TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten Film Festival is going abroad for the first time, sending a roster of films to L.A.’s prestigious LACMA museum.

Selected programming from TIFF’s Top Ten – which consists of a total of 10 Canadian features and 10 Canadian shorts – will be shown in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from July 30 to Aug. 1 of this year.

Initially, TIFF will take three feature films to L.A., but the proposal is to expand the program in the future. This year’s L.A. lineup will include Albert Shin’s In Her Place, Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner and Felix & Meira directed by Maxime Giroux.

Additionally, TIFF’s kid-targeted interactive digiPlaySpace exhibition is heading to four locations in China, including Beijing, where TIFF will present digiPlaySpace in partnership with Beijing Huaxie Cultural Development Company.

For the past five years, TIFF has toured its Top 10 domestically, but this latest announcement is indicative of TIFF’s global aspirations, said Piers Handling, director and CEO of TIFF.

“This is part of a more concerted strategy to take our programming global, in a more forceful, organised and deliberate way,” Handling told Playback Daily.

Handling was quick to iterate the tour is a pilot project and represents TIFF “dipping its toe” in the water in order to assess how best to expand in the future.

“There have been people knocking on our doors for years [about taking the Top Ten to a global market], but we wanted to be strategic and actually take those films to markets where Canadian filmmakers and producers wanted to go, to establish contacts and networks, and expose themselves in a way that TIFF can assist them with. And it won’t just open doors to an audience for them, but open doors to the opinion makers as well – to media and industry too.” said Handling.

The number of films included on the tour will be tweaked in future years, depending on what works and what doesn’t work this year. The goal though, said Handling, is to expand the tour in future years to consist of five feature films and five shorts. He notes that getting the films into China is a challenge, due to domestic regulations, but that the effort to do so is in “really preliminary” stages.

– Image courtesy of Shutterstock