Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) may have gone to great lengths and expense to formalise its market offering for 2026, but elderly hab
Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) may have gone to great lengths and expense to formalise its market offering for 2026, but elderly habits die tough, with most blue-chip UK sellers sticking with their tried and tested TIFF strategies, at least for the market’s inaugural year.
That is, if they make it out there. Around 1,500 flights were cancelled out of the UK on Tuesday, September 8, the day many UK attendees were due to fly out to TIFF, due to an air traffic control glitch, impacting several flights to Toronto. Most flights have been rebooked for Wednesday, and hopes remain high the UK industry will arrive in the nick of time, ahead of the festival and market opening on Thursday.
Travel woes aside, sales agents and distributors love Toronto for its relaxed style and as a space for screening finished films and taking informal meetings, as opposed to hard-selling and hard-launching novel packages.
“I always think Toronto has that September back-to-school energy. Everybody’s come back from their summer holidays, and they’re excited to see people,” says Shane Kelly, senior vice president at Mister Smith Entertainment, repping Ancestors and All That She Wants in the festival. “It’s easing people back into work. I often come back from Toronto feeling really energised because you’ve had some great conversations and seen some invigorating films.
“If you make that another hardcore market where you know buyers have to go and do back-to-back meetings, it might lose some of that end of summer magic.”
“The bigger sales companies feel that the timing of this market is not ideal, because it doesn’t give much of an opportunity after the holidays to start packaging for pre-sales and co-productions,” says Grace Carley, chief executive of sales agent trade body Film Export UK.
”In the back of everyone’s mind was, ’Is there enough time post-Cannes to set films up for Toronto ahead of the AFM [American Film Market]?,” says Cornerstone’s Los Angeles-based co-founder Mark Gooder. ”From our perspective, we need more time. The AFM will be heavier with announcements.”
Sellers report a solid spread of European, Latin American and North American buyers in attendance. Gooder notes his team has “probably more meetings than usual” with buyers, with Cornerstone’s slate including TIFF selections Stuffed and Tender Loving Care.
“Toronto has always been a festival where buyers might have gone to see films they have already bought for the first time in a festival environment or see films that are available to them. That still seems to be the priority,” says Altitude Film Sales managing director Mike Runagall.
On the eve of the market, just a smattering of novel packages outside of the festival lineup has been announced from UK sellers.
Altitude is launching sales on Dakota Gorman’s thriller Speak Up starring Martin Freeman; Mister Smith has Suzanne Farwell’s romantic comedy Otherwise Engaged with a starry cast including Halle Berry, Zoë Kravitz, Colin Firth and Jack Whitehall; Anton has Ignore it led by Lily Collins and helmed by YouTube horror star Sam Evenson; and WestEnd is launching Terry Loane’s comedy drama This Old Love Of Mine, starring Dianne Wiest and Ciaran Hinds.
The set-up
Kaleidoscope and Architect have taken spaces in the novel official market venue of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, but most UK sales agents have not. They are also not taking the full-sized sales teams they would for Cannes, Berlin or the AFM.
Advertised prices for a stand in the convention centre start at $12,000, while a booth is upwards of $20,000.
Around 10 sales agents – including Cornerstone, WestEnd Films, Epic Pictures, Evolution, Altitude, Blue Finch, MetFilm, Independent and Dogwoof – will be working out of the UK stand at the Hyatt, as per tradition, even though the Hyatt is no longer an official festival location.
A UK stand will be operating out of the convention centre, a collaboration between the BFI’s ScreenUK Industry, Film Export UK and the British Film Commission, although this will focus more on promoting UK filmmaking and co-production activities.
The likes of Bankside and Mister Smith will be floating around for meetings and not operating out of either the Hyatt or the convention centre.
“With there being less of a focus on the Hyatt this year, we thought it probably made more sense to [take meetings at venues] maybe closer to the convention centre, or at the Intercontinental,” says Bankside managing director Stephen Kelliher, who is representing sales on Paul Andrew Williams’ TIFF Lightbox premiere Faith.
But sellers aren’t entirely allergic to the idea of formally engaging with the market next year and are seeing this year as a chance to observe how it all works.
“Establishing a market in Toronto is not going to be an overnight thing. It’s a minimum of five-year process,” adds Kelliher.
“[Taking a convention centre space] is certainly something we would be open to in the future. I think just in the first year, we just want to see how it’s landed.”
From the rest of Europe, sellers in town include Germany’s The Match Factory and Beta Cinema, Poland’s New Europe Film Sales and Nordic outfit Reinvent Yellow. A bigger presence from French sellers than usual is anticipated but without plans to launch substantial, North American-facing projects, which they will hold for AFM.
AFM impact
For this year, at least, the TIFF market doesn’t appear to be having a negative impact on November’s AFM in Los Angeles.
“We always see Toronto as serving a runway into the AFM,” says Runagall. “We start to introduce things [at Toronto], that are then concluded at AFM, which is only two months away […] Almost using Toronto and AFM as one market across two months.”
The 2025 AFM was broadly considered a success, and the industry likes the AFM’s novel home of Fairmont Century Plaza after a messy few years of location hopping.
“Last year, we decided not to go to LA [for the AFM] because we all felt there was less enthusiasm,” says Sofia Neves, WestEnd’s Switzerland-based head of sales.
WestEnd has Tim Blake Nelson’s The Life And Deaths Of Wilson Shedd in TIFF’s Gala Presentations. “But after hearing how successful it was, that people really like the new venue and that buyers are really keen to go to AFM, we’ve decided to go and take an office.”
If the TIFF market does hit its stride, the expense of two full-fat North American markets so close together could prove unsustainable in the long term, despite TIFF’s support with discounted hotel rates.
“Costs are getting higher and higher,” says Neves. “Hotels are more expensive, the flights also. You need to make sure that the business is there, and you’re not overcharging too much on your films to be able to attend all these markets.”
TIFF runs from September 10-20. TIFF: The Market takes place from September 10-16.
