Having completed 50 years in 2025, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) embarks on its sixth decade this week with a couple of significant additions aimed at cementing its place as one of the top global film festivals.
It is launching TIFF: The Market, aimed at providing a marketplace for films and a platform for industry professionals to pitch, fund or acquire content. Cameron Bailey, CEO of TIFF, said, “The Market is an evolution of decades of informal dealmaking, talks and business connections to become now the only market in North America aligned with a film festival.” Charles Tremblay, TIFF’s Head of Market, said the inaugural event would host more than 6,000 delegates from over 80 countries, including nearly a thousand buyers. With the Market, TIFF adds a commercial platform to its position as the world’s largest public film festival.
TIFF has long been considered an unofficial tastemaker for the subsequent Academy Awards, especially in the Best Picture category. This year, TIFF will also provide a direct pathway to the Oscars for a non-English language film, making it one of only six international film festivals to qualify for this route. If a non-English language film emerges as the winner in Platform, TIFF’s only competitive section, it will earn a spot to vie for an Academy Award in the Best International Feature Film category.
Angh, set in a Nagaland village amid a remote jungle near the Indo-Burma border in the early 1960s, follows a village chief trying to guard his community’s beliefs and customs when faced with the arrival of an American Christian missionary. Robyn Citizen, Director of Programming at TIFF, found the film both narratively sophisticated and visually striking. “It works on a couple of different levels, which is both the intimate father-son story and the family story, but then the wider look at the 1960s in this community, the process of being missionized and kind of colonized. And we don’t often see that community represented in Indian cinema,” she said.
Another unusual film from India at TIFF this year is HALF, only the third Indian film to be featured in the Midnight Madness section, which has built a cult following among TIFF audiences with its horror and slasher flicks. The world premiere of this largely Malayalam, multilingual vampire film has Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky excited: “The way these vampires tear apart these bandits, I think is going to surprise people. They’re literally ripping limbs off and stabbing other people with another person’s limbs. It’s quite grotesque, but very entertaining.” Kuplowsky added, “I’ve long been a fan of Indian genre cinema, and I’ve made it a special mission to encourage Indian producers to bring their movies to TIFF, specifically their genre films, which typically had bypassed international festivals and gone straight to the commercial market.”
Anne Sajeev, a producer of HALF, said, “We always knew we were attempting something a little unusual for Malayalam cinema. It is a genre film, but there is also something very rooted and personal about it. TIFF was obviously a dream, and Midnight Madness felt particularly right because it celebrates bold, unconventional cinema and has an audience that genuinely embraces it.” Director Samjad recruited well-known Indonesian action choreographer Very Tri Yulisman to create the full-fledged mayhem for HALF. “I’ve always admired the raw, close-quarters intensity of Pencak Silat, and I wanted to blend that specific Indonesian fighting philosophy with our own grounded, visceral style of action and traditional martial arts. Very brought that exact kinetic energy to the table,” Samjad said.
The other major Indian offering at TIFF this year is the Tamil film Dorothy, directed by Karthik Subbaraj and set in rural Tamil Nadu of the early 1990s. Citizen says the film is “set in a world shaped by caste, violence, and toxic masculinity,” and combines “elements of noir thrillers, gangster films, and romances”.
TIFF is also showing the 4K restoration of the 1986 Malayalam classic Amma Ariyan (Report to Mother) by John Abraham, the late stalwart of Indian parallel cinema.
Indo-Canadian filmmaker Richie Mehta returns to TIFF with Phoolan, focusing intensely on a 48-hour siege mounted by Indian law enforcement agencies to corner the famous bandit. “Richie goes in a different direction,” said Citizen, “and it allows us to go deeper into (Phoolan) Devi as a person and not just a legend and see how strategic she was. It’s a really smart way to tell this story that people are already very familiar with because it opens up new parts of her biography and also the people that were sent to catch her.”
Roshan Sethi, another Indo-Canadian filmmaker, will also be at TIFF this year, with his action thriller The Surgeon, starring Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh. Other filmmakers from the subcontinent include Rubaiyat Hossain of Bangladesh, who returns to TIFF with The Difficult Bride, and Nepalese director Abinash Bikram Shah, whose Elephants in the Fog will make its North American premiere at the festival.
TIFF runs September 10-20, 2026, in Toronto.
