Fight Kid made its world premiere on September 12 at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival, screening as part of the Short Cuts programme. For director Michael Del Monte (Art of Documentary), who has spent roughly fourteen years working in documentary, getting there meant learning a new form of filmmaking.
After counting down the top 26 films to watch at TIFF 2026, I wanted to spend some more time specifically on the Canadian side of this year's lineup.
The Toronto International Film Festival returns from September 10th to 20th, 2026, for its 51st edition, bringing 293 titles to Toronto across one of the broadest festival programmes in the world. And, because it is 2026, 26 films also felt like an appropriately unnecessary number to count down.
Buddy is hitting theatres on August 28, after a festival run that started at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and has since included SXSW, the Cleveland International Film Festival, Overlook, and, most recently, Fantasia in Montreal. Somewhere along the way, it also forced me to accept that mascot horror is officially its own subgenre.
I caught No Rest for the Wicked as part of the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival, where it made its world premiere and became one of my favourites of the festival. Fantasia’s Cheval Noir jury shared that response. Kasper Kalle received the award for Best Director, while Pilou Asbæk earned an Outstanding Performance Award for his work as Helge.
It has been 14 years since Casey Walker last brought a film to Fantasia. His horror-comedy A Little Bit Zombie played the Montreal festival in 2012, and he has remained connected to Canadian genre filmmaking since then, including as a producer on The Void and In a Violent Nature.
Someone’s Daughter begins before it gives us anything to look at. A tense, slowly rising score plays over the opening credits while writer-director Wiebke von Carolsfeld holds back the image. By the time the screen opens up, we are already in the middle of a kidnapping.
The Fantasia International Film Festival returns to Montreal from July 16 to August 2, 2026, and this year marks a big one: the festival’s 30th edition. This film festival preview focuses on 15 feature films that stand out across the Fantasia 2026 programme.
There is something telling about the path Sad Girlz has taken over the last few months. Written and directed by Fernanda Tovar in her feature debut, the Mexican-Spanish-French co-production premiered in the Generation 14plus section at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, where it won both the Crystal Bear and the Grand Prix of the International Jury for Best Film.
This preview focuses only on feature films, narrowing the broader festival programme down to 25 titles that stand out across narrative, documentary, genre, international, and spotlight sections. The goal is not simply to list the biggest names or the most obvious premieres, but to highlight a range of films that reflect what makes Tribeca interesting in the first place...