Each September, the road to the Academy Awards begins in earnest.

Before critics’ prizes are handed out, before guilds weigh in, and long before Oscar nominations are announced, four of the world’s most influential film festivals — Telluride, Venice, Toronto and New York — introduce audiences to the films, performances and filmmakers that will dominate awards season.

In a typical year, roughly 80 per cent of eventual Best Picture nominees screen at one or more of these festivals.

The first stop is the 53rd Telluride Film Festival, held high in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado over the Labour Day weekend, from September 4 to 7.

Telluride remains the most mysterious of the major festivals. Organizers refuse to announce the programme in advance, unveiling approximately 40 films only as attendees arrive in the picturesque mountain town.

That secrecy has become part of Telluride’s appeal.

Festival-goers routinely discover surprise screenings of films that go on to become major Oscar contenders. This year’s Guest Director is acclaimed British-American actress and filmmaker Rebecca Hall, who has curated a special programme celebrating overlooked classics and significant works from cinema history.

Alongside anticipated North American premières of prize winners from Cannes and Berlin, cinephiles will once again be searching for the festival’s inevitable “discovery”— the film nobody was expecting that suddenly becomes an awards frontrunner.

Almost simultaneously, attention shifts across the Atlantic to the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, running September 2–12 under the artistic direction of Alberto Barbera.

The world’s oldest film festival remains its most glamorous.

Every year the Lido becomes a showcase where international stars arrive by water taxi against the backdrop of the Venetian lagoon, while photographers line the red carpet awaiting the next iconic image.

Yet beneath the glamour lies one of cinema’s most important launching pads. Recent Golden Lion winners and Venice premières have gone on to claim Best Picture and Best Director Oscars with remarkable regularity.

This year’s Venice Biennale competition is especially rich.

Among the most anticipated films are Martin McDonagh’s 1970s-set black comedy Wild Horse Nine — which, by the way, is the Closing Gala film this year at the 45th annual Vancouver International Film Festival — starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell; Florian Zeller’s marital drama Bunker, featuring Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem; Werner Herzog’s long-awaited, Bucking Fastard, starring sisters Kate and Rooney Mara; Casey Affleck’s directorial effort, Company; Andrea Pallaoro’s The Echo Chamber, with Alicia Vikander and Susan Sarandon; Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson; and highly anticipated new works from Lee Chang-dong and Hirokazu Kore-eda.

Venice’s red carpets will be equally crowded with Dakota Johnson, Pamela Anderson, Claire Foy, Orlando Bloom, Paul Dano, Parker Posey, Stephen Graham and Phoebe Bridgers, making her formal acting début in A24’s Primetime.

Noel and Liam Gallagher are also expected to reunite publicly while promoting the Oasis documentary, Don’t Look Back in Anger.

The festival’s combination of artistic prestige and celebrity spectacle makes Venice one of the defining events of the international film calendar.

North America’s largest public film festival follows immediately afterward.

The 51st Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) runs September 10–20 and remains the industry’s première North American launching pad for prestige cinema.

TIFF opens with Sian Heder’s Being Heumann and closes with Yan Lanouette Turgeon’s Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend. Unlike Telluride’s exclusivity, Toronto welcomes hundreds of thousands of moviegoers, creating an atmosphere unlike any other festival.

Audience enthusiasm frequently helps propel films into the awards conversation, with the festival’s coveted People’s Choice Award having become one of the strongest predictors of eventual Oscar success.

This year’s lineup includes new films from celebrated auteurs Mike Leigh (Tender Loving Care), Takashi Miike (Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo), Anton Corbijn (A Talent for Murder), Lee Chang-dong (Possible Love), Andrew Haigh (A Long Winter), Jesse Eisenberg (The Debut), James Gray (Paper Tiger), Chris Rock (Misty Green) and Rebel Wilson (Girl Group).

TIFF will also showcase an impressive slate of Canadian productions, continuing its long-standing commitment to homegrown filmmaking, while serving as an international marketplace where distributors search for the season’s breakout hits.

The final major stop on the autumn festival circuit is the 64th New York Film Festival, presented by Film at Lincoln Center from September 25 through October 12.

Unlike Toronto, New York rarely emphasizes world premières. Instead, it curates what its programmers believe represents the very finest cinema of the year, drawing acclaimed selections from Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Telluride and Toronto into one strong Main Slate. For many cinephiles, NYFF offers the year’s most rigorously curated programme.

The festival’s Centerpiece Gala will be the world première of Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, starring Pedro Pascal, while Ava DuVernay’s documentary 14th, a follow-up to her Oscar-nominated 13th, will close the festival.

Rumoured selections include new films from Pedro Almodóvar, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Paweł Pawlikowski, Radu Jude, Takashi Yamazaki and Ira Sachs.

“The festival’s ambition is to reflect the state of cinema in a given year, which often means also reflecting the state of the world,” says New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim. “The most notable thing about the films in the Main Slate is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality.”

By the time New York concludes in mid-October, the contours of the Oscar race will largely have been established. Critics will have identified the year’s breakthrough performances, studios will begin refining their awards campaigns, and cinephiles will already be debating which films deserve Academy recognition.

For Vancouver audiences, the excitement will not end there.

Many of the year’s most acclaimed festival selections are expected to, and will, screen at the 45th Vancouver International Film Festival, running October 1–11, giving local movie lovers an opportunity to see many of the season’s most celebrated films months before Oscar nominations are announced.

Announced on August 26th at this year’s VIFF Media Launch,  VIFF programmers have curated perhaps the strongest array of films at VIFF in many, many years, including the Opening Gala film: Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, starring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti.

Also débuting: Cannes winners Fjord, La Bola Negra, and audience favourite, Club Kid, and so very much more.

Plus: Minotaur, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, and Mike Leigh’s final film, Tender Loving Care.

The 45th Vancouver International Film Festival Programme Guide is already online, ready for you to begin purchasing your tickets — or pass — to this year’s festival.

Purchase tickets or a pass to #VIFF 2026 by clicking here.

Each Friday throughout September, VanRamblings will publish a VIFF Insight column in the hopes of preparing you for VIFF 45.

Come October, once the festival is fully underway, VanRamblings will provide coverage each of the two first weekends — given that Monday through Thursday, we’ll be providing in-depth coverage of this year’s Vancouver municipal election —  with VIFF coverage each Friday, Saturday and Sunday in early October, on October 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 9th, 10th, and the final day of this year’s festival, Thanksgiving Monday, October 11th.

For anyone who loves cinema, September is far more than the beginning of awards season.

September announces the annual celebration of the art of filmmaking itself — the moment when the world’s greatest directors, actors and storytellers unveil the films that will shape conversations for the year ahead.