Film critics’ mass exodus after Toronto critics association censors pro-Palestine speech

Film critics are quitting the Toronto Film Critics Association (TFCA) in droves after the association censored a pro-Palestine acceptance speech by indigenous actor and filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers. Tailfeathers returned her TFCA award in protest at the censorship and more than a third of TFCA members have already resigned in solidarity. TFCA president Johanna Schneller has stepped down.

Tailfeathers had been unable to attend the 2 March awards ceremony in person to accept her Best Supporting Performance in a Canadian Film ward. She had sent in a pre-recorded video speech but wrote to TFCA after the ceremony to point out that it had edited the footage, without her knowledge or approval, to remove references to Palestine. The section edited out said:

my heart continues to be with the people of Palestine who are experiencing this ongoing genocide, and thank you to anyone in this industry who’s been brave enough to say anything.

Toronto Film Critics Association censorship

Among the TFCA members who have left it in protest are Toronto Film Festival programmer Norm Wilner and critics Nathalie Atkinson, Sarah-Tai Black, Kathleen Newman-Bremang, Bill Chambers, Alicia Fletcher, Barry Hertz, Peter Knegt, Saffron Maeve, Angelo Murreda, Adam Nayman, Andrew Parker, Jose Teodoro, Winnie Wang, and Radheyan Simonpillai.

In an email to TFCA members, Simonpillai rejected the organisation’s excuse that time constraints forced the edit, and wrote that he was leaving because the only tampered speech was the only one by an indigenous artist in the whole ceremony:

Unfortunately, I can’t in good faith participate in an organization that kicked off the awards ceremony with a land acknowledgement, and then proceeded to minimize the sole acceptance speech delivered by an Indigenous artist.

Timing has never been an issue in the past, and certainly wasn’t when it comes to the speeches, presentations and video montages at the ceremony in question. If it were an issue, it should have been communicated clearly with the artist, whose speech seemed to be the only one that was visibly edited.

The future of the TFCA is now in doubt after decades of prominence in Canada’s film industry.

The outrage is not the first in the 2026 arts world. Author Arundhati Roy boycotted the Berlinale in February 2026 over “jaw-dropping” comments demanding silence from filmmakers over Gaza. A month earlier, the Adelaide Writers’ Week was cancelled completely because almost all of its writers pulled out over its committee’s decision to ban a Palestinian-Australian writer, supposedly because of the Bondi beach attack that had nothing to do with Palestine or Palestinians. Most of the festival’s board members resigned in disgrace. In 2025, protests by performers and staff forced Britain’s Royal Opera to cancel a planned 2026 production run of Tosca by the Israeli National Opera.

Featured image via the Canary