Hi, welcome to the AFA podcast. My name is Brandy Collins. For the latest edition of our podcast, we are speaking with Cameron Bailey from the Toronto International Film Festival, also known as TIFF. Cameron Bailey is a renowned film industry leader who made his bones as a film critic and programmer before joining TIFF in 1990. Since then, he has played a key role in shaping TIFF into one of the world's most prestigious film festivals. Over the years, Cameron has served as artistic director and co-head, curating programs to celebrate diversity and global cinema. As CEO, he has focused on expanding TIFF's global influence, fostering inclusivity, and supporting emerging filmmakers. I was able to speak with Cameron about all this and more during this interview. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. We'll be back in a moment with our full interview.
The AFKA podcast is sponsored by Morgan Stanley Global Sports and Entertainment.
A pleasure having you on the AFA podcast. I think the best way I want to start off with this is before joining TIFF, you started your career as a film critic for Now Magazine and the Globe and Mail. Tell me a little bit about your experience and how being a film critic shaped the work that you do for Toronto International Film Festival.
Well, you know, I first started writing about movies when I was a university student at Western University and I was there as a literature student. I love books. I love stories. Discovered film in a film class and then started writing for the campus paper about film. Did that for the rest of my undergraduate career and then immediately was able to get a job for an alternative weekly called Now in Toronto writing about movies. That was a great gift. I got to write about the first Die Hard, experimental film, documentaries, a lot of Canadian movies, African films. I got into African film when I started working at TIFF as a programmer. So the combination of writing and then eventually programming for TIFF really expanded what I thought of when I thought of film.
That's amazing. Do you remember the film that you watched that had an impact on you and said, maybe I want to dig into this industry?
Well, I took a contemporary cinema class in university, the first film course I ever took. It began with Jean-Luc Godard's film Breathless, which was breaking all the rules of how movie stories were told. That was interesting to me. The films we saw in that class were everything but Hollywood: a lot of European film, Asian film, Latin American, African film. I was suddenly exposed to films that didn't just seek to entertain first. Movies could be political, explore difficult intimate relationships and thoughts, reveal something of interior life like novels or other art forms could offer. But I hadn't seen that in movies up to that point, and then I began to. Of course now people have access to all of that at the touch of a screen, but back then it was hard to find those films.
Absolutely. So going from being a film critic to getting involved with TIFF, your career started with TIFF in the '90s. How did you continue to be promoted to your different roles within the organization to becoming CEO, and what were some lessons you learned along the way?
I am still learning lessons. I'll say that much. I love that growth mindset. You know, in my job here as CEO of TIFF, I think a lot of people who end up in leadership roles in culture, in the arts, it's probably not something you set out to do. I did not know that what I'm doing now was a job when I was younger. It never occurred to me. What I've learned along the way was about managing teams, managing people, trying to lead an organization, things I hadn't really had to think about much. I was very focused on exploring film as much as I could, learning as much as I could, formulating my ideas about film and the film industry and film culture. But when it comes to using that knowledge to articulate a direction for an organization and bring a whole lot of people along, TIFF has almost 200 employees full-time and we've got hundreds more who work with us leading up to our festival every year. I have a board of directors I report to. These are all people I have to galvanize every year with the ideas bouncing around my head. That was and still is the biggest lesson.
I really appreciate that response and the honesty about how you navigate all those different responsibilities. I attended TIFF in 2021 following the first year of COVID. That was a very tumultuous time for Toronto, balancing the film festival trying to get back up and running. So what have been your approaches to navigating challenges like that? Obviously the actors and writers strikes recently, economic downturns, and how do you keep the north star of what the festival is truly about?
