This year TIFF Docs presents 22 titles from 12 countries, 13 of which are world-premieres. The section opens September 7 with Copa 71 by Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine, about the unofficial Women’s World Cup tournament of over 50 years ago which was, at least until now, written out of history. TIFF Docs Lead Programmer Thom Powers discusses his programme rationale with Business Doc Europe.
“There’s a few different things that I’m trying to do when I pull together a programme with my colleagues. I guess the main word I would use is balance,” Powers points out. “We’re looking to showcase a number of veteran filmmakers as we always do at TIFF, but we also have newcomer filmmakers. We’re looking to try to strike a balance from stories from around the world. We’re trying to strike a balance between films that might be very serious and challenging, and also have some films that are accessible and celebratory, so it’s not one or the other. A great programme has a variety of different films that people can connect to.”
Powers happily admits to exploiting TIFF’s A-festival status when promoting his docs, and to help kickstart their market career. “We are in a unique situation of having the attention of a large portion industry and press, more than most other festivals, and I do think about making the most of that. I am thinking about films that are looking for buyers…and can be launched into the North America marketplace and the international marketplace.”
“Then conversely, I’m also looking for films that I think are perhaps not what the marketplace is looking for (even if I wish the marketplace was looking for them) and I want to be giving those a spotlight, because I recognize that film festivals may be the one place where they can connect to audiences [and] that they aren’t going to be the low hanging fruit for distributors,” he says.
Of course, not all docs need TIFF’s help, Powers underlines. “A lot of celebrity documentaries. Some true-crime documentaries. And there were some [documentaries] that I looked at that I just thought, you know what, this’ll do fine in the world. It doesn’t really need a platform like Toronto to give it a lift.”
TIFF Docs therefore offers a “sweet spot” that satisfies both audience and professional needs and tastes, Powers reckons, pointing to films such as section opener Copa 71, telling the hitherto untold story of the unofficial Women’s World Cup, a competition that was disregarded by FIFA but which regularly filled Mexico City’s iconic Azteca Stadium. “That’s a tremendous film and I think coming after this year’s Women’s World Cup gives a frame of mind for people to watch it with renewed expectations,” says Powers.
Another film he believes can “go far in the marketplace” is Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa by Lucy Walker. “Sherpa has climbed Mount Everest more times than any other woman, but that is not even the most extraordinary accomplishment in her life. She’s a single mom of two teenagers who works as a dishwasher at Whole Foods in Connecticut, and we follow her last year as she takes a break from her full-time job without any real rigorous training to make one more attempt to climb Mount Everest in the hope that it can create a better life for her children.”
Powers describes UK director Clair Titley’s The Contestant as the most “what the fuck” documentary in this year’s line-up. The film tells the true story of a Japanese reality TV star Nasubu who, in 1998, was left naked in a room for more than a year, forced to fill out magazine sweepstakes to earn food and clothing. “What he didn’t know in the months that he was in isolation was that his life was being broadcast in a weekly TV show, and he was becoming the most famous person in Japan. So that’s quite an extraordinary story,” says Powers.
This year the TIFF Docs team sifted through 800 features before deciding on its final selection. While Powers has a strong awareness of what is happening in the marketplace, decisions are made based on the completed submissions, he underlines. “There can be lots of promising films in production that, for different reasons, don’t realize their full potential or aren’t what I’m looking for,” he says. “Just staying on top of [the 800 submissions] is more than enough work than trying to scan the lists of every pitch forum to see what might be coming up next year or the year after that.”
Powers, also a docmaker, has programmed at TIFF for the past 18 years, and is Director of Special Projects at DOC NYC, and has therefore observed much change in the sector over the past decades, in terms of how films are made (and who is making them), and the enormous impact of the streamers. “When I began [at TIFF], the films that I was receiving about the global South were largely being made by filmmakers in the global North. It was European and North American filmmakers going to places where there wasn’t as much a filmmaking infrastructure. And that has changed. I think of a film, While We Watched (by Vinay Shukla), that we showed last year about the Indian journalist Ravish Kumar and which just had a successful theatrical run in the UK, and that’s a kind of film and filmmaker from India that I wasn’t seeing as much 18 years ago.”
