Why Indian filmmakers love the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)

It is the Toronto International Film Festival’s (TIFF) 50th year. The perfect occasion to celebrate the fact that there is a record 17 films (including a series) in the official selection from India, South Asia and the South Asian Diaspora, in this year’s edition, on from September 4 to 14.

TIFF is especially valued, as it both flags off the awards season (Oscars, Golden Globes) and is an important gateway to the North American market. For instance, Payal Kapadia’s film All We Imagine as Light, following its screening at Cannes and TIFF last year, won two Golden Globe nominations for Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film. Kapadia also garnered a lot of attention worldwide during her Academy Awards campaign even though her film did not win an Oscar. 

S.S. Rajamouli’s Telugu blockbuster RRR had already had a theatrical release in India and in the U.S., but as a part of the film’s concerted Oscar campaign, the director was interviewed at TIFF in the Visionaries series in 2022. RRR went on to win an Oscar for Best Original Song, as well as a Golden Globe in the same category. 

For Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies, its world premiere at TIFF 2023 no doubt partly influenced its subsequent selection as India’s Oscar entry last year. These are all incremental gains, pushing Indian cinema towards a seat at the Big Table, the Academy Awards.

In 2024, 11 films were selected at TIFF from India, South Asia and Diaspora, and in 2023, 14 were selected. This year’s 17 films and series chosen include eight films and series from India, four South Asian films beyond India, and five Diaspora films. This is an amazing feat, as each has been picked from over 8,000 submissions worldwide.

I love going to TIFF, not just for its superb film selection, but also because it’s a very public-facing people’s festival. And when I was on the red carpet in 2023, crowds of fans screamed “Ki-ran, Ki-ran”. They mistook me for the Laapataa Ladies filmmaker, and I apologised, “So sorry, I’m not Kiran, but you should see her brilliant film Laapataa Ladies/ Lost Ladies,” and we all had a good laugh.

Cinema without borders

“I’m over the moon,” says Bollywood actor Huma Qureshi, whose film Bayaan, directed by Bikas Ranjan Mishra, has its world premiere in TIFF’s Discovery section. In an author-backed heroine’s role without a ‘hero’, Qureshi plays a policewoman in an investigation drama about abuse within a cult. “For any actor, TIFF is a dream because it’s such a global platform, where cinema is celebrated without borders,” she says. “It’s also a validation of the choices I’ve made — stories that are a little risky, that push the envelope. My expectation is about conversations, seeing how audiences across the world respond to our film, how it travels beyond India.”

The other Indian films at TIFF 2025 include Anurag Kashyap’s Monkey in a Cage (Bandar), starring Bobby Deol, in a role that may be a redemption of sorts of his recent testosterone-driven outings in Animal (2023) and Kanguva (2024). Kashyap commends Deol for being “emotionally naked” with his character in Bandar, a prison drama with a different take on the MeToo movement. 

He says, “I never gave him [Deol] a script. I would give him the scene just before we would shoot it. He has never done that before. I told him, you’re not playing a hero, you are a character, one of many. It’s just that the film is about you, so the focus is on you, but you’re not playing a human being superior to anyone. And you’re supposed to be emotionally naked. He took to the process like a fish to water.”

Deol leads an ensemble cast with Sanya Malhotra, Saba Azad, Sapna Pabbi and a host of indie talents from regional language cinema (Riddhi Sen, Natesh Hegde, Indrajith Sukumaran, et al). Apart from being a hat-tip to the growing domestic appeal of Indian cinema, the casting may also help to amplify the film’s appeal.

On a quieter note, theatre artist and filmmaker Jitank Singh Gurjar will also be at TIFF this year, with his deeply moving second feature, In Search of the Sky (Vimukt), about a lower-income family with a mentally challenged adult son and their journey to the Mahakumbh Mela in hopes of a miracle cure. 

“Just being at TIFF will be a big moment,” says Gurjar, who shot his film in Prayagraj at the landmark pilgrimage gathering that is estimated to have seen 660 million people earlier this year. 

“Shooting at the Mahakumbh with a small crew was the biggest challenge, with the chaos, the scale, and carrying equipment through the crowds. But, at the same time, it was also the most satisfying part, because it gave the film an authenticity that cannot be recreated anywhere else,” he adds.

The next big Indian film

This year, for the first time, India also has a series at TIFF. Gandhi, co-created by Hansal Mehta and Sameer Nair and produced by Applause Entertainment, is a lavish period series shot on several continents with an international cast and crew. “Being the first Indian show, one that is truly swadeshi, and to be on this global stage is, for me, already a vindication of the ambition, effort, and passion poured into its making. In a career spanning more than 30 years, this is perhaps the most ambitious and the most challenging story I’ve ever told,” says Mehta. The drama tells the story of Mahatma Gandhi’s early years and is based on historian Ramachandra Guha’s books Gandhi Before India and Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World.

Clearly Gandhi’s producer Sameer Nair has a remarkable appetite for taking calculated risks as well. The big-budget series, starring Pratik Gandhi and Bhamini Oza, was made without having a streaming platform on board initially. “The rise of streamers in the past 10 years emboldened us to tell this great story in the premium drama series format across multiple seasons. We are following our business model of creating the material and then licensing it, so to that extent, it remains within the framework of what we usually do,” says Nair. 

