TIFF Director Talks Competition With Venice & Welcomes Netflix Films Because "The Landscape Has Shifted"

In terms of the fall festivals, 2018 seems to be the year of Venice versus Toronto. While those two are far from the only big festivals happening this time of year, no one can deny that the strongest lineups of any festival in 2018 comes down to those two events. And according to Toronto International Film Festival director Cameron Bailey, that competition doesn’t bother him at all. In fact, he doesn’t even notice it.

The competition between Venice and Toronto can partially be caused by Netflix. Since some of the biggest fall premieres, “Hold the Dark,” “Roma,” and “22 July,” among a few others, were passed over by Cannes, who began enforcing a distribution policy, Netflix held on to a multitude of quality films, from major directors for the fall. And Cannes loss was Venice and TIFF’s gain.

And in a new interview with Bailey (via Screen Daily), the TIFF director is more than happy to have those Netflix films. “The landscape has shifted as a result of changes in production and distribution and how audiences are seeing content,” says the TIFF boss. “Whether [films are] going into traditional distribution afterwards or going on to a streaming service, it doesn’t matter so long as people are aware of the movie, and that’s one of the most important things a festival can do… We value the theatrical experience and we want people to see movies in movie theatres, but I don’t think it has to be exclusively one or the other.”

But as mentioned above, the competition with Venice is something that doesn’t even register for Bailey. “It’s not something I noticed,” he says. “We got the highly anticipated David Mackenzie film [‘Outlaw King’] — that’s a Netflix film. We have world premieres from Steve McQueen [‘Widows’], Barry Jenkins [‘If Beale Street Could Talk’], Claire Denis [‘High Life’], Sebastian Lelio [‘Gloria Bell’] and many more. We’ve done very well.”

TIFF kicks off September 6.