The influential French critic André Bazin once posited that for a certain kind of moviegoer, film festivals represented a form of sanctuary: a sacred space, separated out from regular society and predicated on devotion and defined by ritual and routine. “Fully fledged participation,” he wrote, “is like provisionally being admitted to convent life.”
He wrote “The Festival Viewed as a Religious Order” in 1955, from the sunny climes of Cannes, which was then celebrating its tenth anniversary. Two decades later, in 1976, the ɫɫ International Film Festival launched its inaugural edition, attracting 35,000 attendees. In lieu of a cloistered, monastic order, the festival’s founders cultivated their start-up as party central; contra Bazin’s pious allegory, most of TIFF’s downtown revelers would more likely be seen at last call than morning Mass.
TIFF’s history is not pious, but the festival’s tastes have always been small-c catholic: a strategic fusion of high cinephilia, industry back-scratching and profitable populism, with a sprinkling of hometown heroes, for good measure. Brian Johnson’s indispensable history “Brave Films, Wild Nights” suggests that TIFF’s story is “is one of spinning the counterculture into a mainstream phenomenon” — another way of saying that even when it was being held in modest venues, the festival was trying to erect a proverbial big tent.
Hence TIFF’s original branding as the “festival of festivals,” a term in sync with its host city’s cosmopolitan self-image. The mid-’70s were the beginning of ɫɫ’s perceptual rebrand as Hollywood North, and even though American studios were initially wary about showing their titles in ɫɫ, the festival’s savvy positioning, both on the ground and on the calendar (i.e. at the start of awards season) eventually opened the floodgates for A-list stars to hawk their wares.
This summer, TIFF marks its 50th anniversary with a series of screenings (at its Lightbox headquarters) curated to give a sense of the festival’s history and artistic breadth. “I think we’re looking for a story,” wrote TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey in the note accompanying the new retrospective, which he curated with input from festival programmers past and present. The 50 films on offer were selected according to a rubric leveraging four categories: quality, relevance, significance and popularity, none of which are strictly empirical (including the latter, which doesn’t necessarily correlate to box office success). It is, to be sure, an interesting list; the story it tells is one of a festival embracing its mandate to be as many different things to as many different people as possible while covering its bases for posterity.
For starters, the list has been very deliberately balanced in terms of release dates, spreading out titles more or less evenly across the decades. If anything, the salad days of the ’70s feel slightly under-represented, with only one movie from the fledgling 1976 edition: Barbara Kopple’s marvellous, Oscar-winning documentary “Harlan County, U.S.A.” (Aug. 26, 6:30 p.m.), a stark, rousing chronicle of a small-town mining strike that stands as one of the most influential non-fiction movies ever made. Shot over four years at intimate proximity to its subjects — and occasionally under duress from the Duke Power Company — Kopple’s classic works on both a micro and macro level; by telling a specific, granular story of organized resistance to corporate exploitation, it accrues the gravitas and grandeur of a folk tale.
Insofar as it’s possible to identify recurring themes in TIFF’s story — or the one the new series is trying to tell — “Harlan County”’s staunchly politicized social commentary informs several other selections, including Michael Moore’s 1989 “Roger & Me” (Aug. 10, 3:45 p.m.), which established its maker’s scruffily quixotic shtick against a Reagan-era backdrop of trickle-down economics, and Alanis Obomsawin’s magisterial 1993 “Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance” (Aug. 23, 3 p.m.), an NFB production that subverted mainstream perceptions of the Oka Crisis by bringing the camera behind Indigenous lines. Famously, Obomsawin’s film was rejected by the CBC, which claimed it was too long (but may have been reacting to the way its coverage of the standoff was depicted therein); it made its North American premiere at TIFF, solidifying the festival’s commitment to a filmmaker whose work has always pushed against established national narratives.
Obsomsawin is one of several major Canadian directors spotlighted in “The TIFF Story,” most of whom are obvious (and predictable) inclusions: David Cronenberg (“Dead Ringers”), Atom Egoyan (“Next of Kin”), Sarah Polley (“Away From Her”), Clement Virgo (“Brother”).
