The Surgeon, Bucking Fastard and Prima Facie Courtesy of TIFF After a long buildup, Toronto has finally launched an official market, called, straightforwardly, TIFF: The Market, which runs alongside North America’s biggest film festival from Sept. 10-16.
In typically Canadian fashion, TIFF’s plans are both modest and boldly ambitious. Alongside a core finished film market, TIFF will feature opportunities for presales, co-financing and packaging, and include television as well as interactive projects and games. But market boss Charles Tremblay has made it clear Toronto is not setting up as a direct competitor to the AFM in November, or global TV confab MIPCOM in Cannes in October.
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TIFF: The Market is looking to be something for everyone, and its freshman year will be a time for experimentation. A variety of projects at various stages of production with different financing and distribution strategies will be pitching at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to see how the market responds and how TIFF’s industry event evolves. International auteurs (Werner Herzog, Malgorzata Szumowska) will set up alongside new projects from actors turned filmmakers (Courteney Cox, Tim Blake Nelson) and blockbuster directors slumming in the indie world (we’re looking at you, Zack Snyder). Art house fare mixed together with commercial genre plays, political documentaries next to indie animation.
After years of unofficial dealmaking — capped by the record $15 million sale of Curry Barker’s global box office sensation Obsession at Toronto last year — TIFF: The Market arrives with plenty of momentum and a lot of goodwill from a battered industry hungry for signs of a recovery.
“It’s a tough market, but there’s a lot of opportunity if you’re doing original ideas that push the envelope a little bit and take risks,” says Christian Mercuri of Capstone Studios, who negotiated the Obsession deal with Focus Features at TIFF last year. “Indie success with original fare is not hearsay anymore, we can point to what’s working. As an industry, it’s our responsibility to listen to the new voices and make bets on original fare.”
Here are some of the buzziest bets going into TIFF: The Market.
BUCKING FASTARD
DIRECTOR Werner Herzog
STARS Rooney Mara, Kate Mara, Orlando Bloom, Domhnall Gleeson
BUZZ The wild man of art house cinema is back, working with the Maras, in their first-ever collaboration, who play sisters with a deep, spooky connection — they speak in unison, love the same man and share the same dreams — and set about “digging a tunnel through a mountain range in search of an imaginary land.”
SALES HanWay Films
COPPERHEAD
DIRECTOR John Swab
STARS Miles Teller, Jason Momoa, Adria Arjona
BUZZ The starriest action thriller heading to the market (the cast also includes Kiefer Sutherland) follows a veteran detective forced to team with a young federal agent to unravel a conspiracy in their own task force after an undercover drug deal goes horribly wrong.
SALES Black Bear, CAA, WME
EVERYBODY WANTS TO F*CK ME
DIRECTOR Jonathan Schey
STARS Taron Egerton, Jessica Henwick, Charly Clive
BUZZ Toronto loves a high-concept commercial thriller. The Substance took off after its TIFF bow, and Amy Adams’ Nightbitch was a fest buzz title, even it if didn’t deliver at the box office. This 2026 TIFF play from StudioCanal has Kingsman star Egerton playing a self-styled sensitive feminist and secret serial womanizer whose one-night stand with a mysterious stranger leaves him suddenly, catastrophically irresistible.
SALES StudioCanal
EVIL GENIUS
DIRECTOR Courteney Cox
STARS David Harbour, Patricia Arquette
BUZZ Cox’s true-crime dramedy, a take on the infamous “pizza bomber” case, arrives in finished form — fully financed and produced by August Night with Jason Bateman’s Aggregate Films — but with no sales company attached. For her second directing effort, Cox is looking to replicate what Steven Soderbergh did with The Christophers at TIFF last year: bring a finished, unsold film to Toronto and convert a gala bow into a domestic sale.
HONEYMOON / FUNERAL
DIRECTOR Nahnatchka Khan
STARS Rebecca Ferguson, Greta Lee
BUZZ A gay romance dramedy with two beloved stars is sure to entice streamers always looking for their next ’ship. Ferguson plays a woman recently left at the altar who is en route to her planned honeymoon solo, when she meets a fellow traveler headed home for her mother’s funeral. For her part, Kahn has proved herself in the rom-com space with the Ali Wong starrer Always Be My Maybe.
