The Toronto Film Festival released its industry conference lineup on Monday, led by The Hollywood Reporter’s Visionaries series of onstage conversations.
Joining in the Visionaries program as featured speakers are Donna Langley, chairman of NBCUniversal Entertainment and Studios; Fremantle’s Andrea Scrosati, group COO and CEO of continental Europe; Yelena Rachitsky, head of emerging formats at Meta; Ballad of a Small Player director Edward Berger; and Sterlin Harjo, who is bringing his FX series The Lowdown to TIFF for a first look.
The 2025 Dialogues program will feature conversations with directors Maude Apatow and Raffi Donatich (Poetic License), Jonatan Etzler and indie producers Diana Bustamante, Julia Lebedev, Yulia Evina Bhara, Alex C. Lo and Daniel Bekerman, among others.
TIFF Industry conference organizes also set panel discussions on getting to inclusive productions, Latin American cinema, producing art house TV series, story telling with artificial intelligence and indigenous perspectives on creative sovereignty in film co-productions.
Toronto programmers have introduced for their 50th edition Buyers in Focus, a program to offer more access to decision-makers as TIFF looks ahead to its first-ever official content market in 2026 amid a changing and challenged indie film marketplace globally.
Besides major Hollywood studios and U.S. specialty distributors that have long done business in Toronto on their own, TIFF is looking with its planned official content market next year to bring new producers, distributors, buyers and sales agents from established and emerging international markets to Toronto.
The TIFF content market will also put a focus on content packaging and financing, after Toronto’s unofficial film market in the past saw mostly finished film titles sold by buyers and sellers. The Toronto Film Festival, set to run Sept. 4 to 14, will open with Colin Hanks’ John Candy documentary, John Candy: I Like Me.
