Last year, the festival provided minimal and scaled-back, in-person, socially distanced, and vaccine-mandated screenings at its various venues throughout the city. Despite its unusual format, the 2021 edition of TIFF provided an opportunity to experience the unique challenges and opportunities of forging forward with a physical film festival in the era of COVID-19, in spite of the many risks and reservations.
The festival shifted entirely to a virtual format in 2020 (as did the near entirety of the festival world), but offered a healthy selection of its titles on the TIFF screening platform. “Over the last two years, we’ve learned how to bring digital elements to our festival in new and innovative ways. We are proud of this work. If needed, we are ready to do so again, however, our main focus in 2022 is bringing audiences back in-person to Toronto,” TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey told IndieWire.
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Bailey, who previously served as the artistic director and a programmer of the festival for 25 years, stepped up to the post of CEO back in November 2021. “It is a big job, I am definitely taking that seriously. I’ll have oversight over the whole organization, I’ll be closer to the things that I hadn’t been as close to, when Joana [Vicente] had primary responsibility for those,” Bailey said at the time. “I spent 25 years as a programmer and co-director and artistic director and now co-head and had a chance to learn a lot about the organization and the people who help run it. I have a unique understanding to when Piers Handling, when I first joined TIFF, and Helga Stephenson was in charge. I want to be able to draw from that history without being bound by it.”
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