How Did TIFF’s Lightbox Become Its Money Pit?
You don’t discover what’s lacking at first. Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox—that unassuming glass grid, dwarfed by the big monolithic apartment protruding from the highest of it—nonetheless appears to be like the identical. Inside the five-storey house is a stunning 16,000 sq. metres containing 5 cinemas, a screening room, a gallery and a library in addition to workplace areas from which to supervise all of it: the not-for-profit arts group, which is devoted to “transforming the way people see the world through film.”
Then you catch it: The “TIFF” signal remains to be there above the doorway, however “Bell Lightbox” has been quietly eliminated. Canada’s main telecom firm bought naming rights due to a $30-million funding in 2006, again when this King Street constructing—designed to be the headquarters of the Toronto International Film Festival—was nonetheless being erected. But final summer time, Bell all of the sudden dropped its sponsorship. Now, the signal appears to be like bare, diminutive—4 tiny letters for that cavernous home of mirrors.
When the Lightbox opened in 2010, Noah Cowan, the group’s creative director on the time, claimed that its solely actual analogue was London’s British Film Institute. Last yr, the Lightbox screened 504 movies; a lot of its programming is the sort of smaller, unbiased and worldwide cinema that’s so exhausting to search out on the multiplex lately. This yr, it elevated its membership by virtually 1 / 4, and because it first opened, it has grown its income by $17 million. Coinciding with TIFF’s fiftieth anniversary subsequent yr, the Lightbox’s upcoming fifteenth is itself an achievement.
And but the lack of its greatest sponsor comes after years of inside turmoil, reflecting the exterior tumult plaguing the humanities at giant. “I think TIFF’s status has slipped a bit in the past few years with the pandemic and streaming, which are the two major events that have affected independent film as a whole and film festivals in particular,” says Brian D. Johnson, writer of Brave Films Wild Nights: 25 Years of Festival Fever. This has exerted strain on the bigger arts group that acts as TIFF’s dwelling base, which has been additional squeezed with Bell pulling its financing. At $5 million a yr, Bell was single-handedly retaining the lights on on the Lightbox, which had an “occupancy cost” in its 2022 Canada Revenue Agency submitting of $4.6 million. As one ex-programmer (who wished to stay nameless as they nonetheless work in movie) put it: “That place is a money pit.”
“We didn’t have that clear vision of ‘This is what this company is.’”
The sources I spoke to, a lot of them former workers, characterize TIFF as a dysfunctional establishment weighed down by the calls for of its outsized headquarters. Last yr, on the eve of the competition (already troubled with a diminished star presence because of the actors’ strike), the news broke that Bell had chosen to not renew its sponsorship of TIFF after virtually three a long time. Two days earlier, TIFF’s chief working officer had resigned and affirmation of its vice-president of partnerships’ resignation was additionally made public. All of this piled on to the day-to-day plight, in keeping with a number of sources, of a workers that had gone by a number of rounds of layoffs and felt missed by these above them. Ex-employee Lauren Coughlan distills the continuing issues at TIFF into two central points. “One of them is a true leadership issue. It’s really a from-the-top problem of an inability to successfully hire in upper management,” she says. The different? “We didn’t have that clear vision of ‘This is what this company is.’”
I used to be warned by mates within the movie neighborhood that nobody would discuss to me about TIFF. I spoke to 10 individuals for this piece. Among the 17 others I contacted, most didn’t reply. Some claimed that they had little perception as they now not labored there, felt uncomfortable as that they had mates there or nonetheless labored within the arts and couldn’t be clear. Two individuals contacted me after which didn’t observe up. Two others would converse solely off the report.
So, when Judy Lung, TIFF’s vice-president of technique, communications and stakeholder relations, wrote to me and stated that “it’s not an exaggeration to say most people in the Canadian screen industry have worked in some way at TIFF over the years,” it landed much less as a jovial apart and extra as an indication of foreboding. That outsize affect signifies that TIFF, in some methods a saviour of cinema on this nation, additionally capabilities despotically. The group holds all the movie trade so tightly in its grasp that it might probably’t be held to account.
“This is the thing about TIFF,” says Coughlan. “I looked around the industry and thought, ‘Well, I may have topped out. This might be the best there is.’ Where do you go after a major festival?”
