The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is planning to give an Israeli feature-length film its world premiere at the 2026 festival.
It shouldn’t, nor should it have screened the Israeli films it did in 2024 or 2025. Instead, it should pull this year’s film and ban others going forward.
These statements aren’t based on my opinion, though I agree with them. Instead, they’re based on TIFF’s past declarations.
In March 2022, TIFF announced a suspension of “film organizations and media outlets supported by the Russian state, as well as Russian cultural ambassadors and delegations related to our Festival.” The festival has since upheld the suspension, failing to screen any films produced in Russia.
In making and standing by this decision, TIFF announced it’s a festival willing to determine programming based on global conflicts. As such, TIFF should suspend Israeli films if doing so makes sense according to the logic it used to justify effectively banning Russian ones.
It does.
The central question is whether or not Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the threshold for TIFF to respond with programming restrictions.
They clearly do, given that they’re worse than Russia’s in Ukraine, by any conceivable metric (particularly when you consider that TIFF responded to the Russian invasion a week after it began but has watched the horrors in Gaza unfold for nearly three years).
The latter conflict is a war between two states with standing militaries while the former is a genocide being committed by a nuclear-armed state against an occupied people.
Consequently, TIFF should impose at least the same level of restrictions on the Israeli film industry as it has placed on the Russian one, including banning films supported by Israeli state-funded institutions from the festival.
That ban would include Our Loves, the Israeli feature-length film receiving its world premiere at this year’s festival (which was directed by a guy who moved from New York to Israel to join its military and reportedly spends two-thirds of its runtime depicting the events of Oct. 7, 2023, from the perspective of several Israelis).
This is because the film was produced in Israel with the support of two organizations that cumulatively received at least $148 million in funding from Israel’s Ministry of Culture and Sport from 2017 to 2024. The ministry’s logo is also included at the end of the film’s trailer.
The two other Israeli films screened at the festival since 2024 also received support from the Israeli government. As such, neither film should have been accepted.
In April 2024, TIFF issued a statement that seemed to be indirectly addressing the issue of whether it would include Israeli films in that year’s festival, the first since the Gaza genocide began.
It includes gems such as claims that in “recent months” TIFF has been “questioning its role as a cultural institution in engaging with geopolitical conflicts” and that it considers films “first and foremost, on their creative merits.”
In reality, TIFF determined its role in engaging with wars when it suspended Russian films that enjoy state funding, and put creative merits on the back burner in doing so.
I asked TIFF why they haven’t subjected the Israeli film industry to the same sort of restrictions they’ve put on the Russian one. They didn’t respond.
Their choice is a consequential one, at least according to the Israeli film industry.
The director of the Israeli film that screened at the 2024 festival told The Hollywood Reporter the TIFF invite could “break the curse” on Israeli films, referring to an alleged boycott, and noted foreign distributors and other festivals began reaching out upon hearing about it.
After TIFF’s announcement that Our Loves would be premiering at this year’s festival, the CEO of a production company behind the film claimed it “succeeded in breaking through the walls of the reprehensible boycott directed at Israeli cinema” because TIFF is allowing it to be “presented on one of the world’s most important and prestigious cinematic stages.”
The marketing and distribution head of another one of the film’s production companies called TIFF choosing the film a “significant statement,” and said the company is “pleased to see that the boycott of Israeli cinema is gradually crumbling.”
By continuing to feature Israeli films, TIFF is refusing to adhere to a precedent it established when it effectively banned Russian ones. In doing so, TIFF is helping the Israeli film industry overcome whatever sort of boycott it may have faced in response to the genocide in Gaza.
