Kat: Festival Diary Sept 9
The TIFF diet begins. It’s not intentional, but keeping a crazy schedule means eating badly most of the time. If I was a more organized person, I would probably pack lunches, or at least stock granola bars. Today’s food count: one scone, one muffin, one lime popsicle (a free promo item from the enviro-doc Cool It), one big bowl of ramen noodles with BBQ pork and some assorted Japanese side dishes. And several coffees.
My day included three screenings – Gala opener Score: A Hockey Musical, Swedish thriller Bad Faith and Midnight Madness opener Fubar II (you’ll find my reviews of Score and Fubar II elsewhere on this very site), and a perfectly delightful dinner with the screenwriter of A Horrible Way To Die, part of the Vanguard programme. In between, I checked into a hotel close to the festival centre, where I will thankfully be spending the next ten days so that I don’t have to drag my exhausted butt all the way out to Dufferin every night at 3:00am (my life is so hard, I know).
Top three highlights of the day:
1) Seeing Lips Kudlow of the band Anvil in line for Fubar II with his wife & son right before seeing the cast of Fubar II come rolling down the street toward the Ryerson on a huge flatbed truck full of strippers, bagpipers and loads of pilsner (which they were definitely shotgunning for real).
2) Getting to tell David Lawrence (aka Terry from Fubar) that “hosers will always be relevant”.
3) Meeting Guy Moshe, the charming and down to earth director of Saturday’s Midnight Madness film, Bunraku, just hangin’ outside the Ryerson like he’s no big deal. Anyone who complains about TIFF being “too Hollywood” really needs to take a walk down to the Ryerson some night around 11:30pm.
Decision of the day that I will most regret later, when I forget just how exhausting TIFF can be: not attending the Fubar II afterparty because it’s only the first day of the fest and I need to “pace myself”. Pacing oneself doesn’t make for amazing anecdotes, but hey, I’m not as young as I used to be.
Elliott: Festival Diary #2
Kat: Festival Diary, Sept 8
The day before TIFF begins. Normally, a day I would reserve for things like getting my nails done, or going to sleep early in order to be fully prepared for the madness that lies ahead. Not this year, though. This year, I had to pick up my pass, schedule my first few days of TIFF, and attend a cocktail party. Thankfully, picking up my Industry Pass and package was a breeze, thanks to mercifully short lines and a really well organized industry department.
After rummaging through my bag and finding the Industry Screening Schedule (a handy pamphlet that’s approximately a thousand times easier to navigate than any website could ever be) it was time for the most important fashion choice of the fest. What kind of lanyard to put my pass on. This year, TIFF staff seem to be wearing stylishly thin red lanyards, while press and industry delegates have shiny black ones covered in Guess logos. It actually looks pretty sharp, but I like to stand out, and since last year’s leopard print lanyard (snagged from the Locarno Film Festival booth in Cannes in 2008) was such a hit, this year I chose a pink one with the words “dirty girl” written all over it – actually a piece of swag from a film in this year’s fest, Dirty Girl, an American indie by a first time director.
So. Pass: picked up. Lanyard: selected. Next up: trying to commit to an actual schedule for the first three days of the festival. In my capacity as Operations Manager for REEL CANADA (aka, my day job) I’m seeing a lot of Canadian features at TIFF. For the first three days, my schedule will be Canadian-centric. Screenings of the opening film, Score: A Hockey Musical, Denis Côté’s Curling, Sturla Gunnarsson’s Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie and of course, Fubar II are all on the list, as are cocktail parties hosted by Telefilm Canada, the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and TIFF’s own Canadian Filmmakers party. To balance out the Canadiana, I’ll be trying to spice my days up with whatever fits into my day. The blessing and curse of having an industry pass means being able to play fast & loose with scheduling and never having to commit to attending anything because hey, it’s not like I have a hard ticket. This year’s challenge: not blowing off early morning screenings just because I was up too late at Midnight Madness the night before.
Last but not least: a pre-fest cocktail party with a motley crew of international friends who happen to be in town a day early. The casual, raucous annual event is hosted by Mr. Midnight Madness Colin Geddes (full confession: he’s my fiancé, so this was not a difficult invitation to snag) and always draws a diverse and very cool crowd. I didn’t intend to have more than one beer, and I certainly didn’t intend to stay out until after last call, but a bar packed full of good friends and visitors (some of whom I only see on their annual pilgrimage to TIFF) was hard to pull myself away from. Instead of going to bed early, I drank a bunch of pints of Strongbow and gushed to Michael Dowse, the director of Fubar II, about how he’s directed the “feel good film of the year” and how hosers will never go out of style (for the record, I believe both of those things to be true, even now that I’m sober).
Completely TIFF-unrelated highlight of the night: receiving a belated birthday gift from two wonderful friends. It’s a “VIP Edition” Showgirls DVD, which comes with shot glasses, pasties, and a very, very glossy poster of Elizabeth Berkley. I know you’re jealous of me right now. And you’re right to be.
