Year after year, TIFF Docs tends to be populated by glossy, formally conventional, commercial fare—occasionally punctuated by works from prolific documentarians and festival award winners. Nonfiction works marked by innovation and ambition are pushed to the periphery, a consistent gesture that betrays what the festival regards as “best” in the arena of nonfiction cinema. Here and elsewhere, I couldn’t help but feel the subtle repositioning of the festival in anticipation of the impending launch of TIFF’s official market in 2026. Invitations to seek hidden, artistically driven gems, to interrogate the collapsing of boundaries between fiction and nonfiction remained open across other programs such as Wavelengths and Centrepiece.
Wang Bing
The New York Film Festival (NYFF), now in its 62nd edition, is one of the biggest film festivals in the United States and, along with TIFF, the most important second-run festival in North America. This year’s edition found itself in the intersection of a number of conflicts surrounding the ongoing Israeli bombing of Gaza. These events serve as a reminder, despite the protestation of some donors, that no one can truly shut politics out of the festival. As it happens, protest was itself the subject of many of films in the festival.