SALES FilmNation
THE IDIOT(S)
DIRECTORS Malgorzata Szumowska, Michal Englert
STARS Aimee Lou Wood, Johnny Flynn, Vicky Krieps, Christian Friedel
BUZZ This drama, about the woman who saved Fyodor Dostoevsky from himself and helped him write The Idiot, looks like catnip for art house buyers. Wood and Flynn play Anna and Fydor Dostoevsky, backed by an all-star supporting cast of European A-listers.
SALES The Match Factory/ CAA
THE JULIA SET
DIRECTOR Niki Byrne
STARS Chase Infiniti, Christopher Briney
BUZZ What is a film festival without a promising coming-of-age story from a first-time feature director led by up-and-coming stars? This one follows a young mathematician (Infiniti) who is tapped by a teaching assistant (Briney) for a highly prestigious undergraduate competition.
SALES Gersh, Hanway
THE LAST PHOTOGRAPH
DIRECTOR Zack Snyder
STARS Stuart Martin, Fra Fee
BUZZ This indie action pic, about an ex-DEA agent seeking revenge in a South American jungle, has been a decades-in-the-work passion project for the blockbuster director of 300, Justice League and Man of Steel. Snyder’s an untested property on international indie market. The film’s world premiere at TIFF will be a trial by fire.
SALES CAA
LINCOLN IN THE BARDO
DIRECTOR Duke Johnson
STARS Tom Hanks, Willem Dafoe, Jonathan Bailey, Peter Dinklage
BUZZ One of the most ambitious swings at TIFF this year is Johnson’s stop-motion/live-action hybrid adaptation of George Saunders’ transcendental Booker Prize-winning best-seller. History and imagination mix as Hanks, playing Abraham Lincoln, mourns for his dead son, while the spirits of the dead, voiced by an A-list cast, meditate on grief and empathy.
SALES CAA Media Finance/ WME Independent
THE LIVES AND DEATHS OF WILSON SHEDD
DIRECTOR Tim Blake Nelson
STARS Amanda Seyfried, Scoot McNairy, Wunmi Mosaku
BUZZ Nelson writes, directs and co-stars in this based-on-actual-events drama about Karen (Seyfried), an English teacher in an abusive marriage who takes a job leading creative writing classes at a maximum-security prison in Oklahoma and falls for a charismatic inmate (McNairy). The prestige play should draw interest, and bids, from awards-minded buyers.
SALES WestEnd Films/WME/V42/D Squared Films
NAZA
DIRECTORS Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor
BUZZ The dramatic documentary follow-up from two of the directors of Oscar-winning doc No Other Land promises to be just as explosive. Claiming to reveal “in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” the film builds on reporting published by +972, Local Call and The Guardian between 2023 and 2025 and was produced by The Guardian and The Zone of Interest producer James Wilson of JW Films, with Zone director Jonathan Glazer executive producing.
SALES mk2
PRIMA FACIE
DIRECTOR Susanna White
STARS Cynthia Erivo
BUZZ There’s plenty of early awards chatter about Erivo for her leading role in this finished film, an adaptation of Suzie Miller’s Olivier-winning 2019 stage play about a brilliant young British attorney whose confidence in the law is shaken after the actions of a colleague.
SALES Embankment, CAA, UTA
THE SURGEON
DIRECTOR Roshan Sethi
STARS Michelle Yeoh, Martin Freeman
BUZZ Every proper film market needs a few action movies to rev the engine, and this project, from oncologist-turned-filmmaker Roshan Sethi, was a strong pre-seller in Cannes. Michelle Yeoh stars as a gifted doctor forced at gunpoint to operate on a gangster with a life-threatening condition.
SALES 193, WME
TRASH MOUNTAIN
DIRECTOR Kris Rey
STARS Caleb Hearon, Zooey Deschanel
BUZZ Stand-up comedian and podcaster Hearon pulls double duty as co-writer and star in this dramedy about siblings tasked with cleaning out the house of their late father, a hoarder. While Hearon and Deschanel’s brother and sister act as the backbone of the movie, Jacki Weaver, Jaboukie Young-White and Kyle Marvin also give strong supporting performances in this small, sure-to-be crowd-pleaser.
SALES CAA, WME
VINTAGE VIOLENCE
DIRECTOR Eugene Kotlyarenko
STARS Cole Sprouse, Kiko Mizuhara, Nijiro Murakami
BUZZ This Midnight Madness title, picked by the same Toronto teen committee that went for Curry Barker’s breakout Obsession last year, follows a livestreamer whose plans to make a mint selling vintage denim in Japan puts him the crosshairs of the yakuza. SALES BFF Sales, WME
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