What do you want from the Toronto International Film Festival? Are you a lunch-bag-toting, six-films-a-day-pass junkie with a running list of favourites that never got released in North America? Are you a neck-craning superfan who lolls in the driveway of the Four Seasons Hotel by day and sprints down to Roy Thomson Hall each night, cellphone camera at the ready to snap George or Oprah's noggin?
For Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, "it's still all about discovery." He's been working TIFF since 1979, "back when I used to play Wayne Clarkson in tennis to see which of us would pay to fly in the stars of our films," he says. (He claims he always won.) He'll play his annual hockey game with Jim Cuddy, and squeeze in an old-pals dinner, maybe at Bistro 990, with Clarkson and Helga Stephenson.
He and two colleagues will be promoting Sony Pictures Classics' slate, which includes A Prophet, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes; The White Ribbon, about the grassroots of fascism from director Michael Haneke; and An Education, one of the must-sees of '09.
The great advantage to launching a film at TIFF, Bernard says, is that everyone on the continent gets excited about it at the same time: "The festival draws most of the North American media. So you can have your stars sit with everyone from the small Milwaukee Journal to Roger Ebert, who's the most-read critic in the U.S."
As well, Bernard is looking for films to buy. "There's such wide variety in Toronto, it's like a giant buffet," he says. "Our only mandate is: We buy what we like, and what we think we can make work in the marketplace." Though he says buyers will be more cautious this year - "You don't want to make mistakes in this market. A lot of small companies have disappeared in the last few years, many because they spent too much. I don't think you'll see a lot of bidding wars. The days of 'Let's get everyone in a room to fight over this' are no more" - he admits that he and everyone else will be sniffing for that breakout hit. "A movie like The Wrestler, I don't see it yet, but it may emerge," Bernard says. "It usually does."
For Hussain Amarshi, president of Mongrel Media, the 15-year-old Canadian distribution company that handles Sony Pictures Classics films as well as others, TIFF is about seeing how his titles will play in front of audiences. "I'm particularly keen to see the response to An Education, and to two Canadian films, Cairo Time [a gentle love story starring Patricia Clarkson]and Cooking with Stella [an Upstairs, Downstairs-type comedy set in New Delhi] He's also going to be navigating a new distribution landscape, with fewer American mini-majors - three were shut down in the past year or so: Picturehouse, Warner Independent and Paramount Vantage - and more ambitious Canadian distributors, including E1 and a revamped Alliance Atlantis.
Mongrel's representing 10 films this year, down from 15 in '08. And instead of throwing their customary big corporate party, this TIFF they're focusing instead on smaller, film-based fetes. But some things haven't changed. Amarshi's still on the lookout for films to buy. He made sure, as he always does, to have all his clothes dry-cleaned in advance. And he's still delighted by the idea of welcoming friends and business associates from around the world to his hometown. "Toronto is a cosmopolitan city, but for the next six days, it's dramatically more so," he says. "You bump into people you know from Cannes or Berlin on Bloor Street. The whole world is here. It's magical."
For Stuart Ford, the head of IM Global, a Hollywood-based international sales-and-distribution company, TIFF is about selling: selling his four diverse titles ( A Single Man, the directorial debut of former Gucci head Tom Ford; The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, with Robin Wright Penn and Blake Lively playing the title character at different ages; Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, from festival favourite Don Roos; and the exploitation film Bitch Slap, a Midnight Madness entry) to audiences and to the press, and in some cases, selling international rights.
"I love Toronto, because it's a cosmopolitan cinematic melting pot, but with all possible comforts and efficiencies," Ford says. "All the festivals we attend, in Cannes, Venice, Berlin, London, have their charms. But there's a convenience and slickness at TIFF that's very conducive to doing business." So well-trodden is Ford's path between the Varsity Cinemas and the Four Seasons that, he says, "My one ritual every year is to lament that I didn't get to see more of the city."
Ford agrees that we'll see a "more streamlined industry hitting the ground in Toronto this year. In the past 12 months, there's been shrinkage, both in the number of companies making films and the number of films being made," he says. "But it's a resilient business. I'm expecting Toronto to signal signs of recovery in the marketplace."
And for me? I'm looking, as always, for moments of truth. I'm hoping for a chance encounter that gives me goosebumps, as happened in my final TIFF screening last year, where the gracious man I chatted with turned out to be Brian De Palma. I'm hoping for that rare unguarded flash when an actor says something personal enough to reveal something universal - like the time Dustin Hoffman said of his children leaving home for university, "Nobody tells you about the empty bedrooms," and his eyes filled with tears. (I can't tell you how many people I've mentioned that to when their kids fly off, and it's utterly true.)
I'm hoping for a film that makes my hair stand on end, and for a collection of them that shows us where we are as humans. So far, the ones I've seen are suffused with a sense of loneliness, of people fighting very hard simply to get by. Maybe it's just my state of mind (and credit-card bills).
But that's to be expected, because no matter what you see or to whom you talk at TIFF, your most profound dialogue is ultimately with yourself. And your most lasting memories are those that made you feel - subtly, in the flicker of a frame - changed.
Johanna Schneller