It looks like a landmark, record-breaking year for Indian and South Asian Cinema at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in Canada. There are 14, yes 14, Indian, South Asian and South Asian Diaspora films across sections, at the 48th TIFF that runs from September 7-17. They include a wide range, from mainstream Bollywood’s Thank You For Coming starring Bhumi Pednekar and Anil Kapoor, to Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies and Jayant Digambar Somalkar’s Sthal, A Match, in Marathi. This is an amazing achievement by the filmmakers, despite multiple challenges, from seeking theatrical release to censor board nightmares and worse: Honey Trehan’s Punjab ’95—on human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, who exposed police encounters in Punjab in the 1990s—that was selected for TIFF’s Gala Presentation, was unfortunately pulled out by the producers. TIFF earlier had 10 Indian films, but that was in a specially curated, one-off City to City programme in 2012.

TIFF has a reputation for flagging Oscar and other top awards contenders. Last year’s Oscar winner for Best International Feature, All Quiet on the Western Front, for instance, was at TIFF. Tiny Bhutan’s Pawo Choyning Dorji’s The Monk and the Gun, which is selected at both the Toronto and Telluride Film Festivals, has already been listed by the esteemed Anne Thompson, Editor at Large, IndieWire, as a frontrunner in the Oscar 2024 race, alongside Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall and Ladj Ly’s Les Indesirables, both from France. Dorji’s debut feature Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom had already earned an Oscar nomination in 2022. Despite the SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike in the US that banned actors from promoting their films at festivals, TIFF has about 70 per cent international (non-US) titles anyway. Its overall selection includes Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (opening film), Thom Zimny’s Sly (documentary on Sylvester Stallone, closing night gala), Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall and Ladj Ly’s Les Indesirables.