11 Films To Watch At TIFF 2026
Well, fellow cinephiles, our favourite time of the year is quickly approaching: TIFF season.
I may be a Toronto transplant, but my love for the 6ix runs deep, and I love the opportunity to flaunt my Cinema Studies degree, so of course I eagerly await TIFF each year.
Last year I got the opportunity to cover the festival for the first time (and I got to shoot Jacob Elordi and Charli XCX on the red carpet), and good news: they’re extending the invite once again. So despite claiming my King Street days were behind me, I’ll be back on the TIFF strip taking photos of your favourite celebrities—or, for all you pretentious cinephiles, your favourite ~filmmakers~—and watching 3 films a day.
As fellow TIFF stans know, the best part of the festival is discovering films you might never have thought you’d see, and it’s best to start early, so I’ve scoured through the ever-difficult TIFF site and put together a short list of films I’m excited to see.
Photos courtesy of TIFF
INK
dir. Danny Boyle
Danny Boyle turns his attention to the making of a media empire in Ink, with Jack O'Connell and Guy Pearce leading a drama about Rupert Murdoch's tabloid ascent. It seems like a natural subject for a director who has always been drawn to velocity and moral rot in equal measure, and it lands at a moment when questions about who owns the story have rarely felt more urgent. Netflix picked it up ahead of its festival run, which makes Toronto one of the few chances to see it in a room full of people rather than alone on your couch.
TRASH MOUNTAIN
dir. Kris Rey
Caleb Hearon stars in and co-wrote (with Ruby Caster) this comedy about a gay man in his twenties who leaves Chicago for rural Missouri after his hoarder father dies, and finds himself picking through a house stuffed with a lifetime of objects, some valuable and most not. Zooey Deschanel, Jacki Weaver, Kyle Marvin and Jaboukie Young-White round out the cast, suggesting the film knows exactly how funny grief can be.
VILLENEUVE: THE RISE OF A LEGEND
dir. Yan Lanouette Turgeon
TIFF closes on a homegrown one. Yan Lanouette Turgeon's biographical drama traces the early years of Gilles Villeneuve, the Québécois driver who went from snowmobile racing to Ferrari and became a national myth in the process. Not necessarily an F1 fan, but this seems so CanCon, so I have to tune in.
WE ARE ALL STRANGERS
dir. Anthony Chen
Anthony Chen closes out his accidental "Growing Up" trilogy, thirteen years after Ilo Ilo and seven after Wet Season, with a sprawling family portrait built around a noodle hawker and his aimless adult son. Yeo Yann Yann and Koh Jia Ler return for the third time, having played mother and son in the first film and teacher and student in the second, which gives the whole thing a quiet weight no plot connection could.
CLUB KID
dir. Jordan Firstman
Jordan Firstman wrote, directed and stars in his feature debut as Peter, a washed-up underground party promoter whose life detonates when he learns he has a ten-year-old son and has to actually parent him. Cara Delevingne plays his business partner, Diego Calva the social worker, and newcomer Reggie Absolom the kid in question. Shot on 35mm by Emmy winner Adam Newport-Berra with a score from Cristobal Tapia de Veer, it premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes with nods for both the Caméra d'Or and the Queer Palm. Ofc, A24 snatched it up.
THIRTEEN IN GAZA
13 غزة
dir. Hosam Abu Dan
Hosam Abu Dan's narrative feature debut follows Raghad (Mary Ziyara), a thirteen-year-old who has lost her home and most of her family to a bombing and now lives with her father (Firas Al-Masri) in a displacement camp in the Gaza Strip. She is entering puberty in a place with no privacy, no safety and no room for the ordinary business of growing up, while her father weighs an impossible choice involving the camp's local boss (Ghassan Salem) to keep them alive. Abu Dan and his crew are all based in Gaza, and used their experiences to make something insistently human rather than a catalogue of ruin.
THE WORLD BEFORE
첫세계
dir. Yoon Dan-bi
Six years after Moving On announced her at Busan, Yoon Dan-bi returns with a second feature that shifts her attention from childhood to adolescence. Two teenagers who were best friends as kids reunite for a summer on a small rural Korean island, and the film settles into the specific ache of first love and the exact moment you realize you are not who you were last year. It arrives in Platform, TIFF's juried discovery section, which is historically where you find the film everyone will be citing in three years.
BITTER CHRISTMAS
Amarga Navidad
dir. Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar returns to Spanish after his English-language detour with what may be his most openly autobiographical film. Bárbara Lennie plays Elsa, an advertising director whose mother dies over a December long weekend, who then buries herself in work until a panic attack forces the grief to surface and sends her to Lanzarote. The structure nests inward: a filmmaker writing about a filmmaker writing about a filmmaker. Leonardo Sbaraglia, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Victoria Luengo, Patrick Criado, Milena Smit and Quim Gutiérrez fill out the cast, with an Alberto Iglesias score. A Spanish masterpiece? We shall see.
BEING HEUMANN
dir. Siân Heder
Siân Heder's follow-up to her Oscar-winning CODA opens the festival with a story that belongs in every civics class. Ruth Madeley stars as Judy Heumann, the disability rights organizer who helped lead the 1977 Section 504 sit-in, a weeks-long occupation of a federal building that forced the US government to enforce its own accessibility law. Mark Ruffalo co-stars. Casting a disabled actor as one of the movement's defining figures should be unremarkable by now, and the fact that it still isn't tells you something about why this Apple Original Film matters as TIFF's Opening Night selection.
PRIMA FACIE
dir. Susanna White
Cynthia Erivo plays Tessa Ensler, a working-class barrister who built a formidable career defending men accused of sexual assault, right up until she has to reckon with the machinery from the other side. Suzie Miller adapted her own play, the one that won Jodie Comer a Tony as a solo performance, and the screen version opens it out into an ensemble with Simon Russell Beale, Noma Dumezweni, Toheeb Jimoh and Daniel Ings. Susanna White directs. Watching a famous one-woman show learn to share the stage is its own kind of experiment, and it premieres here first.
HOMBRE AL AGUA
dir. Gael García Bernal
Gael García Bernal's third feature behind the camera, after Déficit and Chicuarotes, is also one he stars in. Co-written with Argentine playwright Mariano Pensotti and shot between Mexico and Cuba, the film is billed as an introspective drama laced with humour and surreal, dreamlike sequences, moving through a world of manipulation and the performances people put on for each other. Esmeralda Pimentel, Débora Nascimento, Manuel García-Rulfo and Natalia Oreiro co-star, with García Bernal and Diego Luna's La Corriente del Golfo producing. It bows at Venice days before landing in Toronto.