LUCID FORGE

The year 2008 marked the first time I ever made the commitment to go down to the Toronto International Film Festival as a full-blown patron. The fist, and the last, time I went was in 2002, and that’s only because somebody I worked with at Zellers got tickets from their dad for a show and they were too busy or otherwise unwilling to see. I didn’t care. I just wanted to go. Heck, I remember when it was called the Festival of Festivals, a little Canadian outfit that looked fun and glamorous, long before it became the Goliath of North American cinema. The place where Oscar-winners are made or broken.

The year 2008 marked the first time I ever made the commitment to go down to the Toronto International Film Festival as a full-blown patron. The fist, and the last, time I went was in 2002, and that’s only because somebody I worked with at Zellers got tickets from their dad for a show and they were too busy or otherwise unwilling to see. I didn’t care. I just wanted to go. Heck, I remember when it was called the Festival of Festivals, a little Canadian outfit that looked fun and glamorous, long before it became the Goliath of North American cinema. The place where Oscar-winners are made or broken.

Naturally, as my luck goes, it was a controversial year. On the first Saturday of the fest, also my first day there, Bruce Kirkland wrote a kind of polemic in the Toronto Sun calling TIFF “an elitist corporate spectacle” and that the festival organizers should “give the Toronto film festival back to the people.” I don’t know a lot about the politics behind the scenes, although I will concede a few things I gathered from my point of view.

First, the policy new for this year that allows donors to get access to tickets before everyone else. Yeah, toss it. I read a blog on the TIFF website that went on about the free market saying that this is the nature of all artistically-related festivals; they need sponsors to run and they need the money to cover all aspects of their execution from paying for films to paying for staff to promotion. I appreciate all that being currently involved in organizing a film festival myself here in Guelph, but really, do sponsors and donors really need a greater incentive to give. This is TIFF!

And besides, you’ve got to appeal to the people because donors and corporate sponsors are great, but without the buzz on the street, the line-ups and the rat race for last minute tickets, the fest loses something special. Yes, I said the line-ups as a positive thing, although there were times my patience were strained. It’s par for the course really, I was in lines that went around two or three blocks, usually at the Ryerson Theatre. The line at the Yonge-Dundas AMC always looked long, but in my experience, length was deceiving and the wait never very long. My longest wait in line was at the Winter Garden for Synecdoche, New York, which didn’t let we the people in until 8:45 and only after the celebrities and VIPs went past.



Yes, the celebrities; a great source of excitement and an indubitable pain in the rump. It’s a feather in the cap for Toronto to say they’re paying host to Brad Pitt, Adrien Brody and the rest of the Hollywood gang, but in a way, it feels like that’s what the festival’s become all about. I was unfortunate enough to toggle past an episode of Entertainment Tonight Canada last week as Jann Carl and Cheryl Hickey gabbed on about who had the biggest crowd at their movie: Brad Pitt or Jennifer Aniston? You want to know about the movies themselves, you can’t watch any of the TV coverage, because talking about movies at a film festival defeats the point while celebs are nearby.

But there were people at the festival not even remotely concerned abut celebrities, or movies for that matter. Back in the Synecdoche line environmentally-minded young people from ecoSanity were handing out slips of info about TIFF’s lack of environmental policy. They belied the festival’s carbon footprint, impacted by all those flights, limos and SUVs, as well as the fact that TIFF promotes “a culture of excess.” I got the feeling that this subtle protest wasn’t reaching a lot of people in line, at least not as much as TIFF’s anti-pirating message. Every time the warning flashed at every screening, a small contingent always growled “Arrrrr,” and this number only increased as the festival carried on.


But the best part of any festival is the discovery. I wrote about every movie I saw, save one: New York, I Love You. It was a preview screening and we, the members of the media in attendance, were asked to refrain from writing about it until the completed print is done next year. It’s too bad because I really enjoyed it. Perhaps not as much as its predecessor Paris Je t’aime, but still it was a really great continuation of the “Cities of Romance” series which will next tackle Shanghai and Jerusalem. I look forward to seeing the finished product in ’09.

And that’s what I really love about this film festival, and indeed, any film festival: getting to see something still to be released or something that may never be widely released. I had no interest in squandering one of my tickets on something like Burn After Reading or Ghost Town. Films I know with absolute certainty will be coming to a theatre near me in the next couple of weeks. Although many a screening came with the benefit of hearing from the directors, actors and other artists in attendance; whether it’s Bill Maher launching into a pre-Religulous tirade about Sarah Palin or Patton Oswalt joke-heckling the director of The Dungeon Masters.



But despite TIFF’s problems, which I think were adequately laid out and addressed in Mr. Kirkland’s column, the experience is unlike any other. There’s nothing quite like racing from theatre to theatre, trying to beat the line-ups, trying to time your schedule perfectly, and then talking to fellow festival goers in line about the movies they’ve seen and what they’re up to and what they like. Despite the corporatism, the celebrities, the ticket issues and the doomsday environmental considerations, it was still a good time. And in the end, isn’t having fun what it’s all supposed to be about?