Constanza Burucúa loves movies, and her passion lies with Latin American cinema.
She has now turned her obsession - her words - into an incredible resource with the launch of Mapping TIFF, an interactive platform that explores the history of North America's biggest film festival since its first edition in 1976.
Complete with maps, access to open data and unique textual analysis, visitors to the site can learn about how the movies of the world have been programmed at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) over the past six decades, with special attention paid to Latin America.
Constanza Burucúa
Fascinated by how and why films produced in countries like Mexico, Brazil and her native Argentina circulate and are understood by ticket buyers and festival audiences around the world, Burucúa has relentlessly tracked movies by some of the world's greatest directors, including Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro G. Iñárritu.
For the past decade, the Western languages and cultures professor has forged an impressive body of academic work on TIFF, one of the largest publicly attended film festivals in the world.
After years of correspondence and visits to the TIFF archives, Burucúa received an email that changed everything. Attached was a spreadsheet with a breakdown of all 13,000 films ever featured at TIFF, which included country of origin and a bounty of production data and statistics.
With a hat tip to Faye Dunaway in the 1976 classic Network, she'd struck the mother lode!
"I think one day they got tired of me," she joked. "They have always been extremely generous, but one day they sent me an Excel file with the entire data set - all films ever programmed at TIFF - and I was immediately flooded with this remarkable treasure trove of information," said Burucúa. "Every day, we are flooded in data and there are all sorts of data. But we are far less flooded in organized data."
Matthew Ketchin
An expert in qualitative analysis of film, Burucúa required assistance with the quantitative work and found the perfect research assistant in the geography and environment department with graduate student Matthew Ketchin.
While not on Burucúa's level as a cinephile, Ketchin likes movies, too. Data is more his jam, and the opportunity to work on Mapping TIFF was an easy decision.
"Movies are great, but I am more interested in leveraging unique data sets, like the one Constanza received from TIFF, which is such a comprehensive and robust amount of global information that really traces geopolitical dynamics through art," said Ketchin.
Global citizens need global cinema
Burucúa hopes Mapping TIFF will "tantalize" people's curiosity about which films they are watching and in which countries they were produced. She believes engaging with international art is fundamental in how we learn new things but also develop empathy for the world's population - desperately needed in this time of political instability, ever-growing chasms in social inequalities and existential risks caused by climate change.
"We live, inevitably, in a global world," said Burucúa. "Whether we acknowledge that or not, we are who we are precisely because we live in a world that is based on dialogue. And dialogue, increasingly more, is not happening through words, but through images."
Screen capture of 'Focus on Latin America' dashboard from Mapping TIFF. (Matthew Ketchin/Western Social Science)
Burucúa believes it's great to be carried away by the tale a film weaves, but equally important to pay attention to what we are being told.
"The best films from around the world, and this is the holy grail of world cinema, are ones that strike the perfect balance between a story that allows us to identify as human beings, and at the same time, discover something about someone different from ourselves," said Burucúa.
Latin America at TIFF
While Burucúa will be analyzing this dataset for years to come, her preliminary findings indicate that interest peaked for Latin America movies at TIFF in the mid-1980s, which coincides with the region's first-ever win in the best foreign language film category at the Academy Awards in 1986.
The Argentine film The Official Story won the People's Choice Award at TIFF in 1985, an honorific that cemented the idea that TIFF is a "taste broker" when it comes to catapulting a new production into the cultural zeitgeist. The previous example was Chariots of Fire, which won the People's Choice Award at TIFF in 1981 and a year later cleaned up at the Academy Awards, winning four Oscars including best picture.
Latin American films at TIFF from 1976 to 2023. (Matthew Ketchin/Western Social Science)
Despite the meteoric rise, and a well-received Latin American retrospective in 1986, the popularity proved to be merely a blip. Films from the region have dipped over the years, with consistently only five to seven per cent of movies at TIFF originating from Latin America.
"Does that surprise me? Not really, and that is my argument shown throughout the Mapping TIFF project," said Burucúa. "I think it somehow corresponds to Canadian geopolitics and the place that Latin America plays, or doesn't play, in Canadian imagery and understanding of the world."
With recent Oscar winners for best picture like Iñárritu's Birdman and del Toro's Shape of Water, Burucúa is convinced Latin America cinema will remain relevant globally and believes TIFF continues to play a key role sharing the voice and images of the region with Canadians. This cultural connection is important due to Canada's geographic proximity and economic relationship with Latin America.
Movie posters for Birdman, Gravity and The Shape of Water. (Image design: Julide Cakiroglu/Western Communications)
"There are not as many Latin American films as I would hope, but what comes to TIFF out of Latin America is consistently strong," said Burucúa. "And even though TIFF has not consecrated any Latin American filmmaker yet, I hope they will one day discover the next big Latin American name in cinema."
