TIFF Adds September Market to Fill Post-Cannes Gap
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- TIFF is running its inaugural official market September 10-16 alongside its 2026 festival at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, having signed up roughly 150 exhibitors and promotional bodies by end of June.
- CAA Media Finance's Roeg Sutherland argues September timing lets buyers launch projects for January or February production, whereas AFM (November) hits April or May at best, the EFM June or July, and Cannes August.
- Mubi's Arianna Bocco says the market lets her company — which produces, acquires and sells films — plan its 2027 buying slate nine months ahead in one efficient September window rather than across multiple stops.
- Goodfellas' Vincent Maraval is bringing his full Cannes sales team plus The Veterans, announcing at least two new French-language projects ready for Cannes and at least four English-language projects aimed at fall shoots.
- Maraval adds that TIFF can recreate the Cannes/Berlin dynamic for Asian buyers, who have largely stopped pre-buying at AFM and need a festival-attached market where completed films and pre-sales can be screened.
- Sony Pictures Classics' Michael Barker, a TIFF attendee since the early 1980s, calls the formalized market "vital" as digital links erode face-to-face deal-making and erases the spontaneous late-night engagements that historically closed major deals.
- The TIFF Market will offer 400 industry screening slots, including curated audiences mixing public festivalgoers with professional buyers — a format Sutherland says suits today's slower sale-to-release pipeline, as with CAA's 2022 private TIFF screening of The Holdovers.
Why it matters: Four of independent film's most powerful sales executives are publicly staking their September slates on TIFF. The September 10-16 slot is positioned to shift greenlight timing: projects launched in Toronto can enter production in January or February, versus April or May after AFM, reshaping acquisition planning for the 150 exhibitors already signed up.
