Canada Built Hollywood North. Now It Needs More Than Hollywood.

TIFF grew from a modest Toronto film festival into one of the world’s most influential places to launch a movie. Canada built a world-class production industry too. The next question is how much more of the stories, rights, financing and global success can be built here as well.

A Spanish film won Toronto’s biggest audience prize on Sunday. La Bola Negra, directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, took TIFF’s People’s Choice Award, while Canadian cinema had wins of its own: Sunburn won Best Canadian Feature Film and Cody Lightning’s Smudge the Blades took Best Canadian Discovery. That is TIFF in miniature: films arrive from everywhere, and some leave Toronto with global momentum.

TIFF began in 1976 as the Festival of Festivals, gathering notable films from other festivals for Toronto audiences. Its first edition drew about 35,000 people to 127 films from 30 countries. Over five decades, it became something much larger: a public festival, an industry gathering, a press event and a launch pad for films from around the world.

This year, 294 films screened at TIFF’s 51st edition. Toronto did not become important by waiting for somebody else to declare it important. It built something the film world eventually had to notice — and there may be a lesson in that for the rest of Canada’s screen industry.

Hollywood North worked

“Hollywood North” can sound faintly patronizing, as if Canadian film production is notable mainly because Hollywood occasionally remembers the border exists. The numbers say otherwise: Canada’s film and television industry generated $10.17 billion in production volume in 2024–25, contributed about $11.72 billion to GDP and supported an estimated 181,360 jobs. Foreign location and service production accounted for about $5.32 billion of that activity and roughly 97,920 jobs, according to the Canadian Media Producers Association’s Profile 2025.

Toronto alone is one of North America’s five largest production hubs, with almost three million square feet of studio space, a screen workforce of about 40,000 and annual direct production spending that has reached $2.6 billion.

The broader ecosystem extends well beyond Toronto. Vancouver built a major production and visual-effects sector. Montreal developed deep production, animation and post-production capability. Alberta keeps attracting projects with landscapes that can stand in for large parts of the continent. Canadian crews, studios, effects houses, suppliers and technicians routinely work on productions whose audiences may never realize how much of what they are watching was made here.

Canada hardly lacks creative proof either. David Cronenberg, Denis Villeneuve and Sarah Polley have been working internationally at the highest level for years, while Canadian performers have become some of the most recognizable faces in global entertainment. Canada is already deeply embedded in the business. The more interesting question is how much of the value created here stays here.

Making the movie is not the same as owning it

Canada’s two federal film tax credits make the distinction unusually clear.

The Film or Video Production Services Tax Credit gives eligible productions a refundable credit equal to 16 per cent of qualified Canadian labour expenditures. It is designed to make Canada attractive to productions that employ Canadians and use Canadian production services, and it is available to both Canadian and foreign-owned corporations that meet the rules.

That is one foundation of Hollywood North: bring the production here, hire Canadian crews, use Canadian stages and suppliers, and spend money in Canadian communities. It helped create infrastructure, expertise and employment that would not exist at the same scale otherwise.

The Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit has a different job. It provides eligible Canadian productions a refundable credit equal to 25 per cent of qualified labour expenditures and is intended to encourage Canadian programming and an active domestic independent production sector. For non-treaty productions, the rules go further, including Canadian-control requirements around copyright ownership and the initial licensing of commercial exploitation rights.

One program helps make Canada a world-class place to make screen productions. The other is built around work that is more deeply Canadian-controlled. Both create value; they just create different kinds of it.

TIFF is moving closer to the money

One of this year’s most interesting TIFF developments happened away from the red carpet. The inaugural TIFF: The Market brought filmmakers, producers, distributors, buyers and other industry players into a formal marketplace. The new Market was funded by a $23-million Government of Canada investment, while the Canada Pavilion gave Canadian-controlled companies a dedicated place to meet international buyers and partners.

For Canadian filmmakers, that matters because making the film is only one hurdle. A good movie still needs financing, rights still need buyers, distribution still has to be arranged, and international audiences do not appear simply because a Toronto crowd applauded.

TIFF has spent decades becoming a place where films gain attention. The new market pushes it further into the business of financing, selling and distributing them. For Canadian producers, the question becomes less Can we get this made? and more How much of what happens after it is made can we keep?

A reminder arrived from Washington

That distinction matters more when Canada’s biggest production partner starts talking about changing the rules. The U.S. administration has floated a 100 per cent tariff on films produced outside the United States, arguing that overseas production incentives have drawn work away from American production centres. The idea should not be mistaken for an implemented film tariff; its legal and practical mechanism remains unclear.

A movie is not a refrigerator.

A modern production can be financed in one country, written in another, shot in several more, edited somewhere else and distributed globally. Where was it “made”? What, exactly, would cross a border to be tariffed?

Canada should not treat an unclear proposal as accomplished policy, but the episode does illuminate a vulnerability. Foreign location and service production accounted for 54 per cent of Canadian film and television production jobs in 2024–25, and the 2023 Hollywood labour disputes also hit Canadian production hard before activity began recovering.

That does not make foreign production undesirable. It makes the concentration visible. A country can have excellent studios, crews and effects houses and still feel decisions made somewhere else.

Hollywood North was a compliment. It should not become a job description.

More Canadian does not have to mean less international

TIFF itself makes that case. The festival became important by opening Toronto to international cinema, not closing it off. This year’s People’s Choice winner was Spanish, and the program brought films from across Europe, Asia, North America and elsewhere to the same city. Chinese-language and China-produced films were also more numerous this year, with six Mainland China and Hong Kong productions at TIFF compared with three in 2025.

Canadian filmmakers were not merely supplying the venues. They won major Canadian prizes, and Canadian producers had a more formal business platform inside TIFF’s new market. An internationally connected Canadian screen industry does not become less Canadian because foreign filmmakers work here, and strengthening Canadian ownership does not require sending international productions home.

One ambition attracts work. The other builds assets that remain Canadian after the production wraps.

The hard part comes after the soundstage

British director Andrew Haigh made the point plainly during TIFF. After shooting A Long Winter in Alberta, with the province standing in for Colorado, he praised Canada’s locations, infrastructure and filmmaking talent while arguing that local filmmakers also need the financing to make work capable of competing internationally.

That problem is less photogenic than a new studio, but it may be more important. Who owns the intellectual property? Who controls distribution? Who finances the next project? Who owns the company after one film succeeds? Who participates when Canadian work sells abroad?

Those questions do not diminish production-service work; they ask what Canada can build on top of it. We have spent decades proving we can be trusted with somebody else’s expensive production. The harder task is building more Canadian companies capable of turning Canadian-created work into internationally valuable businesses — a different kind of Hollywood North.

Canada does not need to audition forever

TIFF unfolded this year against an unusually tense Canada–U.S. backdrop, and questions of Canadian identity were plainly present around the festival. But TIFF remained what it has become: an international cultural institution, not an anti-American rally with movie tickets. That is the more useful response.

Canada’s screen industry does not need Hollywood to fail. Foreign productions bring investment, work, expertise and relationships. American studios will remain important customers and collaborators. International partnerships expand audiences and opportunity. The question is whether Canada can build more ownership, financing, distribution and valuable intellectual property alongside that success.

TIFF offers a useful precedent. In 1976, Toronto built a festival around films that had already earned attention elsewhere. Today filmmakers come to Toronto hoping TIFF will help determine what audiences around the world notice next. Canadian screen production has already made a similar leap, from convenient location to serious global production centre.

The next leap is harder: from being excellent at production to owning more of what production creates.

It is not about stopping Hollywood North.

It is about making sure Hollywood North is only part of the story.