How TIFF Became a Dumping Ground for Vanity Projects

In the fall of 1976, a mysterious mass illness suddenly struck the city of Los Angeles—or at least that was the only plausible reason in the mind of Canada’s secretary of state. How else to explain why not a single Hollywood studio distributor had sent a film to Toronto’s first international film festival, with executives telegramming him directly to say they would not be in attendance? Studios cited arcane distribution rules as the excuse for their non-participation, but Canadians—reliably among Hollywood’s biggest customers—felt deliberately snubbed.

The Festival of Festivals, as it was called then in reference to its acceptance of films that had already played elsewhere, ploughed ahead. The pie-in-the-sky threat of a box-office levy on imported films in Canada never came to pass. Over the next few years, more American stars packed their warmer clothes and hopped on flights out of LAX. The glitz refracted, appeared to multiply. In 1982, the Toronto International Film Festival convinced critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert to host a gala tribute to Martin Scorsese, who invited Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. A former communications director for the festival told the Globe and Mail, “Those people were as hot as you could get. . . . It was through the tribute to Scorsese, then Robert Duvall and Warren Beatty, that the celebrity era took over.” By 1985, organizers declared Cannes, Venice, and Berlin the festival’s only rivals in the wide presentation of the newest and greatest cinema from around the world.

TIFF has always had the twin goals of bringing the best of world cinema to Toronto and the best of Canadian cinema to the world (or: balancing the budget between Hollywood and CanCon), but in the festival’s fiftieth year, the platforming of Hollywood by TIFF has reached a fever pitch. TIFF’s program has shrunk across the board—in 2019, it played 333 titles, compared to this year’s 291, with more and more of these slots dedicated to actor passion projects. The fetishization of big-name celebs is how TIFF became a playground for actors to achieve new steps for mankind—i.e., trot out their feature-length directorial debuts. This class of film isn’t bad by default, though it does, in many cases, result in uninspired films with inspired faces. It smacks of a cash grab that undermines the organization’s mission “to transform the way people see the world.”

This comes at the cost of the experimental and the exciting that cinephiles feel are in decline—namely, the Wavelengths programme, which includes feats such as Kahlil Joseph’s anti-documentary BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions and Alexandre Koberidze’s cellphone-shot Dry Leaf. “[Why] has TIFF persisted in cutting down the program that arguably delivers it the most credibility?” writes Cinema Scope editor Mark Peranson in the Globe and Mail. There are only eight Wavelengths features this year—fewer than Primetime, the section for coming TV series.

These films may be the most quality bunch, but they are far less likely to make blockbuster box-office bucks than star-studded joints from the majors, or from the independent American studios like A24 and Neon that have made smart bets on the zeitgeist. In trying to identify what TIFF wants to be in its middle age, I discovered that TIFF is also confused, caught between its obligations to audiences, studios, and its board of directors—good movies are losing ground to the movies Hollywood has a vested financial interest in. Actor-directed joints symbolize the insider-y tenor of the film world and the impression of a network of friends doing favours. So I set out to see as many of these as I could handle.

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In the completely unnecessary Eleanor the Great, Scarlett Johansson directs June Squibb as a nonagenarian who pretends to be a Holocaust survivor to make friends. Brian Cox’s “love letter to Scotland” is Glenrothan, a saccharine tale of the estranged heirs to a whisky distillery (Cox plays the brother who stepped up, and Alan Cumming plays the brother who moved to Chicago). James McAvoy also returns to his ends for the cute California Schemin’, the true tale of a Scottish rap duo who posed as two Americans to get a record deal. Maude Apatow, Euphoria star and daughter of mega producer/director Judd Apatow, carries the family torch by directing her mom as an undergraduate poetry class auditor in a campus comedy. Not Hollywood but one of Taiwan’s most famous actresses, Shu Qi spent years on a personal portrait of family abuse, titled Girl—a harsh and claustrophobic watch with a distinct aesthetic perspective. Idris Elba directed Seal in a short that the Guardian called a “luxury vanity project” and an “oddity in the CVs of all the talents involved.”

