Penelope Cruz prior to the red carpet for La Bola Negra during the Toronto International Film Festival, on Sept. 15. The festival closed out its 51st edition by awarding Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s movie its People’s Choice Award.Keito Newman/The Canadian Press
Halfway into the new historical drama La Bola Negra, which follows three generations of gay Spanish men as they wrestle with devastation and desire, Penélope Cruz shows up for 10 minutes and brings the house down. Playing a 1930s showgirl who bewitches a troupe of soldiers during the Spanish Civil War, the actress delivers a quick but enduring jolt of energy to Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s feature – a movie that, while beautiful in its aesthetics and epic in its construction, mostly feels distended and reaching for a profundity just beyond its grasp.
It is that defining tension of La Bola Negra – a wannabe showstopper in which you can see its seams stretch and fray as it struggles to please its eager crowd – that was top of mind Sunday as the Toronto International Film Festival closed out its 51st edition by awarding Calvo and Ambrossi’s movie its coveted People’s Choice Award. Like the film that it was honouring, this year’s TIFF seemed, from a distance, to be a rather gorgeous, glamorous and highly ambitious affair. But upon closer inspection, TIFF 2026 also felt as if it was using a handful of exhilarating moments of Cruz-like potency to paper over many larger, structural fissures and fault lines.
We can start with La Bola Negra’s own curious path from Cannes to the People’s Choice Award, a seeming moment of triumph that was offset by confusion when it was announced, just seconds before, that the British drama Elsinore had won the International People’s Choice Award.
Last year, TIFF organizers introduced a new “international” version of the PCA, in which audiences vote for the best festival film produced outside of Canada and the United States. Theoretically, this allows TIFF to spotlight foreign titles that might otherwise be overshadowed by the winner of the “real” PCA, which has long been considered an Oscars bellwether and has often gone to an English-language movie made in the Hollywood system.
But in practice, the new international award feels both confounding – unless you’ve read the fine print of the eligibility rules, you’d be rightly perplexed as to why the Spanish-language La Bola Negra won the “real” PCA, and the English-language Elsinore earned the international version – and nakedly opportunistic. TIFF is not spreading the wealth here for filmmakers, but for its own reputation as an Oscars kingmaker. Why settle for saying that your festival can cement the Academy Awards chances for one film when you can boast that you solidify the prospects for two?
Penelope Cruz attends the red carpet for La Bola Negra. Cruz is in the film for 10 minutes and brings the house down.Mark Blinch/Reuters
Well, because almost everyone in the industry can see straight through the ploy. Just as all those players are taking an especially hard look at TIFF’s other big recent initiative, albeit one engineered and executed on a far grander scale: the launch of an official market.
The inaugural edition of TIFF: The Market, which ran parallel to the festival’s official screenings, gathered buyers, sellers and creators of film and TV under the roof of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre for seven days of meetings and potential deal-making. But if organizers hope that TIFF’s market will eventually match the reputation (and earned revenues) of Berlin’s European Film Market and the Marché du Film in Cannes, they’re going to need to embrace some sizable course corrections.
Not only did attendees highlight serious technical issues – hours-long waits to pick up badges, an app that felt designed in a hurry – but, to borrow the language of the industry’s coveted Gen Y demographic, the vibe was off.
Between a lack of foot traffic, a sizable portion of the convention floor being taken up by a sparsely populated food court, and too many stands occupied not by highly valued sales agencies, production companies or buyers but various countries’ national film bodies (Telefilm’s space was easily the busiest), the space often felt like a particularly sleepy version of a tourism conference. Sure, the high-profile Paris-based Goodfellas sales agency and production company had a large pavilion in the centre of the floor, but also a noticeable lack of on-site activity. Any producer hoping to score a connection from a walk-up there would likely need to keep on, well, walking.
Already, TIFF seems eager to crown the market an out-of-the-gate success – but in its rush to do so, organizers appear to have tripped over some key figures.
According to a press release sent Friday, market chief Charles Tremblay noted that 7,010 industry delegates were registered this year, a 40 per cent increase compared to TIFF’s “informal, previous offering, which typically drew 5,000 people to the city.” Yet according to TIFF’s own numbers from its 2025 edition, the festival attracted 6,000 industry delegates last year, making the actual jump in attendance just 16 per cent. At the same time, about 200 delegates, mostly international buyers who had either never attended TIFF or not been in several years, had their travel and accommodation subsidized. Will they return on their own dime?
