When news breaks, you need to understand what matters β and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today? The vast majority of what plays in Toronto each September is bound for art-house theaters, cult DVD labels, or a longer trip around the festival circuit β not to the Golden Globes or the Academy Awards.
The grassroots enthusiasm of audiences and critics in Toronto changed their fortunes. All four movies listed above went on to win Best Picture. What does this mean for the average moviegoer? Well, TIFF marks the time of year when summer blockbuster season ends and fall prestige season begins, which means the festival is where many of the movies that are going to be talked about the most in October, November, and December get their first real exposure. But TIFF is just one part of the year-round film festival circuit, a major part of the international movie business.
Understanding that circuit can help you pinpoint some of the best movies in the world, weeks or even months before they arrive in the US. But no matter their unique wrinkles, regional fests devote a large chunk of their programming to films that originally played at one or more of a small handful of major international festivals.
But the majority of the foreign-language, indie, and weird genre pictures that fill out festival lineups around the world made their initial debuts at Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Venice, Telluride, Toronto, or New York.
They form the center of the festival circuit. The smaller regional festivals β and even some of the bigger city fests β can give quirky art films places to be seen, to help build their reputation and their audience. With the decline in actual art-house cinemas, a long festival circuit run is often the best that some very good movies can hope for, before they reach their inevitable home on DVD, Blu-ray, streaming, and cable.