The actor-turned-director fare at TIFF has been a trend for the past few years, despite the fact that these movies are rarely critical or box-office darlings. In 2023, the New York Times counted ten of these movies, mostly debuts, by the likes of Chris Pine, Anna Kendrick, Viggo Mortensen, and Michael Keaton. TIFF chief Cameron Bailey told the paper, “I suspect some of these actors used the opportunity of the pandemic disruption to get more personal projects made.” But because the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA was on strike, the red carpets at venues across King Street West were absent of the faces that constituted the value of these films. Last year’s grand finale was the world premiere of The Deb, directorial debut of Rebel Wilson (Pitch Perfect, Bridesmaids), which has yet to be seen by anyone beyond that audience because the film is so embroiled in legal trouble.

This is an industry where names are everything. It’s a smart bet if the person who made the debut is someone audiences already recognize and associate with movies they love. “I think we underestimate the curatorial function that actors have,” says Robyn Citizen, TIFF’s director of programming. “You start to watch people’s work because you trust the projects they pick. When they become filmmakers, that extends to, ‘What story do they want to tell?’”

The problem with the actor-directed movie is that no one has less of a grasp on how the world works than someone who makes crazy amounts of money approximating how people are. Eleanor the Great can’t conceive of a New York beyond a Woody Allen–inflected pastiche of dollar slices and kindly old Jews. The shaky future of the whisky distillery could have been solved in the first five minutes of Glenrothan (what if  . . . a local lass takes over!). To be fair, these are problems that originate with the script. Cox, who declared last year that “cinema is in a very bad way” given the Marvel of it all, was the only one of the actor-directors to appear in his debut. This was a win. I’ll enjoy him as a spunky old man spooning venison stew, no matter how lame the overall product. I wish I could have glimpsed ScarJo in synagogue at Eleanor’s bat mitzvah.

If we were to trace a theme that connects the 2025 actor-directed debuts, it would be transformation. Characters take on new and surprising roles, adapting to a change in circumstances, even late in life, perhaps mirroring what their creators are attempting. These are portrait studies that rely on extremely close shots of faces, venerations of the art of acting more than the art of cinema. We’re left with Squibb’s tear ducts and lip quiver over and over and over again.

Not all nepotism is created the same. Sometimes it can be used for good. “Like any industry, there’s such a thing as a family business,” says Citizen. Maude Apatow’s Poetic License is charming and just as funny as her dad’s aughts hits, minus 60 percent of the raunch. This twenty-seven-year-old actor-turned-director has great taste. It also might be the final boss of nepo baby output, not only because Leslie Mann stars and Judd Apatow produced. Opposite Mann is a heartrendingly talented Cooper Hoffman (son of Philip Seymour) plus Nico Parker (daughter of actress Thandiwe Newton and director Ol Parker), who are rumoured to be dating after they playfully debated whether to get a puppy on the Toronto red carpet. These are the media stories coming out of TIFF, as much or more than reviews of the works of art.

This year, fans report that much of the red carpet space is now taken up by corporate booths. I understand those who know TIFF only as a ten-day period in which there’s a chance of spotting Jacob Elordi. We all get a little fame crazed at times. Proximity might be the desire of the hangers-on in cocktail attire, whom I witnessed photographing Dylan Sprouse not very surreptitiously at a pop-up lounge called the Campari Cinema Centre or thronging a Rolls-Royce with tinted windows. It might have been my desire one night outside the party for Erupcja starring Charli XCX. It is a separate issue from the stuff a damn good movie makes.

To Citizen, TIFF can almost be a test screening ground for Hollywood. Celebrities have been a big part of TIFF for decades. But as famous faces crowd auteur spaces, that balance feels off. Screening films on 35mm, for example, is more beautiful and more accurate to the artistic intent, but it requires more time, care, and expertise. But since the early 2010s, TIFF moved away from screening in 35mm and toward DCP, or digital cinema projection. Since then, only a smattering of films have continued to be presented on 35mm and 70mm, including All Too Well, Taylor Swift’s music video short film, and Chris Pine’s directorial debut, Poolman. (Though due to unspecified technical difficulties, Poolman, considered by critics a flaming disaster, had to be screened digitally after all.)

TIFF is only fifty; how does it want to spend the rest of its days? “It’s the new Tribeca,” quips a critic friend, referring to the New York City film festival founded by De Niro in the wake of 9/11 that dropped “film” from its name a few years ago because, amid the video game launches and brand activations, it had strayed too far from that promise. Is the escalating chase for fame what the smart and sophisticated audiences really want? Or is it wish fulfillment for Hollywood’s major players, a stamp of intellectual merit on a career marked by appearances, to which Canadian audiences are subjected? If TIFF capitulates to the prioritization of vanity projects, it risks one day becoming TIF.