TIFF's Documentary Slate Put Four Hours on Elon Musk. The Running Time Is the Argument
Twenty-one documentaries, opening with Megan Rapinoe and built around Alex Gibney's nearly four-hour Musk — a film its subject has already called a hit piece. Against a man whose native medium is the instant post, length is a position.
Twenty-one films, and one of them is nearly four hours
TIFF unveiled its 2026 documentary slate at the start of August: twenty-one titles from around the world, programmed by Thom Powers, who told Variety's Marlow Stern he is not worried about taking on Elon Musk.
He has reason to be asked. The film that will define the section's news cycle is Musk, Alex Gibney's documentary about the richest man in the world, and Variety reports it runs nearly four hours. Gibney has been working on it since 2023. Musk has already called it a hit piece.
I want to argue for the running time, because it is the most interesting decision on the slate and it will be the most complained about.
Photo: Sarah E. Freeman / Grady College · CC BY 2.0 · source
What four hours is for
Gibney's subject has spent a decade being covered at the speed he sets. The post, the reply, the screenshot of the reply — the unit of Musk journalism is something you can read while walking, and it is a unit he controls, because he can produce a new one whenever the previous one is going badly. Any account that matches that tempo is playing an away game.
Four hours is the refusal to play it. It is long enough to put 2018 next to 2024 in the same sitting and let a reader of the film, rather than a reader of the feed, notice what changed and when. Nothing about a four-hour film is convenient — not for a festival schedule, not for a distributor, and not for the audience. That is close to the point. Length here is a claim that the story is a chronology rather than a series of incidents, and a chronology cannot be answered by a fresh incident.
Gibney has built a career on exactly this kind of patience against exactly this kind of subject. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room took apart a company that had been explained to the public in press releases. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God followed an abuse cover-up in the Catholic Church. Going Clear did the same work on Scientology.
