Toronto film festival honors Penélope Cruz, Helen Mirren and Seth Rogen at Tribute Awards gala

TORONTO — The Toronto International Film Festival handed out its eighth annual Tribute Awards on Sunday evening, honoring ten actors, directors and craftspeople at a gala inside the Fairmont Royal York Hotel that doubles as the festival's largest annual fundraiser. Penélope Cruz, Helen Mirren and Seth Rogen were among the names recognized, alongside Isabelle Huppert, Rosalind Eleazar, Fan Bingbing, South Korean director Lee Chang-dong, filmmaker Siân Heder, cinematographer Adam Pietkiewicz and director Bassam Tariq.

Cruz received the TIFF Special Tribute Award, presented by Chanel, which the festival says recognizes lasting and extraordinary contributions to film. Rogen was given the Norman Jewison Career Achievement Award, reserved for a Canadian film figure whose work has had global reach, while Mirren received the Share Her Journey Groundbreaker Award, tied to TIFF's initiative supporting women in the industry. Huppert and Eleazar each collected a Tribute Performer Award, Lee took the Ebert Director Award, and Heder was recognized in the impact-media category. Fan received a second Special Tribute Award, Tariq the Rising Talent Award presented by Amazon MGM Studios, and Pietkiewicz the Variety Artisan Award for cinematography — the last three named as part of what organizers called the final wave of honorees announced last month.

Ten honorees, eight categories

This year's ceremony was the eighth since TIFF introduced the format, and it landed on day four of the festival's 51st edition, an 11-day run scheduled through Sept. 20. Unlike TIFF's competitive prizes, which are decided by juries or audience ballots, the Tribute Awards are chosen in advance by the festival's own board. Tickets to the dinner are sold to underwrite the nonprofit organization's year-round programming, making the evening as much a benefit dinner as an awards show. The 2026 edition also debuted TIFF: The Market, a new industry marketplace running through Sept. 16 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre that organizers project will draw about 6,000 industry professionals and 225 global exhibitors, with Canadian delegates accounting for roughly a third of attendees.

A fundraiser with a track record

TIFF began the Tribute Awards in 2019, choosing honorees more in the manner of an awards-season kickoff dinner than a competitive jury. Early recipients included Joaquin Phoenix, Meryl Streep and Taika Waititi; subsequent galas have feted Spike Lee, Pedro Almodóvar, Angelina Jolie and Guillermo del Toro. The one stretch of disruption came in 2023, when the SAG-AFTRA strike briefly pushed the format toward general career-achievement honors rather than recognition tied to a specific festival performance, before organizers returned to the current structure. The lineup has since settled into a handful of standing categories — actor, director, artisan, emerging talent and impact media — supplemented by newer prizes such as the Share Her Journey Groundbreaker Award, introduced in 2022 to spotlight women in the industry, and the Norman Jewison Career Achievement Award, added in 2023 and named for the Canadian director of "Moonstruck" and "In the Heat of the Night," who also founded the Canadian Film Centre.

"Each has shown a profound impact on screen storytelling," TIFF chief executive Cameron Bailey said of this year's honorees. "It's our privilege to recognize their achievements as we gather to celebrate another exceptional year in film and rally support for TIFF's ongoing work."

Who is on screen this week

The honor comes with festival real estate as well as a trophy. Cruz is in Toronto for the film "Bunker," co-starring Javier Bardem, and is paired with Mirren for an onstage conversation at TIFF Lightbox spanning both actors' careers. Mirren is premiering Anton Corbijn's "A Talent for Murder," in which she plays crime novelist Patricia Highsmith. Rogen is presenting the world premiere of "Babies," directed by his wife, Lauren Miller Rogen — three years after his production company, Point Grey Pictures, backed the Apple TV+ comedy "The Studio," which last September set a record for a first-year comedy with its sweep of 13 Emmy Awards.

Fan, whose screen career spans three decades of Chinese-language and international cinema, is presenting Wayne Wang's "Diary of a Mad Old Man" as a Special Tribute honoree; she first drew wide attention in the 1998 television series "My Fair Princess" before headlining films such as "Cell Phone" and "I Am Not Madame Bovary," the latter a TIFF selection that also won her a best-actress prize at the San Sebastián festival. Tariq, honored with the Rising Talent Award presented by Amazon MGM Studios — a prize inspired by Toronto-born actor and United Artists co-founder Mary Pickford — is showing "Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother," starring Mahershala Ali, after building a reputation with the Sundance-winning short "Ghosts of Sugar Land" and the BAFTA-nominated feature "Mogul Mowgli."

What happens next

The gala did not pause the rest of the festival's calendar. TIFF's Student Academy Awards ceremony, held in partnership with the film academy and feeding winners toward eligibility for next year's Oscars in the short-film categories, was scheduled for Monday at TIFF Lightbox. Days earlier, the National Film Board's {RE}DEFINED filmmaking initiative began rolling out short documentaries from five emerging Canadian and Indigenous directors at the festival. Prime Minister Mark Carney was expected to appear at a festival event over the weekend, a reminder that Canada's flagship film festival regularly draws political attention alongside its star wattage.

The public festival continues with premieres, red-carpet events and industry panels through the close of its 51st edition on Sept. 20, when the awards-season conversation the Tribute Awards traditionally kicks off will shift toward the fall festival circuit and, eventually, the winter's precursor prizes. For TIFF itself, Sunday's gala is less a verdict on any single film than a statement of institutional health: a decades-old nonprofit festival persuading working actors and directors to don formalwear for a cause, at a moment when the film industry's economics remain unsettled.