You know, I've learned a few things in facing the challenges we've all faced in the last several years. First thing is you can't get out of any challenge by yourself. What I learned most when we shut down the doors of TIFF Lightbox, our building in Toronto where I'm sitting right now, we didn't know how long they would be shut. We just knew we couldn't operate anymore. We were in the middle of a screening and we made the decision that when this afternoon screening is over, we're closing up. So then you have to figure out what now. That took a whole lot of people, a whole lot of discussion. Our senior team began to meet every single day. We were meeting remotely, which was a whole new thing at the time. We barely used any video conferencing, but then we were doing it as the main way we were collaborating. We had to make big decisions. We knew we would have to be online in some form in 2020, and we were able, working with a partner in New Zealand of all places, to invent and launch a new streaming platform for the festival in about three months. We didn't know we could do that, but we just chopped up all the different pieces of the job, allocated it, made sure we were touching back with each other on progress, and we just got it done because we had to. We didn't have any other choice. So one of the things I learned is you have to depend on your colleagues, your teammates. You have to make sure you've got great people on your team who are smart and aren't fazed by something going off the rails, as the whole world did in 2020. And then you just got to get down to work, keep focused on the solutions, and bring all the best ideas to the table so we can figure out the best path forward. By the time 2023 came, we were almost finished our selection for the 2023 festival in September. In late June, early July, we heard the actors are going on strike. We didn't know who was going to show up at the festival. We have an audience every year of about 650,000 people between free programming and screenings. If they think the movie stars aren't going to be here, the red carpets aren't happening, what does that do to our bottom line, our sustainability, our ability to put on an exciting festival? So we just had to get down to it and make that work too. Meet every day, figure it out, dispense with options that aren't going to work, and find your way to the best solution. It was a lot of figuring it out together with people who have the same motivation and never giving up.
I appreciate that. I've been following you since you did Matt Belloni's podcast, The Town, last year. I've marveled at how you handle the stress of this role. So what's your approach as a leader to handling stress and making sure it doesn't impact your direct reports and the talent you work with?
I don't fully know the answer to that question. I'm not somebody who gets easily stressed out. Not to say I don't feel stressed, I do, but I don't operate at a high pitch. I'm more of a calm person temperamentally. But in addition to that, what helps me is putting things in perspective. I'm lucky enough — everybody who works here is lucky enough — to be involved in something beautiful, an art form that is inspiring and transformative for so many people. We're almost 50 years old. We've been doing this for a long time, countless hundreds of thousands of people we've been able to be a part of their personal transformation through what they've seen. When you look at it that way, you shouldn't get too thrown by anything you're doing on any given day because you're lucky to be doing something that on balance is positive for the world. It's like running an ice cream shop. If you're serving ice cream all day, what's the worst that can really happen? It's the same with movies.
I mean, the ice cream can all melt and you don't have any prep. Just get more ice cream. What's the process that TIFF follows when considering what films and art to showcase on a yearly basis? Because in addition to the annual festival, you have regular programming, workshops, events, and additional screenings. How do you and your team approach that every year?
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that because not everyone knows as much about our year-round work. We've been a year-round organization since at least 1990 when we took on a library and a cinema for year-round arthouse screenings. We're doing a whole lot more now. We do a lot of talent development. We have this great program working with Jordan Peele's company Monkey Paw and NBC Universal to develop talent in the genre space for BIPOC creatives doing interesting work with genre stories. All of that is part of our overall mission: to transform the way people see the world through film. That means we have to be engaged with the creative people making and telling stories, involved with the industry. Every year we have about 5,000 delegates who register to buy, sell, acquire, and promote films. We're going to grow that in 2026 by launching an official film market. We're involved across Canada through the Film Circuit, working with small volunteer-run film clubs to help them get films and build capacity for monthly screenings in about 100 different locations. We work internationally, partnering with film festivals in India, South Africa, and other places to help them build capacity. All this year-round work, plus talks and panels, is towards that mission of transformation. The festival is the pinnacle and the most prominent thing we do, but we wouldn't fully live up to our potential if we only did it for 11 days every September. The year-round piece keeps more people engaged.
Now, you have such a high-ranking role in the festival. Obviously you're not screening every submission, but how often do you watch those films before they screen at the festival to make sure they're a good fit? And do you watch movies on your personal time since movies are your life?
In my current role, I am still directly programming our Gala section at the festival, roughly 20 films playing in our biggest house, Roy Thomson Hall. So I'm seeing many films to come up with that list. I'm also involved in other sections like Special Presentations as needed. Sometimes I'm a point of reference for a programmer deciding between films, and I and some colleagues will watch as part of arriving at a final decision. My main job now is to make sure we have the best programming team possible. I think we have one of the very best in the world, but I'm not watching as much as I used to. For this past year's festival, we received over 8,600 submissions total, features and shorts. I'm seeing several hundred in any given year, maybe 500 to 600 movies, mostly for professional reasons. But on weekends with my family, I also watch movies for pleasure. I let myself be directed by my son and my wife because they get to choose more often.
