Twenty-five years ago today, the Toronto International Film Festival was in the middle of its 26th edition — ten days, 326 films, 54 countries, and the kind of buzzing, star-filled energy that has always defined the festival’s first week. By the end of that Tuesday morning, none of it mattered anymore.

An Ordinary Morning, Until It Wasn’t

September 11, 2001 began like any other festival day. Stars including Ryan Gosling, Benjamin Bratt, and Heather Graham were settled into hotel suites doing press for their films. Harvey Keitel, in town for the premiere of The Grey Zone, was the one who broke the silence in a foyer at the InterContinental Hotel: “Have you heard what happened? Have you heard?” Within minutes, people across the festival were gathered around hotel televisions, watching footage from New York that none of them could quite process.

At the TIFF press centre inside the Park Hyatt, someone taped up a handwritten sign: all press conferences for the day were cancelled. Festival director Piers Handling turned off the television as the first tower came down. “We were speechless. You had nothing to really say,” he later recalled. “It was a shattering event.”

A Filmmaker Watching From a Hotel Lobby

Among those caught in the moment was Zacharias Kunuk, the Inuit filmmaker who had flown roughly 15 actors and elders from the remote hamlet of Igloolik in Nunavut to attend the Canadian premiere of his debut feature, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Kunuk was watching the towers fall from a Toronto hotel lobby when it happened, and for a moment, the images didn’t register as real. He remembered thinking, at first, that he was watching a commercial.

The Hardest Call: What to Do With the Rest of the Festival

Handling and then-managing director Michele Maheux formed a crisis team and made the first decision quickly: shut the festival down for the day. Every remaining screening, press conference, and party scheduled for September 11 was cancelled, including the night’s Mira Nair gala for Monsoon Wedding and screenings of Y Tu Mamá También and Hotel. The Celluloid Celebration party was called off entirely, and the Windsor Arms Hotel donated the food meant for that night’s InStyle event to homeless shelters instead. A trauma counsellor was brought in to support festival guests who needed someone to talk to.

The harder question came next: should TIFF continue at all? Some argued the entire festival should be cancelled out of respect. Others urged Handling not to let the attackers “win” by shutting it down. In the end, the festival chose a middle path — it would keep running, but with none of its usual glamour. No red carpets. No sponsor acknowledgements before screenings. No after-parties. Corporate logos were stripped from the films entirely. The roughly 28 public screenings and 13 industry showcases that had been pre-empted on September 11 were pushed to later in the schedule, and the festival’s closing days went on without a traditional awards ceremony or closing-night party.

Returning to the Theatre

When TIFF reopened its screens the next day, film critic Peter Howell remembered walking into a packed theatre for Y Tu Mamá También — the very film that had been cancelled the night before. Sitting in a dark room with strangers, watching something other than the news, felt like a kind of relief nobody quite had words for yet. Howell would later call it “TIFF’s shining moment”: a festival that managed to hold space for grief without losing sight of why people had gathered there in the first place.

Behind the scenes, the festival was quietly emptying out. Close to 90 American films had come to Toronto that year, along with hundreds of U.S. publicists, distributors, journalists, and stars. In the days after the attacks, many of them checked out of their hotels and headed for the border, desperate to get home to their families. The festival that remained was smaller, quieter, and stripped down to what Handling called its “bare bones” — nothing left but the films and the people willing to sit with them.

Twenty-Five Years Later

A quarter-century on, it’s worth remembering that TIFF’s response wasn’t really about films at all — it was a group of people deciding, in real time and under enormous uncertainty, how to hold both grief and community in the same room. They didn’t cancel the lights. They just turned the volume down and let people sit together in the dark, which is sometimes all a festival — or a city, or a country — can offer. As TIFF’s 51st edition unfolds this week under very different circumstances, that choice from 2001 still says something true about what these gatherings are for.