Market organizers also boasted that the exhibition floor contained 238 exhibitors. But the official convention centre directory only listed about 100, depending on how you counted outfits that shared pavilion space and whether you included filmmakers participating in the “Innovation Hub” showcasing interactive media projects.
Meanwhile, higher-end companies, including AGC Studios, WME and StudioCanal, were holed up on floors inside the InterContinental and Ritz-Carlton hotels – spaces not quite as accessible and amenable to the kind of pop-in meetings that participation in the market intimated.
Mahershala Ali on the red carpet for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother. Watching Ali’s Muslim hitman destroy legions of racist henchmen in Bassam Tariq’s film was a surreal delight.Laura Proctor/The Canadian Press
Then there were the market-only screenings, in which sellers paid TIFF to show films designed to spark buyer interest – presentations that represent a key revenue driver for the market and can act as a barometer of industry activity. Last year, TIFF said it would provide 650 market screening slots. But in the recently released figures, organizers said just 196 were booked, suggesting a lack of appetite compared to available inventory. (Even if that 650 figure included both private market-only screenings and the festival’s combined “press and market” screenings, for which every film in the official program receives at least one, then initial expectations were still not met.)
Finally, if the market was intended to spark a flurry of bidding wars that would prove Toronto to be an unmissable stop on the global industry calendar, then organizers can only so far point to the sale of a movie that was not technically up for sale at all: the horror movie River, which Universal paid US$10-million to acquire from IFC, which already had the film’s distribution rights coming into TIFF. (It is not unprecedented for a smaller distributor to give up a film to a larger company, but it is highly unusual; IFC must have figured that the deal was more than they’d be able to earn if they released the film on their own.)
The market was launched with significant support from the federal government, but Ottawa’s three-year $23-million commitment runs out this coming March. With or without Prime Minister Mark Carney’s help, TIFF will have to be flexible in vision if it hopes to keep the event going, let alone growing to a projected target of 12,000 delegates by 2030.
At TIFF, and in Washington, Quebec’s film industry finds itself in the hot seat
It is not even unreasonable to wonder, given where the industry winds appear to be blowing, whether TIFF should have accepted the federal cash in the first place and instead focused on sustaining its core asset, the festival. There is a pattern inside the organization, it feels, of introducing a new problem for itself instead of finding a solution to the challenges it already has.
Thankfully, one of TIFF’s longest continuing challenges – its programming – wasn’t as thorny this time around. Sure, Toronto missed out on a handful of titles that burnished the reputations of its festival-circuit rivals (Venice had the headline-making documentary NAZA; Telluride had the buzzy Nathan Fielder/Elizabeth Holmes doc You Can See Everything; New York will soon debut the OpenAI docudrama Artificial). But for the most part, nearly every prestige fall title available made its way onto TIFF screens.
Watching Mahershala Ali’s Muslim hitman destroy legions of racist henchmen in Bassam Tariq’s audacious Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother was a surreal delight. Peeling back the layers of class and contempt nestled inside Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love was a beguiling experience. Discovering an emerging Canadian director such as Toy Gun Bandit’s Rémi St-Michel was a real-time thrill. And seeing the 83-year-old Mike Leigh standing proud inside the Lightbox Cinema 1 after the premiere of his latest, and possibly final, drama Tender Loving Care was a singular privilege.
Of course, there was bloat – any festival with nearly 300 titles will do that – and there were a handful of selections that called into question the faculties of its programmers. Bring me the head of whoever approved Zack Snyder’s irredeemable The Last Photograph. And we’ve got to find out what is going on with the Gala slate, whose selections are instantly vaporized from memory.
But there were enough startling, pinch-me moments of cinematic joy to prove that TIFF is an institution worth fighting for. And that work needs to begin now – no matter how far La Bola Negra (or Elsinore) goes in the Oscar race.
Barry Hertz’s Top 10 Films of TIFF 2026
10. Club Kid
9. The Debut
8. The Stunt Driver
7. The Man I Love
6. Fjord
5. Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother
4. Tender Loving Care
3. All of a Sudden
2. La Gradiva
1. Possible Love