TIFF50: India on the move

By Pickle September 1, 2025

Saibal Chatterjee

Around the time that Bill Marshall, Dusty Cohl and Henk Van der Kolk founded that the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), then known as a “Festival of Festivals”, dramatic changes were sweeping through the Indian movie industry. In 1975, the era of multi-starrers, inaugurated a decade ago by Waqt, took firm roots in the Hindi movie industry with Sholay achieving unprecedented commercial success and Amitabh Bachchan cementing his status as a superstar with Deewar. Down South, Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth, who would impact the next five decades of Tamil cinema in no uncertain terms, debuted in the mid-1970s. In Bengal, Satyajit Ray made Jana Aranya (The Middleman), the last film of his Calcutta trilogy, in 1975 before directing his first Hindi-language film Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977), which was to become TIFF’s first-ever Indian entry. While TIFF has evolved in striking ways the past five decades – the festival dropped its original moniker and officially became TIFF in 1994, the year it hosted a large “India Now!” retrospective, Indian cinema, too, has made its way, for better or for worse, into its modern era. Films from the world’s largest movie industry (in terms of the number of yearly productions) continues to figure prominently in North America’s premier festival, representing a parallel growth path of great significance.