never Too Late, Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch and Ron Howard’s Eden make their world premieres here, along with many others. Filmmakers get that strong, immediate reaction from a full-house Toronto audience, with upwards of 2,000 people — not just industry attendees — cheering on their film. Very few festivals have that.

You’ve got A-listers like Cate Blanchett, Elton John, Angelina Jolie and Amy Adams doing on-stage talks and receiving awards at the gala fundraiser. Describe the appetite among talent to attend festivals after the 2023 strikes.

The actors are back in a big way. We had a lot of actors here last year, but now we’ll have the cast of some of these great films here as well… It just feels like there’s a party on. It’s especially important now, as the film industry goes through so many changes, to feel that live connection between the artists and the audience.

TIFF’s Primetime series showcase celebrates its 10th anniversary. What does it say about the state of cinema when some of its greatest practitioners are making television?

You’ve seen just about all the most acclaimed filmmakers work in series. This year, Alfonso Cuaron comes with Disclaimer and it stars Cate Blanchett, who like many leading actors also works in series. People are thinking about series in a very different way now. It truly is longform, novelistic storytelling, as opposed to something that’s simply episodic.

Rogers is this year’s presenting sponsor. Will the one-year deal be renewed?

We partnered with Rogers a couple of decades ago… They’re excited by what TIFF offers. We’ll both see how this year goes and I hope we can build on that.

The departure of TIFF’s previous lead sponsor, Bell, left a $3.7m (c$5m) hole in annual support. Can you maintain the level of year-round activity without them?

This has been a challenging period not just for TIFF, but for a lot of cultural organisations and cultural events across Canada and North America. The landscape has changed a lot [and] some funding sources are shifting their priorities. We’ve got a balanced basket of funding sources, including government, private companies, philanthropic individuals and our own earned revenue. Membership is up this year and all these things make up what we need to continue doing the work.

• Spain at Toronto: stand-out titles and key events for international industry