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Launched in 1976, The Toronto Festival of Festivals, as TIFF was initially identified, was a chance for 3 movie producers—Bill Marshall, Dusty Cohl and Henk Van der Kolk—to showcase one of the best movies from festivals around the globe in addition to a few of their very own works. It hopped round completely different venues within the metropolis that mirrored its democracy and the style of its programmers. Valerie Laws, who began attending in 1983, remembers when a go meant you possibly can stroll into something. She as soon as noticed eight movies in at some point. “It was essentially a different film festival for every person who attended,” she says.
This home made approachability—one week, 100 motion pictures, $6 passes—gave the occasion a quaintness that Torontonians may personal and it turned referred to as the “people’s festival.” “It could crudely be called the indus- trial outlet mall of world cinema,” says Johnson, “while Cannes was the high altar.”
Things began to alter after Piers Handling turned CEO in 1994 and the occasion was rebranded because the Toronto International Film Festival. A string of People’s Choice Awards wins—voted for by the competition viewers—that translated into Oscar awards meant that TIFF turned much less a spot for locals to hang around than for Hollywood to marketing campaign for awards. This upmarket iteration of the competition now not match the places of work it was renting a couple of doorways down from Maple Leaf Gardens at 2 Carlton—which ex-staffer Nathaniel Siegler describes as “really crappy.” He was one among a ragtag group of younger, inexperienced cinephiles on the fundraising workforce prepared to work lengthy hours for low pay and competition entry; they had been changed in 2006 by a shiny new crew to entrance the marketing campaign for TIFF’s new headquarters.
A steady dwelling meant the competition would now not be a roving occasion in thrall to native theatre chains. For programmers like Diana Sanchez, who would go on to grow to be TIFF’s senior director of movie, the prospect of sustained programming exterior competition constraints was thrilling, she informed me. This would come with the Cinematheque, TIFF’s in style year-round sequence of screenings and talks centred round a seemingly bottomless archive of traditional movies. (In truth, there are about 9,000.) In 2017, Handling informed The Globe and Mail that his purpose was “to build a centre of critical study somewhere in Canada.” If the competition was to supply the pulsing coronary heart of this new group, the Cinematheque would give it its soul. But for a scrappy group that operated on a mere $13 million in 2004, a marketing campaign objective of $196 million was, to place it mildly, bold.
Toronto’s KPMB Architects, the agency behind the Gardiner Museum and Koerner Hall, had been employed to design the constructing. They labored alongside a vociferous committee of worldwide filmmakers—amongst them Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Sarah Polley and Deepa Mehta—who, in keeping with architect Bruce Kuwabara, referred to the theatres he was to construct as “cathedrals of cinema.”
“I was desperately trying to make sure it didn’t look like an office building,” remembers Kuwabara. He was in a position to hold out avenue sounds and vibrations by designing the theatres as “kind of a building within a building” and inserting concrete packing containers on the constructing’s body like “a big carton onto a bookshelf,” he says. (At the tip, Kuwabara revered Egoyan specifically for saying, “You’re the director. You’ve got the final cut.”)
But whereas this centre for cinematic communion was being born, the competition was changing into much less and fewer about neighborhood. “From the time they announced the Lightbox was going to be built, the tickets were getting more and more expensive,” says Laws. With the largest proportion of TIFF’s funds coming from philanthropic donors and sponsors (38 per cent in 2022), they had been prioritized, together with TIFF members. This led to much less ticket availability for most people. Add to that the more and more elaborate star-studded galas designed to draw patronage, and TIFF began to appear like, as Toronto Sun movie critic Bruce Kirkland put it in 2008, “an elitist corporate spectacle.”
When Laws noticed the price of her tickets bounce by 28 per cent in 2014, she lastly wrote to Handling. He despatched her again “a nice letter” and two opening- night-gala tickets. Two years later, TIFF began utilizing Ticketmaster, the positioning well-known for controversies surrounding astronomical ticket-resale costs. If you might be fast sufficient to get into common competition screenings lately, the value is an inexpensive $26 (on par with different festivals around the globe). But even earlier than resellers plump up the costs, premium screening tickets can go for as excessive as $88. So a lot for the individuals’s competition; TIFF is now the sort of occasion for which you’ll be able to resell a premiere ticket for greater than $1,000.
