by Larry Kardish
The Toronto International Film Festival just celebrated its 50th anniversary. It began a half century ago with typical municipal bravado as “The Festival of Festivals,” and indeed, it quickly became one. A behemoth with over 210 feature films, all of major interest, shown over ten packed days, TIFF 2025 was expansive, inclusive, and a true treasure chest of recent cinema. Films that premiered at other major festivals like Berlin, Cannes and Venice, were shown along with a significant number of world premieres. Many of those films were from the U.S., as Hollywood jumpstarts its Oscar campaigns in Toronto.
Torontonians love their festival and attend it in droves, filling theaters as early as 8:30 am every morning and enduring long waits in rush lines to take the seats of no-shows. TIFF is located in a hideous but contained geographical area affectionately known as the Entertainment District. TIFF’s own cinemas and headquarters, the Lightbox, occupy a five-story structure that is the base of a 42-story residential building. TIFF also uses a neighboring multiplex, nearby live theaters and a concert hall, all overshadowed by soulless glass skyscrapers and smaller buildings with character waiting for their imminent execution by developers. Once off the street and in the projection rooms, audiences experience excellent moving-image projection.
I saw dozens of films but there were five I hope we can show at the Crandell in 2026 if they find theatrical distribution in the U.S.
Franz, directed by no-nonsense, hard-hitting Polish director Agnieszka Holland in the Czech Republic, is a maze-like, pseudo-biography of Franz Kafka, played by newcomer Idan Weiss, that takes place just as much in the present as in the past.
Silent Friend, written and directed by the Hungarian Ildikó Enyedi, features a majestic Ginkgo biloba tree on Marburg University’s campus that witnesses the world around it over time. The movie jumps between 1908, when the first woman was admitted to the German university, 1972, when student protests erupt, and 2020. The modern characters include a Hong Kong neuroscientist (Tony Leung), quarantined on campus, who wonders how the tree, like the babies he studied in China, learns.
The Condor Daughter, written and directed by Alvaro Olmos Torrico, is set high in the Bolivian Andes where Clara, a young woman with a blessed voice, helps her midwife mother deliver babies to her songs. Most young people in the village have left for the city below, and Clara, disturbed by the community’s patriarchal authority and superstitions, is also tempted to leave.
The Tale of Silyan is set in a northern Macedonian village, just like the one in Tamara Kotevska’s earlier feature, Honeyland (2019), the first film in Oscar history to be nominated for both Best International Feature and Best Documentary. In a town where white storks outnumber the farmers, a young man who refuses to work the land, is, according to legend, turned into a unwelcomed stork. Kotevska, setting her fable in the here and now, and without the use of special effects, spins glorious cinematic magic.
The Wizard of the Kremlin is one Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), a fictional character (based on someone real) who, behind the scenes, helped propel Vladimir Putin (Jude Law) from being a lower official in the Russian government when the Soviet Union collapsed into the all-powerful emperor he is today. With gusto and in English, French filmmaker Olivier Assays directs this three-hour intelligent epic about Machiavellian maneuvering covering continents, decades and the political spectrum.
For those readers eagerly awaiting FilmColumbia, I note three of the most popular films with Toronto audiences are in our festival this year: Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, USA), No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook, South Korea), and Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier, Norway).
Crandell Board member and FilmColumbia Co-Executive and Co-Artistic Director Larry Kardish is senior curator emeritus for film and media at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, teaches Film in the Graduate Program of the School of Visual Arts, New York, and is an Academy scholar whose book, Up on the Roof: The Passionate Life and Radical Works of Shirley Clarke, will be published in late 2026 by the University Press of Kentucky.
(Photo top: Lee Byung-hun stars in No Other Choice, a popular film at TIFF coming to FilmColumbia25.)