The Rise and Fall of the Stratford International Film Festival

This paper will examine the legacy of the Stratford International Film Festival (SIFF) and its impact on Canadian film exhibition, distribution, and production. SIFF, which ran from 1956-61 and again from 1971-6, was Canada’s first international festival for feature films. The film festival asserted Canada’s cultural presence on the world stage as part of a larger push to raise Canada’s cultural profile in the aftermath of the Second World War, and built on the meteoric success of the theatre and music programs at the Stratford Festival (SF). This paper positions SIFF within a growing body of literature that treats festivals as places of geopolitical and socioeconomic competition and underscores how the second edition of SIFF developed the concept of an audience-driven “Festival of Festivals” which the Toronto festival of the same name would appropriate in 1976.