Magazine Brings 2011 Print-Era New York to Toronto
Alexandra Pechman's first feature, Magazine, had its world premiere in Discovery at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 11.
The 2026 US production is listed as an English-language film with Pechman credited as writer-director, and it runs 1 hour 45 minutes, according to TIFF and The Hollywood Reporter. Discovery is TIFF's strand for emerging film-makers. For Pechman, it is a debut after television and shorts.
Magazine centres on an aspiring poet, played by Lily McInerny, who spends a summer interning at Platen, a fictional literary magazine. The story is set in New York in 2011. It follows the intern through the offices, parties and late nights of the city's media and literary scene, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter.
The cast includes McInerny alongside Jake Lacy, AnnaSophia Robb and Iris Apatow. The film was shot on location in Tribeca. Costume designer Michelle J. Li created more than 150 looks for the cast, a fast turnaround for a low-budget period piece set only 15 years ago.
Pechman drew on her own early working life. She graduated from Northwestern's School of Journalism with a bachelor's degree in magazine journalism. She then interned at AV Club and The Paris Review and worked as a fact-checker at ArtNews before moving into film-making, with credits including the Syfy series Channel Zero and several short films.
She cited Almost Famous and The Last Days of Disco as inspirations for Magazine. Both are ensemble stories about young outsiders finding their way into closed worlds of music and nightlife. Pechman applies that structure to print media at the point when it was losing ground to digital.
What makes this stand out for festival buyers is timing. Magazine arrived in Toronto without US distribution, with sales still to be settled, according to IndieWire. A Discovery premiere gives a first feature a public launch and a first set of reviews before any release date is set.