Jeremy Irons stars in David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers.”
One heartening selection is 2013’s “Rhymes for Young Ghouls” (June 21, 9 p.m.), the acclaimed debut feature by the Mi’kmaq director Jeff Barnaby, who died tragically in 2022 at the age of 46. Set in 1976, the film takes place at a brutal residential school presided over by a sadistic Indian agent; its heroine, Alia (Devery Jacobs), is a defiant teenage weed dealer eking out an existence on the margins. Barnaby was an unrepentant horror-movie fan, and his genre instincts served him well on his breakout. “Rhymes for Young Ghouls” is a harrowing history lesson that vibrates on its own potent wavelength of dread.
Jeff Barnaby’s “Rhymes for Young Ghouls” screens June 21.
Auteurs — homegrown and otherwise — have always been part of TIFF’s story, and it’s telling that Bailey’s series is weighted toward contemporary figures: directors who could plausibly claim to have been discovered (or supported) by the festival in real time, as opposed to established titans premiering new works in the home stretches of their careers. So: no Jean-Luc Godard (who attended a 1980 retrospective of his work in ɫɫ) or Akira Kurosawa (who sent “Dersu Uzala” in 1976), but plenty of entries by masters who emerged in the ’80s and ’90s — Pedro Almodóvar (“Matador”), Jane Campion (“In the Cut”), John Woo (“The Killer”), Kathryn Bigelow (“Near Dark”) and the Coen brothers (“A Serious Man”) — as well as a generous selection of millennial standouts. (Full disclosure: I’ll be hosting the screening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s career-making porn-industry pastiche “Boogie Nights” on July 12; my own personal PTA-at-TIFF pick would have been 2012’s “The Master,” one of the most overwhelming festival screenings I’ve ever attended, but either way you can’t tell the story of 21st-century American cinema without him.
Michael Stuhlbarg stars in the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man.”
For all its careful engineering and nods to the esoteric and experimental end of the spectrum — kudos for finding room for British filmmaker Ben Russell’s ecstatic ethnographic feature “Let Each One Go Where He May” (Aug. 3, 4 p.m.), the TIFF 50 list is by no means definitive. Bailey isn’t pretending otherwise: in his note, he acknowledges that his picks have been shaped by his own history with the festival, adding that “some films (you) might have expected to be ‘obvious’ for inclusion couldn’t be included here.” There are indeed a few movies that are conspicuous by their absence, like Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight,” which rode its rapturous reception at TIFF in 2016 to a Best Picture Oscar, and Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” the winner of the festival’s People’s Choice Award in 2000.
That prize’s status as an Oscar season bellwether is variable: it didn’t do anything for Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical “The Fabelmans” (Aug. 16, 4 p.m.) in 2022. Still, historically, the winners are illustrative of TIFF’s sweet spot: accessible, accomplished red-carpet fare. Some People’s Choice Award winners selected for the TIFF 50 series include “The Big Chill” (July 12, 1:30 p.m.), “Antonia’s Line” (June 15, 6:30 p.m.) and “Slumdog Millionaire” (Aug. 9, 6:30 p.m.). The one true classic in the bunch is probably Rob Reiner’s sweetly satirical “The Princess Bride,” which was, appropriately enough, chosen as the kickoff screening for the entire series next Friday at 6:30 p.m.
As far as personal favourites go, I’d recommend German ace Christian Petzold’s sublime “Vertigo” riff “Phoenix” (July 15, 6:30 p.m.), one of the most precisely written and directed thrillers of recent years, and Peter Jackson’s bonkers 1992 zombie comedy, “Braindead” (July 24, 6:30 p.m.).
There are also some movies here that I would not personally use to tell the story of TIFF — or cinema in general — but that’s just me. If somebody gets something out of revisiting “The Secret in Their Eyes” or “Thank You for Smoking,” more power to them.
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