Day 6 and day 7 of TIFF 11 merge into one long 48-hour event.


It’s the best way to convey a sense of the festival spirit apart from propping your eyes open with toothpicks and shining flickering lights in your eyes for 90-minute stretches. 

Are we complaining? No.



We're alert, armed and drunk on celluloid.



By day 6,  festival hangover kicks in. 
Films and titles and faces start to blur, but no excitement wanes. 


Buzz on the must-see films circulate like gossip and you realize that none of those titles are on your schedule: 


Chicken with Plums, Alpis, Sarah Palin - You Betcha!, Faust, Wuthering Heights, Pina Café de flore, Shame, Restoration.



Day 7 and you’re madly playing catch-up, revising your movie choices, scratching out one title, highlighting another and scrambling to get tickets to films your media pass will no longer get you into.



The past few days I've pretty much been striking movie gold: A diabolically funny slasher-film You're Next; a sexually frank story of female escorts, Elles; a bizarre, minimalist science fiction, Carré Blanc; a darker and broodier Wuthering Heights; a near perfect character study in Tyrannosaur; and a satirical criticism of America in the well received, but ultimately disappointing, God Bless America

.

Star Struck

 

Atom Egoyan walks out unnoticed from a screening of Mary Haron's The Moth Diaries. He was reluctant to share his opinion of a colleague’s movie — but willing to pose for a photo.



Emerging Filmmakers Meet Their Benefactor



Barry Alvrich arrives at celebrity hotspot Sassafraz. Each year Alvrich, in memory of his father, Irving Alvrich, purchases 25 industry passes to be distributed to young emerging filmmakers. Alvrich covers a lot of ground as a philanthropist, a patron of the arts, a documentary filmmaker, a published author and a marketing genius. He joins the filmmakers and TIFF representatives for a brief interview, of which I'm lucky enough to host. Alvrich fields questions about marketing skills, the link between art and commerce, and a few great stories about making a documentary on Harvey Weinstein.