Since 2011, Torontonians have enjoyed free outdoor screenings courtesy of the Toronto Outdoor Picture Show.
Toronto Outdoor Picture Show (TOPS) is a local charitable organization that presents thoughtfully curated, accessible, diverse outdoor cinema programming for communities across Toronto. It is Toronto's largest public outdoor film festival, welcoming over 25,000 people each summer to its events.
TOPS is seeking financial support in order to continue offering free public screenings after Summer 2024. They are asking for charitable donations in exchange for perks or for fans to purchase a special Commemorative Audience Poster.
TOPS Artistic and Executive Director, Emily Reid completed the MA program at the Cinema Studies Institute. She reflects on how her experience lead her to where she is today.
How did your MA at CSI prepare you to helm TOPS?
My MA offered me countless opportunities for academic and professional growth (as a film programmer, as a strong communicator, as a researcher) but I think the most meaningful preparation was relationship building. I was new to Toronto when I moved here for my MA program, and I had no sense to what degree the small community that I worked with over that period would become the foundation of my professional career in film festival work. From a small cohort of 13 peers, several of these people would go on to become my colleagues and creative collaborators over the next 15 years: from Stacey Feero and Ayesha Husain who would later serve on the Board of Directors of TOPS, to Peter Kuplowsky who I would work closely with during my years as part of the TIFF programming team. Furthermore, many later CSI students became interns and eventually staff members at Toronto Outdoor Picture Show.
What gave you the idea to start an outdoor film festival in Toronto parks?
As a new Toronto resident, I saw the city through fresh eyes. Like many new graduates, it took me a little while to find interesting employment, but I knew I had something to contribute to this city, and a lot of drive to create something new. At the time, there were outdoor screening series in the downtown core, but there was no outdoor cinema in neighbourhoods, in green spaces. I wanted to create something at the intersection of my two great loves, parks and cinema, to create a cultural experience that was perhaps a bit unexpected but that felt welcoming and familiar. As a resident of the Christie Pits neighbourhood, that was the site of all my screenings for the first few years, and the original name of the organization, Christie Pits Film Festival. Those events remain a beloved Sunday night tradition, but Christie Pits is now part of a much larger family of TOPS events, in several communities across the city throughout the summer.
What do cinephiles gain from watching movies under the stars?
I like to think that different cinephiles gain different things when they attend TOPS. There are cinephiles who connect with nostalgic feelings when they get to see a beloved favourite film in an outdoor setting, their toes in the grass. And there are others who become cinephiles at TOPS: whether young or not-so-young, we often hear of people who see a canonical film (for example, Rear Window or Do the Right Thing) for the first time at a TOPS screening, and their memory of that film is thereafter forever tied to a place and time, and the people they saw it with. That's quite special, to me. Finally, it's so meaningful when attendees discover filmmakers working in our own communities by seeing their short or feature films on the big TOPS screen. Our long history of pairing shorts and features together along stylistic and thematic lines has earned us a reputation as a festival to discover new filmmakers you may not have known previously, and that's something we're very proud of.
The Toronto Outdoor Picture Show continues screening until August 25.