TORONTO – When Jodie Foster began working in Hollywood as a child actress, she says there weren’t very many women around.
“Occasionally there was a script supervisor or maybe a makeup and hair person, but then mostly not,” Foster said on the red carpet ahead of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Tribute Awards.
Foster was among the Hollywood elites being honoured Sunday at the awards show that celebrates the contributions of actors and filmmakers to cinema, alongside the likes of Guillermo del Toro, Channing Tatum, Idris Elba and Catherine O’Hara.
Foster received this year’s Share Her Journey Award for helping to pave the way for women in film.
Ahead of the gala, the two-time Oscar winner reflected on how the film industry has changed since her career began more than 50 years ago.
“I grew up with brothers and fathers that taught me everything, so it was a new experience to have women (in roles such as) technicians … and eventually producers, and eventually studio heads,” she said.
“The last domino, of course, was women directors in America,” said Foster, who’s lauded for her performances in the 2023 biographical sports drama “Nyad” in and 1991’s “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Foster is at the festival this year for the Canadian premiere of Rebecca Zlotowski’s “A Private Life,” which tells the story of a psychoanalyst who tries to make sense of the death of a client.
“I went from being in only one movie over the course of fifty-some years with a woman director, and now I’ve done three in a row! So that’s extraordinary, right?”
Del Toro was honoured with the TIFF Ebert Director Award in celebration of his decades-long career that includes an Academy Award win for “The Shape of Water.”
In his acceptance speech, del Toro recalled his first meeting with film critic Roger Ebert, who is the award’s namesake, during a screening of his film “Pan’s Labyrinth” at the Cannes Film Festival, where Ebert apologized to del Toro, saying they couldn’t be friends as a film critic and a director.
“He was always a guiding light. He was always saying ‘the greatest empathy machine ever created was cinema,’ which is absolutely true,” del Toro said.
“We live in a world that is really, really different to the world we experienced back then in 2005. It’s a world that now wants to tell us, loud and clear, that art is not important. They want to insist that it can be done by an app, that it can be done by anyone and that it’s something that is just a commodity, but it isn’t,” del Toro said.
“They want us senseless, they want us separated and they want us hopeless, and we cannot allow that to happen. Which brings me to Canada.”
Del Toro called Canada a “bastion of hope in the world,” saying TIFF holds the same “cherished” principles it did when it was founded, which he said is to “make a platform in which voices can be heard from all over the world and they can be heard by … the greatest festival of any audience in the world.”
“What a centre of excellence (Toronto) is,” he said.
Del Toro is at the festival to promote his new Netflix film “Frankenstein,” which he said sweetens the award for him.
”(The award) is a culmination of 30 years as a storyteller with a movie I thought was impossible,” he said.
O’Hara is recipient of the Norman Jewison Career Achievement Award.
The Canadian-born actress is known for iconic comedic characters in “Beetlejuice,” “Home Alone,” and “Schitt’s Creek.” Earlier this year she received an Emmy nomination for a supporting role in Seth Rogen’s TV series “The Studio.”
The evening’s proceeds go toward the festival’s talent development and visionary artists.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 7, 2025.