To take over one among Canada’s greatest not-for-profit arts organizations throughout a worldwide pandemic requires a sure degree of sang-froid—and Cameron Bailey is unquestionably cool. In February, we sat within the TIFF CEO’s minimalist workplace with Senegalese actress M’Bissine T. Diop, in a nonetheless from the 1966 movie Black Girl, watching over us, together with TIFF’s director of communications, Alejandra Sosa. Bailey wore a buttery black leather-based jacket and exuded a serene sense of management. When I requested him why nobody would discuss to me about his group, it was one of many uncommon moments his serenity flickered, however solely as a result of he was baffled. By sheer pressure of presence, Bailey transcends confrontation. This sort of unflappability will need to have been invaluable when he was named to his place in 2021, proper in the midst of Covid. “That has been one of the defining elements of my tenure,” Bailey informed me, including with fun, “It’s not great.”
I used to be there the day the Lightbox shut its doorways in March 2020, arriving for a screening of Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow solely to be turned again. (“We thought it was going to be a couple of weeks,” Bailey says.) In the next 18 months that the Lightbox was closed, TIFF membership dropped by half, in keeping with Bailey. Offers of free entry to the Cinematheque for members and free membership to anybody beneath 25 propped these numbers again up once more. “But the makeup is different,” Bailey says. “It’s younger than it used to be.” He expressed shock at so many younger individuals looking for out auteur cinema, regardless of the rising success of repertory theatres in Toronto. Bailey likens screenings of Chantal Akerman’s 1975 feminist rendition of sluggish cinema Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles to a rock live performance. “It’s become one of those real markers of being in the know about movies. And we find that young people actually want to be in the know.”
What the viewers needs is of prime significance to Bailey. “I think what TIFF means to most people who have some connection with us is that it’s a people’s film organization—that it is about the audience,” he says. His interpretation of the individuals’s competition is as a lot about what TIFF brings to that viewers as it’s about what that viewers brings to TIFF. That’s why there are such a lot of social areas within the Lightbox, from the ground-floor restaurant to the second-floor bar to the third-floor café. The act of gathering to debate cinema is transformational, Bailey says. “It unites everything we do: When people start talking about movies, you get their different perspectives, and that tells you who they are.”
Bailey describes common workplace “curation meetings” that contain “thinking through how we engage people in all the different ways they show up.” In the previous, particular person cinephiles with sharp style knew tips on how to interact these individuals. It’s much less clear whether or not that also stays the case. “Now, none of the programmers have any identity and you don’t know who likes what,” says the nameless ex-programmer. It additionally signifies that the as soon as in-depth choices of Cinematheque, with its 40-films-long retrospectives, have been dramatically diminished. Rather than, for example, diving right into a director’s full profession—revealing their development throughout their total oeuvre—this system is now extra about sampling. Bailey believes that as a result of streaming makes so many older movies obtainable, exhaustive programming is much less beneficial than introducing new work to audiences who need to be within the know. It’s a giant change for the group: Outside the competition, Cinematheque was maybe its most revered year-round offshoot. Not to say the unique aspiration for the Lightbox was to be a spot of essential examine that will additionally home the intensive archives that gas the Cinematheque. The program’s diminution is a standard level of frustration amongst native cinephiles, for whom it has been a uncommon alternative to totally interact in cinema and its historical past. It additionally limits the depth of debate, countering the group’s objective of transformation.
While TIFF was initially famend for its approachability, there appears to be an all-encompassing inaccessibility to it now. Already the title itself is complicated for most people: Is TIFF an arts group or a competition? Then there’s the placement, smack between an inhospitable row of theatres and tourist-trap eating places. “A lot of people expected that the Lightbox would change that strip of King Street,” says Siegler, who labored on the constructing’s fundraising workforce from 2004 to 2006. “That’s one of the few areas that’s been pretty much exactly the same over the past 20 years.”
Once you get previous its refined exterior, the within of the Lightbox is itself perplexing. Only on my most up-to-date go to did I discover a silver slab hooked up to a concrete pillar off to the facet mapping out every ground. That’s once I realized it’s important to take the elevator to get to the highest ground, dwelling to maybe essentially the most spectacular of the Lightbox’s rooms: the Film Reference Library. This house is so replete with archival materials that once I visited, Crimes of the Future set items had been unceremoniously strewn about. These are the sorts of objects that will have as soon as populated The Gallery, an exhibition house on the primary ground, however it turned out to be too costly to maintain it as an precise gallery and it’s now rented out for occasions. The cinemas, which seat a complete of 1,333, are additionally rented out in the course of the day; in keeping with a 2017 Globe and Mail report, Lightbox ticket gross sales usher in lower than $1 million in income yearly. (Sosa stated by way of electronic mail that they don’t publicly share the income from Lightbox ticket gross sales or leases.)