“Today I see a rise in filmmaking all over the world that is very encouraging. I think that the world of the streamers and their reach are undeniably very important in creating audiences for documentaries. I’m old enough to remember when distributors did not want to touch a documentary film simply because called a ‘documentary.’ That doesn’t exist anymore. If you get onto an airplane with in-flight media, there’ll be a category called ‘documentary.’ So that represents a real step forward of progress in my mind, in the way documentaries are looked at by viewers.”
“Undeniably, this year, we’re in a transitional state of what the corporate marketplace means for documentary film and where their tastes are for documentary film,” Powers continues of the shift in spending priorities of the streamers. “There’s a tremendous corporate shift of mergers and deficit spending that has run out. And I think we can all see that now that we’re coming out of a 10-year bubble when there was a lot of spending on documentary that wasn’t always rational spending, if you define rational spending as something that’s tied to revenue. There were a lot of streamers that were just trying to take big swings for awards, for headlines, for attention, and their bosses were not heavily monitoring what they were spending on it. And so there was some really record spending that took place in the last 10 years. I don’t know if that’s ever going to come back, because I don’t know that we’re ever going to be in this kind of the kind of land-rush for subscribers that took place in the last 10 years. So I think we’re in a period of adjustment, but I think things are going to be okay.”
To many people, Toronto is regarded ostensibly as a feature festival with a bit of doc on the side. Powers strongly disagrees with this assessment, stressing how the doc quotient has, at least historically, been a lot higher in Toronto than in the other European A-fests to which his festival is generally compared, arguably with the exception of Berlin. “Berlin, I think, would be a good corollary as a festival that has always paid a lot of attention to documentary films, but often paid attention with a different direction than what Toronto has, which is good. It’d be boring if all festivals were programming with the same outlook.”
Yes, there may be vast differences between TIFF and doc-only fests CPH:DOX or IDFA, but Totonto’s audiences are turned on as much by docs as by fiction, he points out, and he is more than prepared to bang the drum as loudly as necessary for his selections. “To programme documentaries in an environment where you’ve also got big celebrities and huge marketing budgets that documentaries usually don’t have…you need to be a little bit more creative in making noise for those films. But I think what’s extraordinary when a documentary does pop out at TIFF is that it carries some of the aura that is generated by this big media machine that’s here to see the ‘red carpet’ stuff.”
“I think over the years of films like I’m Not Your Negro or Collective or Free Solo that played at TIFF and really struck a chord with audiences. In the case of Free Solo, it won the Audience prize here, and carries the TIFF laurels, which are the same laurels that are on Steven Spielberg’s Meet the Fabelmans,” Powers ends.
TIFF Docs 2023 selections
- OPENING FILM Copa 71 Rachel Ramsay & James Erskine, United Kingdom, World Premiere
- Boil Alert Stevie Salas & James Burns, Canada/USA, World Premiere
- Bye Bye Tiberias Lina Soualem, France/Belgium/Qatar/Palestine, North American Premiere
- Defiant Karim Amer, Ukraine/United Kingdom/USA, World Premiere
- Flipside Chris Wilcha, USA, World Premiere
- God is a Woman Andrés Peyrot, France/Switzerland/Panama, North American Premiere
- Homecoming Suvi West & Anssi Kömi, Finland/Norway, World Premiere
- In the Rearview Maciek Hamela, Poland/France/Ukraine, North American Premiere
- Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros Frederick Wiseman, France/USA, North American Premiere
- Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa by Lucy Walker, USA, World Premiere
- Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe Robert McCallum, Canada, World Premiere
- Silver Dollar Road Raoul Peck, USA, World Premiere
- Songs of Earth Margreth Olin, Norway, North American Premiere
- Sorry/Not Sorry Caroline Suh & Cara Mones, USA, World Premiere
- Stamped From The Beginning Roger Ross Williams, USA, World Premiere
- Summer Qamp Jen Markowitz, Canada, World Premiere
- The Contestant Clair Titley, United Kingdom, World Premiere
- The Mother of All Lies Asmae El Moudir, Morocco/Egypt/Saudi Arabia/Qatar, North American Premiere
- The Pigeon Tunnel Errol Morris, United Kingdom/USA/Hungary, International Premiere
- The World is Family Anand Patwardhan, India, World Premiere
- Viva Varda! Pierre-Henri Gibert, France, North American Premiere
- Walls Kasia Smutniak, Italy, World Premiere
