Overview The Toronto International Film Festival is 11 days of premieres in downtown Toronto whose best-known prize is chosen by the audience: the People's Choice Award comes from public ballots, and past winners include Slumdog Millionaire, The King's Speech and Nomadland, all three later Best Picture winners at the Oscars. TIFF calls itself the largest public film festival in the world. Bill Marshall, Dusty Cohl and Henk Van der Kolk founded it in 1976 as the Festival of Festivals, and its year-round home, TIFF Lightbox, opened in 2010 with cinemas, galleries and archives. On site Screenings run across downtown venues including Roy Thomson Hall, Scotiabank Theatre and TIFF Lightbox, with ticketed premieres, events and parties around them. Outside the cinemas, Festival Street is the free public side of the festival: in 2025 it drew 458,800 visitors, against 283,400 at ticketed films, events and parties. In 2026 TIFF added The Market, a separate industry conference and sales market at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, running alongside the first week of the public festival. Audience TIFF's own research describes the engaged audience as skewing to high-net-worth Canadians: people in creative fields, senior executives and small business owners. Ticket buyers spend between 100 and 1,000 dollars each on festival tickets, by TIFF's count. The industry side brought about 5,000 delegates from 80 countries in 2025, and SponsorPulse's 2024 report found one in three Canadians aged 13 to 64 had engaged with TIFF in the previous 12 months. Talent and Influencers The 2025 festival, TIFF's 50th, opened with Colin Hanks's John Candy: I Like Me. Chloé Zhao's Hamnet won People's Choice, ahead of Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein and Rian Johnson's Wake Up Dead Man. The Tribute Awards that year honored del Toro, Jodie Foster, Catherine O'Hara, Channing Tatum, Nina Hoss, Idris Elba, Lee Byung-hun, Jafar Panahi and Zacharias Kunuk. Track record Attendance across TIFF 2025 rose 4.17% on 2024. The festival counted 112 million digital impressions during the 2025 festival, up 34.9%, and 52,000 media mentions valued at 296 million dollars in publicity. For partners, the 2025 IMI SponsorPulse report measured average partner awareness at 35% among engaged Canadians, against 26% in 2018, with consideration up 45% and favorability up 49% among those who were engaged and aware. Brand presence Partners work the whole calendar, not only the 11 days in September: TIFF Lightbox runs new releases, Cinematheque screenings and monthly series year-round, and Film Circuit has taken films to 110 locations across Canada since 1989. The festival's own channels carry partner messaging, with 4.5 million email impressions and a 47% average open rate during TIFF 50, and 1.68 million website users.