It’s been five years since Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) CEO Cameron Bailey took the reins from former head Piers Handling. Needless to say, there’s been just a little added stress in that time.
In 2020, Bailey and former TIFF co-head Joana Vicente had to shift the festival mostly online due to the pandemic. That concern has faded in the rearview: screenings for the forthcoming 48th installment (Sept. 7 to 17) will all be in-person.
But there is a new threat hanging over the festival. As of this writing, simultaneous strikes by actors union SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America may result in the diminished presence of A-list talent, who drive mainstream media coverage and much ticket-buyer interest. One would think Bailey, who assumed full control following Vicente’s 2021 departure, might be feeling a little snakebitten.
“You want to have a year with nothing unusual happening,” he acknowledges to Playback from his office in the downtown TIFF Bell Lightbox. “But that may never happen. Many things can affect what we do, and we have no control over the environment. It’s how we respond that matters. And part of my job is to make sure we’ve got a great team here that can respond. We’re doing that right now.”
Crises are nothing new for the festival. Bailey’s predecessor Handling, who started as TIFF executive director and CEO in 1994, had to navigate 9/11 in 2001 and SARS two years later. The former chief commends Bailey and his colleagues for their agility in the face of recent challenges.
“Rotating online was wonderful,” Handling says. “I applaud Cameron and TIFF for that quick shift because it was relatively seamless. They did the best job they could have done.
“Holding together the morale of the organization, making tough decisions, working out the financial future and dealing with sponsors requires real diplomacy. Everyone loves the festival and wants it to succeed. You just have to steer it and reassure people that it’s going to still be there in the future. Cameron and the team have done a very good job.”
And more challenges lie ahead. In late August, Bell confirmed it won’t renew its 28-year sponsorship of TIFF beyond this year, while COO Beth Janson resigned with just weeks to go before this year’s festival.
Handling adds that the key to success as CEO is hiring the best people and letting them loose. And that’s why he brought on Bailey in 2005 as a year-round programmer focusing on films from South Asia and Africa before he moved up the ranks.
That marked Bailey’s second tour at TIFF, having originally served as a freelance festival programmer from 1990 to 1997. Along the way he tried his hand at screenwriting, co-scripting features The Planet of Junior Brown (1997) and A Winter Tale (2007). He had earlier made a name for himself as a film critic for Toronto alternative weekly Now starting in 1988 and continuing for nearly two decades.
Now a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Bailey still calls on that critical muscle when helping decide what movies make the cut for the festival – which this year will screen approximately 220 features and 55 shorts out of nearly 8,200 submissions – and chipping in program notes.
“I want audiences to understand the draw of a film and I analyze what makes it interesting and what makes it work,” he says. “Our programming team is very trained and knowledgeable in the history and global culture of cinema. We have two PhDs in cinema studies. So when we talk about films, it’s a high-level discussion, and having been a critic helps.”
One of his biggest accomplishments during his first festival go-round was the launch of the Planet Africa sidebar in 1995, highlighting that continent’s cinematic output. Four years earlier, he and Handling, then TIFF artistic director, ventured to the Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. Bailey made connections in the local industry and upon his return began selecting African films for TIFF.
“I became aware of a knowledge gap our audience had because they hadn’t been exposed to films from Africa or even the African Diaspora,” he notes. After Handling took over as TIFF head, they agreed on the need for a section that would assemble these works.
Bailey was born in London and grew up in England and Barbados before coming to Toronto at age eight. “I hadn’t been inside a movie theatre until then, and even then it was rare. I was more into books,” recalls the Western University graduate in English Language and Literature. “It was only at university that I switched on to movies. I took a film course in my second year and that blew my head open.”
He and sister maxine bailey were raised by their mother Luciene. Although Bailey says the family matriarch was not a film buff, she did love a good story. Incidentally, maxine also became a powerful figure in Canadian cinema, currently serving as executive director of the Canadian Film Centre.
“Even as a child, Cameron was smart and thoughtful and grew up surrounded by strong women, which appears to have made him a great listener, sympathetic and able to appreciate great storytelling,” maxine tells Playback.
That appreciation spans the art house and the multiplex. Bailey says he is most proud that TIFF is a public-facing institution, both in its annual festival and its year-round cinematic offerings at the Lightbox. “I came into it as somebody who loves the highest achievements in the art of cinema but also commercial action movies and genre films,” he says. “That openness to a full range of films is something I’ve tried to promote here in terms of how we hire and what we celebrate. I never wanted it to be elitist.”
He says the festival is in a good place in both its diversity of content and scope. It was in growth mode until the 2010s when it became, as he says, “unwieldy and not serving each film as well as we wanted it to.” And so TIFF cut down its number of films by approximately 16% in 2017 and this year will maintain that level, which Bailey calls “a good number for us.”
Where he does want to see growth is on the business side of the festival, which is regarded as one of the “Big Five” festivals in the world alongside Cannes, Sundance, Venice and Berlin.
“We have become a unique marketplace in terms of being in North America but not in the U.S., and being plugged into Asia, Europe, Latin America and the whole world,” he notes. “That’s unique to a city where half the people are from somewhere else and have ties to somewhere else. We can take better advantage of Toronto as a global cultural and business hub when it comes to buying and selling films.
And that’s just one thing on Bailey’s to-do list. While being recognized by the Canadian Film and Television Hall of Fame is cause for reflection, he insists, “It’s not done. I feel like I still have some things to contribute here.”
Playback‘s Canadian Film and Television Hall of Fame was founded in 2007 to recognize extraordinary achievements in the Canadian entertainment industry. Inductees are selected by a jury of their peers.
A version of this story originally appeared in Playback‘s Fall 2023 issue
Photo by Luis Mora
