The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) started rolling out its 2026 selection this week with the announcement of Siân Heder’s Being Heumann as the opening film and world premieres for Prima Facie and The Assassin(s).

While distribution for Being Heumann is already tied up with Apple through CODA director Heder’s overall deal with the platform, both Prima Facie and The Assassin(s) will be looking to tie up North American and international deals on the ground.

With much of the sales and distribution film biz taking a breather in the dog days of the summer, deal-making is on the back-burner, but TIFF is aiming to fire it up again this September, earlier and more vigorously than usual with the inaugural edition of its first official market.

Running September 10-16, with it main hub in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, a stone’s throw from the TIFF festival hub, the new initiative had signed up some 150 exhibitors and promotional bodies by end June.

Alongside building on the unofficial North American market that has long coalesced around festival titles and big-name packages, the aim is to jumpstart international sales activities previously gathered under TIFF’s Industry sidebar which never fully came back after the physical hiatus of the pandemic.

It remains to be seen whether the international sales and distribution community will fully embrace the inaugural edition or rather take a wait and see approach.

With exactly nine weeks to go until its kick-off, packaging, sales and distribution heavyweights Roeg Sutherland, Arianna Bocco, Vincent Maraval and Michael Barker, who are also members of the 15-person TIFF Market Advisory Committee, tell Deadline why they are getting behind the new initiative.  

First and foremost, they say, its addresses a gap in the film festival and market calendar for sales between Cannes in May and Berlin the following February, not filled by either Rome’s MIA market in October or the AFM in November.

“We’re not trying to start a market in Toronto, we’re trying to address a need where September is kind of a cornerstone: people get their budgets back… and are figuring out what they’re going to be doing for the next year,” says CAA Media Finance Co-Head Sutherland.

He praises the AFM’s return to L.A. and revamped format in the Fairmount Century Plaza location but suggests TIFF’s September slot trumps the former’s November dates.

“Being able to launch sales on a movie right after the summer break allows it to go into production in January or February. If you’re launching a movie in November, the best-case scenario is April and May; with the EFM, it’s June or July; while with Cannes, it’s August,” he says.

“Of course, all these markets can have a longer lead, but to make a movie in the first quarter of next year, you really need to launch it in the market as early as September… Toronto, just from a timing perspective, fills a need that I think the market has as a whole.”

Mubi SVP of Global Distribution and Acquisitions and former IFC Film head Bocco concurs on the timing and also points to the benefits of the market running alongside a festival.

“We’re a very unique company in this scenario as we produce films, we acquire films, and we sell films, so to have a market in the fall where we have the ability to do all three of those things creates an efficiency,” she says. “It makes planning a lot easier.”

“As a buyer, we’re always nine months ahead of the calendar year… so to be able to go in September to plan our 2027 slate… and see finished films, packages and promos that creates an efficiency that currently doesn’t exist,” she adds.

Goodfellas and The Veterans co-founder Maraval believes the combination of the market and festival could draw in Asian buyers, who remain out in force in Cannes, and also attend the EFM, but are less present at the AFM.

“The problem with the AFM is that they [Asian buyers] don’t pre-buy much anymore, so you need a market where you screen completed films and pre-sell films… they’re not going to cross the ocean for 10 projects, especially now, when local markets are doing well with local films,” he says.  “It’s good to recreate the dynamic of Cannes or Berlin, where they know three or four films will come out of screenings that could work in their cinemas.”

In a sign of his belief in the new TIFF market, Maraval is taking a Cannes-strength Goodfellas sales team and will also be out in force with The Veterans, alongside co-founder Kim Fox.

“We’re always at Toronto with films, both in and out of the selection, as well as with presentations of upcoming projects. What’s changing this year is that the whole Goodfellas sales team is coming, and we will announce a minimum of two new projects, which will be among the biggest budget projects for French cinema next year and ready for Cannes,” he adds.

“Usually with those projects we would wait for Berlin, even if it’s last minute, because they’re not typical AFM projects… we are going to use Toronto to have a bit more time and have distributors locked or in place that allows us to better prepare Cannes next year.”

Maraval also plans to bring at least four English-language projects under The Veterans banner, with the aim of finalizing financing for planned fall shoots.

He and Sutherland both welcome the chance to space out project launches outside of Cannes and Berlin.

“A major post-pandemic difficulty is that there’s so much pressure on Cannes to the point that there are too many movies in the market… people can’t get to them,” says Sutherland. “We used to send out scripts three, four weeks in advance, now we’re sending them out six weeks ahead of time… we’re going to the market with 45 films, we need to spread that out across the calendar year.”

