--- title: 'TIFF''s Documentary Slate Put Four Hours on Elon Musk. The Running Time Is the Argument' type: 'blog post' section: 'Watchlist' standfirst: '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.' author: 'CinePixo' published: '2026-08-20' updated: '2026-08-20' about_people: - 'Alex Gibney' - 'Elon Musk' - 'Edward Said' - 'Raoul Peck' about_films: - 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)' - 'Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012)' - 'I Am Not Your Negro (2016)' tags: - 'TIFF 2026 documentary slate' - 'Alex Gibney Musk documentary' - 'Edward Said Between Worlds' - 'Rapinoe documentary TIFF' - 'Thom Powers TIFF Docs' - 'Always Lalisa LISA documentary' sources: - 'https://variety.com/2026/film/news/tiff-docs-elon-musk-alex-gibney-megan-rapinoe-edward-said-1236827957/' - 'https://theplaylist.net/tiff-2026-docs-short-cuts-rapinoe-musk-20260805/' - 'https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurasirikul/2026/07/20/documentary-about-lisa-always-lalisa-to-premiere-at-toronto-international-film-festival/' canonical: 'https://cinepixo.com/blog/tiffs-documentary-slate-put-four-hours-on-elon-musk-the-running-time-is-the-argument' publisher: 'CinePixo' --- # 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.* By CinePixo, 2026-08-20 · Watchlist ## 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. ![Andy Grieve, Kristen Vaurio and Alex Gibney at the 75th Peabody Awards, where Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief was honoured.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/670c56da-e3d5-47a4-87fd-c980923a0315.webp) *Photo: Sarah E. Freeman / Grady College · [CC BY 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Andy_Grieve,_Kristen_Vaurio_and_Alex_Gibney_at_the_75th_Annual_Peabody_Awards_for_Going_Clear-Scientology_and_the_Prison_of_Belief.jpg)* ## 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. *Agents of Chaos* went at alleged Russian interference in the 2016 American election. Every one of those subjects had a faster, better-funded version of itself in circulation. He is not a filmmaker who wins arguments on the day. Whether the film is good is a separate question and one nobody can answer yet. But a hit piece is a short form. Four hours is a strange shape for a hit. ![August Diehl and Raoul Peck at the Berlinale press conference for The Young Karl Marx in February 2017.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/7f18f45f-3528-4266-99b4-643299a1e245.webp) ![The panel at the Berlinale press conference for The Young Karl Marx, February 2017.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/df79cfd4-a6a0-477c-a82c-09a8d54b2d77.webp) *Photos: Maximilian Bühn · [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) · [source 1](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:August_Diehl_%26_Raoul_Peck_Press_Conference_Der_junge_Karl_Marx_Berlinale_2017.jpg), [source 2](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Press_Conference_Der_junge_Karl_Marx_Berlinale_2017_01.jpg)* ## The one Powers compares to *I Am Not Your Negro* The section also holds the world premiere of *Edward Said: Between Worlds*, and Powers put it beside Raoul Peck's *I Am Not Your Negro* — which, if the film earns the comparison, is a large claim, because Peck's film solved a genuinely hard problem. He had an unfinished manuscript and an author who could not be interviewed, and he made the absence into the film's method rather than its excuse. A Said documentary has the same difficulty and a harder audience. He is a figure whose name arrives in most rooms already argued about, which means the film's first job is to get a viewer to hear a sentence before placing it. Peck's film managed that with James Baldwin. It is the right comparison to be measured against, and it is not a compliment yet. ## What else is on it The section opens with *Rapinoe*, about the footballer, and it includes *Re/Pair*. Separately, Forbes reported in July that *Always Lalisa*, a documentary about LISA, will premiere at the festival. That spread is worth noticing on its own. A slate that can open on an athlete, run four hours on a billionaire, premiere a portrait of a literary theorist and make room for a K-pop documentary is not a slate with a house style. It is a programmer betting that the documentary audience is wider than the one that shows up for issue films, which has been the quiet argument of the form for years and is now simply how the section is built. ## The line I keep returning to Gibney started this film in 2023 and it arrives in 2026. Variety describes his subject as the world's richest man and its most incendiary culture warrior, which is a fair description of someone who can move a news cycle from a phone. Three years of work, against a man who can change the subject in three seconds. That is either badly timed or precisely timed, and the running time is Gibney's answer as to which. In September, in Toronto, we find out whether he is right. ## In this piece - [Alex Gibney](https://cinepixo.com/people/alex-gibney) - [Elon Musk](https://cinepixo.com/people/elon-musk) - [Edward Said](https://cinepixo.com/people/edward-said) - [Raoul Peck](https://cinepixo.com/people/raoul-peck) - 2005 · [Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room](https://cinepixo.com/movies/enron-the-smartest-guys-in-the-room-2005) - 2012 · [Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God](https://cinepixo.com/movies/mea-maxima-culpa-silence-in-the-house-of-god-2012) - 2016 · [I Am Not Your Negro](https://cinepixo.com/movies/i-am-not-your-negro-2016) ## Sources - https://variety.com/2026/film/news/tiff-docs-elon-musk-alex-gibney-megan-rapinoe-edward-said-1236827957/ - https://theplaylist.net/tiff-2026-docs-short-cuts-rapinoe-musk-20260805/ - https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurasirikul/2026/07/20/documentary-about-lisa-always-lalisa-to-premiere-at-toronto-international-film-festival/ Every factual claim above is drawn from these. The reading of them is ours. Source: https://cinepixo.com/blog/tiffs-documentary-slate-put-four-hours-on-elon-musk-the-running-time-is-the-argument Written for CinePixo. Nothing on this page is imported prose.