“There’s a consistent issue of ‘Are we trying to be a theatre or are we an event rental space?’” says Coughlan, who was within the programming division from December 2014 to June 2021. She cleared the rights for Film Circuit, the group’s movie outreach program, and says there have been fixed tense conferences over house. Various sources agreed that TIFF can’t appear to correctly handle being a theatrical venue. “The people who are running the Lightbox are not exhibitors,” says Ron Mann, co-founder of Films We Like, one of many few remaining Canadian movie distributors. “That’s really the problem. They don’t know how to do it.” The subject, as he sees it, arises when financial concerns dictate curatorial ones. This is especially problematic when theatres for native indie and world cinema are dwindling; the place 20 or extra as soon as existed in Toronto, now there are solely a handful. When Mann does get display time on the Lightbox, it’s restricted, which makes his job—in addition to the native movie scene—more and more unsustainable. (Fifty of 193 movies screened on the competition final yr had been Canadian.)
“There’s a consistent issue of ‘Are we trying to be a theatre or are we an event rental space?’”
Even then, the schedules aren’t launched a lot prematurely, whereas wider adjustments aren’t at all times introduced clearly, if in any respect—a current hike in ticket costs, for example, appeared to return out of nowhere. (Sosa stated by way of electronic mail that they had been introduced on the web site.) The group’s streaming service, which was created for the pandemic, was additionally quietly shut down in February. (The web site claimed the group is “shifting focus” to the bodily Lightbox; Sosa stated by way of electronic mail that subscribers had been notified.) Then there’s the labyrinthine web site. The digital welcome mat to the competition has been a barrier for years. Sosa expressed exasperation once I introduced it up, because it was solely simply redesigned in July. Guiding me by ticket buying, Bailey admitted it required quite a lot of steps, however stated, “We’ve focused on ease of use.”
TIFF’s string of high-profile departures over the previous 5 years—most notably Bell—appears disproportionate, even accounting for the pandemic. Bell declined an interview, however an announcement from Devorah Lithwick, the corporate’s senior vice-president and chief model officer, praised the competition’s work. Though Lithwick didn’t handle the dissolution of the TIFF sponsorship, two months earlier than its announcement, Bell’s father or mother firm reduce 1,300 jobs and introduced the closure of six radio stations and the sale of three others. (Lithwick stays on TIFF’s board.) In the previous 5 years, TIFF additionally misplaced its co-head, senior director, chief working officer and vice-president of partnerships—all of them girls. While there’s gender parity throughout TIFF’s management, its prime three positions (chair of the board, CEO and chief monetary officer) are all at present occupied by males.
“There were really consistent issues of people not being ready for the scope of their job,” says Coughlan. It just isn’t unusual for arts organizations to workers their larger positions based mostly on artistic experience moderately than business acumen, which is likely to be extra pertinent. Bailey, for example, began out on the competition as a programmer earlier than changing into the artwork director and making his approach as much as co-head after which head—however he was promoted to these positions. “The problem is how they let the managers go,” the nameless ex-programmer says. “There is no transference of knowledge in that organization.” This is doubly problematic as a result of, per Coughlan, individuals are usually recruited based mostly on their programming expertise for positions exterior their talent set. “People [were] hired to be senior managers—managing teams of people, overseeing other managers—without management experience,” she says. “This happened repeatedly.”
Coughlan initially loved working at TIFF when she arrived in 2014 however seen a precipitous decline inside a couple of years. This sample of preliminary pleasure adopted by excessive disillusionment united a variety of the sources I spoke to. And posts from the previous yr on Glassdoor, a job web site the place workers can assessment organizations, are per Coughlan’s description of ill-equipped management at TIFF. The phrase “toxic” seems a number of occasions. (The web site provides the group a rating of two out of 5 based mostly on 229 evaluations, whereas the CEO will get a 20 per cent approval ranking.) Repeated criticisms encompass the combination of latest hires, lack of promotion and overworked and underpaid workers. And compensation does seem to skew top-heavy. In 2022, the variety of individuals making over $200,000 grew from three to 5 regardless of TIFF shedding 60 per cent of its full-time workers and 70 per cent of its part-time workers between 2018 and 2022. “With TIFF, it’s always been kind of like, ‘You should be grateful,’” says the ex-programmer. “‘Aren’t you lucky to be working in a job that you’re so passionate about?’”