Like Sutherland, Maraval praised the 2025 edition of the AFM and said Goodfellas and The Veterans will return, but suggested the later timing sometimes hindered deals.

“It’s really at the end of the year when people are wrapping up their activities and budgets, and have stopped buying, advancing the market by two months makes for a more positive mood among the buyers.”

He also suggests that nothing can replicate the energy of a market attached to a festival for spurring buyer sentiment.

“When you see a great movie in a festival like Berlin, Cannes or Toronto, it feeds your passion for films, your desire to buy and distribute films, whereas the AFM, is more about dealing with product you need for your slate, your business plan,” he says.

“When you get films like Club Kid or La Bola Negra in Cannes, it reminds us that miracles happen and that lights a spark.”   

TIFF veteran Barker, who has been attending the festival since the early 1980s, first as the head of UA Classics, and then as co-founding head of Sony Pictures Classics from 1991, suggests the officialization of a market is a “vital” step in an era when technology is eroding face to face physical contact.

“We’re in a very transitional place in the business, and what’s of real concern to me is that because everyone’s got these links flying, companies can somehow justify to themselves not showing up at these markets, because they can do everything at home,” he says.

Acknowledging Cannes as the number one festival, followed by Berlinale and its European Film Market, due to their place in the calendar as the business comes out of hibernation post December-January festivities, Barker suggests TIFF has also been a key meeting on the circuit ever since it leapfrogged Montreal as Canada’s premiere film festival in the early 1990s.

“Toronto, whether it was a market or not, became a place like Cannes where you went to engage and meet with people. Over the years, we would stay at the Sutton Place, or the Four Seasons, or the Hyatt, and go to Bistro 990 every night. Some of the most important business relationships in my life were forged at TIFF,” he says.

Across the decades, SPC has acquired a raft of titles out of the festival and used it as a North American launchpad for previously acquired films.  It made its first major acquisition of Orlando in 1991, with recent acquisitions includingThe Penguin Lessons, On Swift Horses and I Swear, while its countless TIFF distribution launches include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Call Me By Your Name, Eleanor the Great, Blue Moon and Nuremberg to name but a few.

“The kind of engagement that made these great films, that caused these films to be bought… Toronto has always had that excitement. It’s always been known as the people’s film festival. The most responsive audiences in the world are at that festival,” says Barker.

“The idea of organizing something like this now, where we are forced to engage with each other in this way, I think it is more than ever vital given this aspect of the new technology we’re dealing with that keeps us away from the kind of social engagement which causes major movies to happen and to be sold.

“When a market like this is created, you come to Toronto with your brain in the mode of, ‘We’re here for business, we’re open to buying something or selling something’ in a way you wouldn’t normally be… I think it’s very exciting, and I think it will just add to the cosmology of the other places.”

Alongside booths, the TIFF Market is also laying on 400 industry screening slots, across all configurations. Capitalizing on the festival’s famously engaged audiences, one innovative offering is the possibility of curated audiences, combining public and professional spectators.

Sutherland says the new screenings component is a boon in a slower sale to release dynamic, pointing to CAA Media Finance’s operation on Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, which it introduced to buyers in a private TIFF screening in 2022, for it to premiere the following year in the festival.

“The days when you could sell a movie in September and it could still go out in the fall that’s not the case anymore. What we did with Alexander Payne’s movie was screened the movie in parallel to the festival,” he says.

“The idea was to lock in the distributor, without ruining the festival life of the movie. We wanted to show it in the market, then come back to Toronto the following year and release the movie in the fall, which is what ultimately happened with Focus. We think that we can replicate that again,” he says.

This type of operation in turn, could entice in more buyers, he adds: “Buyers don’t only travel for movies in the festival, they also looking at what’s in the market for the following year. If you know there’ll be 10 to 20 movies of a very high caliber showing in the market, that’s a draw.”

In the backdrop to Sutherland, Bocco, Maraval and Barker’s enthusiasm for the new TIFF Market, there’s uncertainty about how many international film professionals will make the trip this year.

Sutherland is cautiously optimistic: “That’s really a question for TIFF but it feels like we’re in a good place. It was already better last year. It may take a couple years to get everyone back but we’re certainly all going to try. What happens is people miss a great opportunity, and then, the next year they say they can’t ever miss it again.”

Barker adds: “Personally, I they think they will come. There’s always a certain portion of people that are averse to change and will take a much longer time to come to the conclusion that this is of value to them. It’s natural that you’ll have some laggards in that regard, but the bottom line is that we’re in a relationship business.”