The ambitious sentiment is echoed by Bayaan producer Shiladitya Bora. “I see selection at TIFF as part of a larger vision of pushing Indian cinema into the global mainstream in a way that films from South Korea, for instance, have managed to do,” says Bora, founder of Platoon One Films. “We’ve had great moments in the past with films like Lunchbox, RRR, and more recently, All We Imagine As Light, but we are still waiting for that one film that will become a global phenomenon, like Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. Can Bayaan be that film for India? It is a story with a global appeal, and TIFF is the perfect launchpad to start its journey around the world.”

Journey to the Oscars

From South Asia beyond India, there’s British-Pakistani filmmaker Seemab Gul’s Ghost School in Discovery, Bangladeshi director Adnan al Rajeev’s Ali, which received a Special Mention in Cannes’ Shorts Competition; and Pakistani director Sana Zahra Jafri’s Permanent Guest. 

One of TIFF’s centrepieces will be Hamlet, British actor-rapper of Pakistani descent Riz Ahmed’s reimagining of Shakespeare that has been “13 years in the making…,” wrote Ahmed on Instagram. The film was launched at Cannes in 2022, when Ahmed and director Aneil Karia told entertainment portal Deadline, “Our Hamlet is an outsider in a wealthy British Indian family, who starts to question his relatives’ morality and his own sanity after encountering his father’s ghost.” Also premiering at TIFF after much delay is Indian-origin American standup comic-actor Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut Good Fortune, starring Keanu Reeves as angel Gabriel, and Sandra Oh. 

TIFF is one of the Big Five global film festivals that also comprise Cannes, Berlin, Venice and Sundance. Premieres at TIFF are crucial because they lead up to the awards season. Unlike the other A-lister festivals, TIFF, like Berlin, is among the most accessible. Its commercial, popular cinema draws in the crowds who are then introduced to independent arthouse and New Wave films that are a crucial part of the festival’s mix. TIFF is a gateway to North America as the U.S. theatrical release/screening is a key step in the journey to the Academy Awards. 

While Cannes premieres are the first indicator of Oscar probables, over the decades, TIFF openings have also secured Oscar nominations and wins. Notable TIFF-to-Oscar success stories include Chariots of Fire (1981), which launched this predictive tradition, followed by Life Is Beautiful (1998), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Silver Linings Playbook (2012), La La Land (2016) and American Fiction (2023). 

The India connect

Rima Das’s Village Rockstars (2017), Lijo Jose Pellisery’s Jallikattu (2019) and Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies (2024), all TIFF world premieres, were sent as India’s official entry for the Academy Awards. TIFF not only discovered Das and turned her into a global name, it made Indians sit up and take note and give Das the National Award in 2018. Das has since been a festival alumna, often premiering her films at TIFF and Berlin. Back in 2007, Mr. India director Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age premiered at TIFF and went on to get Cate Blanchett a Best Actress nomination and won Alexandra Byrne the Best Costume Award at the 2008 Oscars.

Filmmaker Shonali Bose — whose Margarita with a Straw (2014, co-directed, written and produced with longtime collaborator Nilesh Maniyar) won the NETPAC Jury Award at TIFF — attests to the leverage provided by the Canadian festival. “I consider myself a TIFF baby and feel very lucky that all my fiction films have been selected there, the last one being The Sky is Pink[2019], the only Asian film in the Gala section. Here’s a funny story: Cameron Bailey [CEO, TIFF] first saw my debut, Amu [2005], in Berlin at its world premiere. After my Q&A, he came up to me and offered TIFF. I said no at first, since it meant I couldn’t screen anywhere else till September. Other filmmakers said, ‘Are you crazy?’ So, I chased him down to say yes. Cameron has been a huge supporter and friend since.”

TIFF premieres usually help with finding distributors/ sales agents globally and help in theatrical releases back home, especially for smaller productions such as Nithin Lukose’s Malayalam debut Paka (2021) or Jayant Digambar Somalkar’s Marathi indie Sthal (2023), for instance. But there have been exceptions such as Ritwik Pareek’s Rajasthani satire Dug Dug (2021) which remains unreleased in India. “TIFF is also called the Oracle of Oscars, whatever film does really well here, it maybe, wins an award at the Oscars or a buzz gets created around it. The chances are much higher to get a nomination,” Pareek had said during his TIFF premiere.

This year, apart from the 17 selections, SRFTI (Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute) alumna Kunjila Mascillamani’s work-in-progress Malayalam feature debut Guptam (The Last of Them Plagues), co-produced by Jeo Baby, Richa Chadha and Ali Fazal, Payal Kapadia and Kani Kusruti, has been selected as one of the 16 global filmmakers for the competitive talent development programme, TIFF Director’s Lab.

Delhi-based contemporary photographer and filmmaker Sohrab Hura, the only other Indian to be on the prestigious Magnum Photos member collective since Raghu Rai, will also premiere his shoestring budget film, Disappeared, at TIFF.

(With inputs from Tanushree Ghosh)

The Mumbai-based writer is a film curator/ programmer to the Toronto, Berlin and other film festivals worldwide since 30 years. She is not a part of the final selection committee at TIFF 2025.