According to Bailey, these complaints could also be conflating TIFF’s year-round non-profit arts establishment with its star-spangled namesake. “Sometimes it gives people a certain impression of the workplace.” TIFF can’t match the salaries of for-profit corporations, he says. What they’ll provide the younger workers they usually rent is skilled improvement, mentoring, publicity to the trade and the sensation that they’re “making a difference.” Bailey admits that the 10-day competition’s exhausting deadline “brings a certain kind of intensity to the work,” however they’re tips on how to enhance that: “I don’t think we’re there yet. But I can tell you that we are working on it.”
I’d have appreciated to speak to different members of TIFF’s management workforce, however over a number of weeks, I wasn’t in a position to safe interviews with the chief monetary officer, Douglas Allison, the top of the board, Jeffrey Remedios, or the chief programmer, Anita Lee. I emailed Sosa, the director of communications, 10 questions on numbers and stats, however solely 4 had been answered. (The monetary data throughout this story was cobbled collectively from TIFF’s annual reviews, publicly obtainable on its web site, in addition to harder-to-access public filings with the CRA.) As an arts group that will get one-third of its funding from authorities grants, TIFF is anticipated to be clear. But Canadian watchdog group Charity Intelligence, which bases its outcomes on audited reviews supplied by the CRA, provides TIFF a D+ for public reporting. It additionally states that solely 64 cents on the greenback can be found for its applications after fundraising and administration and administration prices, which lands “outside of Charity Intelligence’s reasonable range” of overhead spending. “There seems to be this internal sense of ‘We’re just this little festival,’” Coughlan says. “We all know that arts are tricky to fund and are constantly trying to do more with less, but it’s also one of the biggest festivals in the world.”
“With TIFF it’s like, ‘You should be grateful to be working in a job that you’re passionate about.’”
Of TIFF’s $43 million in expenditures in 2022, $29 million was spent on charitable actions. That contains extremely publicized range initiatives, like Share Her Journey, which focuses on illustration of girls, and Every Story, which helps a multiplicity of under-represented teams. But what these applications really do and their sustained impacts will not be instantly clear. (Various Share Her Journey fellows didn’t reply to interview requests.) This is especially troubling contemplating neighborhood companions like BIPOC TV and Film, a non-profit group advocating for fairness in Canada’s display trade, assist with outreach regardless of their very own lack of assets. (BIPOC operates on one-tenth of TIFF’s funds at greatest and typically runs initiatives on no funds just because it advantages the neighborhood.)
What I may glean from the TIFF web site is that its talent-development applications contain mentorships, workshops and talking alternatives (and, after all, a better presence on the competition). Bailey describes connecting individuals throughout the trade for Share Her Journey, which is paying homage to his method throughout the Lightbox. “We try to open those doors,” he says. “We’ve made some progress. We can point to people who have moved through those programs and gone on to be able to create new work. Is it enough? There’s always more that we could be doing.”
In its splendid kind, the TIFF Lightbox affords one thing more and more beneficial for a way uncommon it’s lately: immersion. At its greatest, it’s a house devoted to forging a sustained relationship with cinema, one during which time ceases to be restricted and there are not any distractions.
Corey Atad, a member of TIFF who is commonly on the Lightbox a number of occasions per week, has had these transformational experiences that Bailey talks about. He mentions 2020’s Angela Schanelec retrospective, which screened 9 of the German auteur’s movies in all their static, emotionally ambiguous glory. This holistic method to 1 filmmaker’s oeuvre allowed him to get misplaced in her improvement as an artist and in flip helped him develop. “It changed how I think about cinema,” he says.
The TIFF Lightbox constructing itself was designed to be immersive. Kuwabara explains that it was set as much as choreograph the individuals progressing by it. “There’s the whole thing about seeing and being seen and sequencing movement,” he says. But what’s immersive in principle just isn’t at all times the so in follow.
The Lightbox can function as a warren—field upon field of disorientation; in some methods, it’s an ideal reflection of a company that capabilities in comparable confusion. TIFF is a $43-million field that retains tipping from its preliminary ambition to be Canada’s centre of cinema into an actual property property struggling to pay its payments, the lack of its greatest sponsor rendering the duty much more troublesome. It is a spot that initially grew out of native cinephilia however now leans on its viewers for perspective; a spot that usually launches sparkly initiatives round identification moderately than devoting its assets to fortifying a various native movie ecosystem.
In an environment like this, the place grand creative ambitions usually go unrealized, it is sensible that the very giant, very heavy hinged doorways Kuwabara initially selected for the entrance entrance of the TIFF Lightbox, had been silently changed by sliding doorways—“like you see in malls,” he says.
