The 49th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) will take place from September 5-15, 2024.
Last year, Dear Jassi by Indian director Tarsem Singh Dhandwar won top prize, the Platform Award. This year, 10 new films made in 17 countries will compete in the Platform lineup for the $20,000 CAD prize. Many more films will be screened in sections like Centrepiece, Discovery, and Midnight Madness.
Here is everything you need to know to get ready for Toronto 2024!
Guests of Honor
Since 2019, festival organizers have given TIFF Tribute Awards to recognize extraordinary contributions to cinema. Award recipients are announced on a rolling basis ahead of the festival. Since the honorees are so illustrious, we’ll briefly summarize their accomplishments before directing you to their recent work.
For the first time, the TIFF Tribute Awards will have an Honorary Chair, Korean-Canadian actress Sandra Oh. A 14-time Emmy® nominee, Oh won a Golden Globe® for her supporting role in Grey’s Anatomy (2006) and another for her leading role in Killing Eve (2019). She recently appeared in The Sympathizer, a miniseries based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
The TIFF Tribute Performer Award will go to American actress Amy Adams. A six-time Oscar® nominee, Adams won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance for her supporting role in Junebug (2005). Subsequently, she earned Golden Globes® for American Hustle (2014) and Big Eyes (2015). She stars in the new film Nightbitch (2024), which will premiere at the festival out of competition.
The Norman Jewison Career Achievement Award will go to Canadian writer-director David Cronenberg. Widely known for his remake The Fly (1986), Cronenberg won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes for Crash (1996) and Best Canadian Feature Film at Toronto for Spider (2002). With his most recent film, The Shrouds (2024), Cronenberg earned his seventh nomination for the Cannes Palme d’Or.
The TIFF Share Her Journey Groundbreaker Award will go to Australian actress Cate Blanchett. (Share Her Journey is a gender equity program that TIFF launched in 2017.) A 12-time Golden Globe® nominee (and four-time winner), Blanchett won Oscars® for The Aviator (2005) and Blue Jasmine (2014), as well as Venice’s Volpi Cup for I’m Not There (2007) and Tár (2022). She stars as the jaded treasure hunter Lilith in Borderlands, which was released in early August 2024.
The TIFF Ebert Director Award will go to English writer-director Mike Leigh. A seven-time Oscar® nominee, Leigh won Best Director at Cannes for Naked (1993) and the Palme d’Or for Secrets & Lies (1996). Subsequently, he won the Golden Lion at Venice for Vera Drake (2004). His latest film is Hard Truths (2024), which will premiere at the festival out of competition.
The TIFF Emerging Talent Award will go to Canadian critic and new director Durga Chew-Bose. Since publishing the essay collection Too Much and Not the Mood (2017), Chew-Bose has turned her talents toward filmmaking.Her debut film, Bonjour Tristesse (2024), will premiere at the festival out of competition.
The TIFF Variety Artisan Award will go to French musicians Camille Dalmais and Clément Ducol. Camille (her stage name) achieved widespread acclaim with her album Le Fil (2005) and has contributed music to films including Ratatouille (2007), The Little Prince (2015), and more. Ducol has composed music for Annette (2021) and many other films. Camille and Ducol will be honored in Toronto for their collaboration on the soundtrack to Emilia Pérez (2024).
The Jury
Members of the Platform Jury were announced in July. It will be led by Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan. He will be assisted by South Korean director Jin-ho Hur and American producer and director Jane Schoenbrun.
One of Canada’s most acclaimed filmmakers, Egoyan has won the TIFF Best Canadian Feature Film Award for five titles: Family Viewing (1987), The Adjuster (1991), Exotica (1994), The Sweet Hereafter (1997), and Adoration (2008). His films have competed twice for the Golden Lion at Venice and six times for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. His most recent film, Seven Veils (2023), concerns an opera director’s harrowing experiences while staging Salome.
Hur has been celebrated since his feature film debut, Christmas in August (1998). Other works include Happiness (2007) and Dangerous Liaisons (2012). His most recent film, A Normal Family (2023), examines the strained relationship between two very different brothers as they react to a crime committed by their own children.
Schoenbrun, a rising talent, commanded attention at Sundance and other festivals with We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), a film about a teenager who is changed by an immersive and horrifying computer game. In Schoenbrun’s most recent film, I Saw the TV Glow (2024), the cancellation of a beloved television show alters the lives of two friends.
The Films
The festival will open with American director David Gordon Green’s Nutcrackers, starring Ben Stiller as a workaholic whose routine is disrupted when he becomes responsible for four young nephews. The festival will close with Australian actress Rebel Wilson’s directorial debut, The Deb, starring Wilson as a teenager preparing for her small town’s Debutante Ball.
In between the opening and closing films, there are so many screenings and other events that we cannot possibly cover them all. Simply printing the festival’s Films & Events page would require 25 sheets of paper. We checked!
Therefore, we thought we would help you to start exploring the festival by highlighting a few selections from the Platform lineup. Remember – we’re drawn to the offbeat, the absurd, the eccentric, and the strange, so what catches our eye may be different than what catches yours. There’s no accounting for taste. 🤷🏻♀️
The opening film of the Platform lineup is Daniela Forever by Spanish multi-hyphenate Nacho Vigalondo. He made his feature film debut with Timecrimes (2007), a quirky thriller about a man who fights to save his normal life after accidentally traveling back in time. A quixotic quest for normalcy is likewise the subject of Vigalondo’s latest film, in which an experimental drug brings a man’s dead lover back to life, but only in his dreams.
Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto makes his feature directorial debut with Pedro Páramo. Prieto has earned Oscar® nominations for his cinematography in Brokeback Mountain (2006), Silence (2017), The Irishman (2020), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2024). As with the first and last, Pedro Páramo appears to be a Western. It is set, however, in rural Mexico and infused with magical realism.
Looking over the Platform lineup, we also noted Paying For It, the latest unflinching examination of sexuality from Canadian multihyphenate Sook-Yin Lee. Lee starred in Shortbus (2006) and directed films including Year of the Carnivore (2009) and Octavio Is Dead! (2018). Now, she has adapted Chester Brown’s graphic novel Paying For It (2011), which is subtitled, “a comic-strip memoir about being a john.” Since Lee supplements Brown’s life story with her own, the film becomes more than a retelling – it’s a double autobiography.
Enjoy the Festival!
Whether you are attending TIFF or following news about it from elsewhere, we hope our blog has given you reasons to feel excited. You can find even more reasons, of course, by browsing the TIFF website.
Please join us in thanking the organizers for planning another amazing festival. Let’s wish good luck, as well, to all the filmmakers screening new works at Toronto 2024!
