The film festival circuit is broken because of the horror nerds. These dopamine chasers now inflict their limbic system on every film, cheering for lizard brain human suffering. Combine that with one sided political gatekeeping, a filmmaker on a festival podium is like a town square Inquisitor - aiming to vivisect as entertainment under the guise of moral superiority. It's why naked old women humiliation rituals like The Substance are hyped up into Greatest Movie Ever territory while doing their circuit, attracting a combination of prosthetic fetishists, convoluted feminism, and theater laugh exhibitionists. Meanwhile, the movie that seems to work the best at TIFF this year is I PLAY ROCKY - a studio movie from Amazon that is not an indie needing distribution at an Independent Film Festival. While the independent filmmakers must placate gore junkies who perverted the culture into medieval public executions, the studios are free to make emotionally cathartic material. The irony is their movie is about a making movies when movies were good, and also an independent movie about a white guy that that triumphs over a scary black guy. Try to get that into TIFF in 2026. It's hard to get an honest audience out of these things anymore. The gore junkies perverted it with the aura of a public execution with the veneer of respectability. Everyone's lying.