By Leonard Klady Klady@moviecitynews.com
Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie: Toronto 2014 – Getting Started
The time has come the Walrus said to think of many things
Of shows and slips and entertainment tax
Of Cabbagetown and King Street
Let’s just dub this ditty Blabberwocky. Somehow it felt apt as I girded myself for the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival. Naturally my Canadian content level has risen in recent days and came into focus last week when Telefilm Canada hosted a pre-fest event for journalists and buyers in Los Angeles.
Apart from product reels and a limited bar the ‘do also had a healthy supply of TIFF’s program book … or rather tome. To the event’s credit it’s developed a rather good system of press and industry screenings that run parallel to the public showings. The veteran TIFFer can keep to the P&I projections with a couple of regular screenings tossed in to mingle with the hoi polloi.
The daunting aspect is that there are roughly 300 features screened with the majority world or North American premieres. So I’ve become rather adept at avoiding a game strategy until the very last moment. That and thoughts of maple leafs brought back memories of (Winnipegger) Richard Condie’s brilliant animated short Getting Started. For the uninitiated the focus is on a pianist prepping for a big concert. Except he finds endless reasons not to prep from adjusting the ideal height of his piano bench to snack breaks, telephone calls and gazing out at the view outside his window. Many of us are convinced Condie is a peeping tom who found a metaphor for our lives.
Toronto it’s fair to say has the product. The list of auteur offering – domestic and foreign – runs the gamut from (Roy) Andersson to Zanussi. It would be a cake walk to see three or four films a day by filmmakers with a track record such as Godard, Cronenberg, Bennet Miller, Francois Girard, Jason Reitman, Raoul Peck, Bent Hamer, Nuri Bilge Ceylan … you get the picture. The discoveries are a little harder to unearth but circumstances this year may help out in that department; certainly the dozens of email entreaties from more publicity firms than our in the heavens only go so far to that end.
Rather dramatically in late July Toronto artistic director Cameron Bailey announced (along with the unveiling of its initial slate) that any films debuted during the Labor Day weekend Telluride Film Festival would not be screened during TIFF’s opening weekend.
It’s not revealing any secrets that Toronto has evolved into a very front-loaded festival. It also doesn’t take a brain surgeon to suss out that producers, filmmakers and studios with the greatest heft want their picture screened early for maximum attention from the international media. Toronto runs 11 days but historically around day six there’s already a palpable exodus of the mainstream industry and press contingents.
