Cameron Bailey spends a lot of time pondering where Torontonians live and work.

Not in a creepy, electronic surveillance kind of way.

Bailey’s focus is urban demographics, as his brain trust at the Toronto International Film Festival sizes up ethnic enclaves around the city to make Bell Lightbox a better draw.

“We spend a lot of time thinking about where you live, thinking about your street, your social circle, whose houses you go out to, a coffee shop you go to, and thinking about where you work or go to school,” Bailey, TIFF’s artistic director, told a TEDxToronto salon series audience on Tuesday night.

For example, the throngs of people on an average Toronto subway platform offers a “true picture” of multi-cultural Toronto, he insisted. But fan out to the city’s diverse neighbourhoods and you find a more fractured Toronto.

Here, people more from convenience than compulsion live in ethnic enclaves like Little Italy, Forest Hill and Greektown to maintain shared languages, religions or cultures.

“There’s a sense that we have wandered, slept-walked into these divisions in the city,” Bailey said.

So as he aims to make TIFF and Bell Lightbox a cultural eye-opener when it comes to the unknown and unrealized in global cinema, Bailey is not about accepting or rejecting the city’s ethnic enclaves.

Bailey is instead aiming to recast Toronto’s cultural identity to seductively draw its varied diaspora audiences downtown to support his festival.

“That is the promise of Toronto, that our ethnic enclaves will rise and fall as they must. But what moves faster is the rivers of culture that flow around them and change their shape,” Bailey argued.

Here Bailey is banking on the crossover success of global cinema to get ethnic enclaves to explore new paths in cultural and ethnic expression.

“We want to go into them (enclaves) and draw people to what we want to program, to show them, and try to find ways for different communities who may exist in an enclave to move out of that,” he explained to Playback after his TED talk.

That might be on a global scale as Chinese cinema moves from traditional melodrama to Hong Kong’s Internal Affairs to Hollywood’s Kung Fu Panda, or more locally from Markham to Bell Lightbox with TIFF’s recent A Century of Chinese Cinema program.

“It was a challenge for us because we had to make sure we had paths into the Chinese community in Markham,” Bailey recalled about the Chinese film retrospective.

That meant getting the word out that a Chinese-Canadian community already with its own cinemas in Markham had to come to Bell Lightbox to see select titles, or see Chinese directors in the house.

Of course, TIFF has an edge on rival festivals in Toronto, having a myriad of ethnic communities poised to see films from around the world.

“No other festival can program a film from Russia or India or China or the Philippines and know that we could if we wanted to fill the house with people who hail from that particular country,” Bailey said.

TIFF doesn’t do that, and instead goes for a mix of ethnic insiders and outsiders in its festival audiences to broaden everyone’s experience.

Still, the festival has an uphill battle to get ethnic enclaves to go beyond commercial crowd-pleasers to embrace indie cinema.

For example, Brampton’s South Asian community cannot be faulted for thinking Bollywood and Hindi song-and-dance extravaganzas are the true face of Indian cinema.

TIFF just wants them to know Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai, or last year’s City to City festival focus on films from Mumbai can have equal appeal.

And catering to the fantasies and fears of an ethnic enclave is its own balancing act.

Bell Lightbox programs a long-running Summer in France and Summer in Italy film series for those wanting a staycation.

At the same time, TIFF serves up gritty realism like this year’s City to City focus on films from Athens, many of which reflect that country’s economic collapse.

“Athens is a beautiful historic vacation spot for a lot of people, and the Greek islands are not far away. But these films are definitely not escapism,” Bailey said.

Also complicating TIFF’s audience-building is ethnic enclaves are not monolithic.

They are filled with pioneers and newcomers divided along geographic and generational lines.

“People… remain fixed in their tastes and their sense of the homeland at the moment of immigration,” Bailey observed.

That means some look to Indian or Chinese films, for example, to see their homeland as they left it, often due to political conflict or disruption.

Their children, by contrast, less tied to a sense of place or time, are more willing to embrace contemporary takes on their ancestry, via the latest in national cinema.

“It’s less old school stuff,” Bailey observes.