Piers Handling has been the director of the Toronto International Film Festival since 1994 and was formerly the deputy director of the Canadian Film Institute. He has organized major retrospectives of Canadian, Latin American, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Hungarian cinema as well as creating retrospectives of Canadian cinema for the Sundance Film Festival, and festivals in Havana, London, and Washington, D.C. Handling has written extensively on Canadian cinema and has been published in numerous film journals. His publications include The Films of Don Shebib and The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg. He has been climbing since he was 16 in the Alps and Nepal and is a collector of mountain literature.