THE TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL THROUGH THE YEARS

Thursday, September 2, 2010

THE TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL THROUGH THE YEARS

By John H. Foote, ScottFeinberg.com contributor
(and former director of the Toronto Film School)

What began as the upstart Festival of Festivals in the mid-seventies is now North America’s premier film festival and arguably the single most important film festival on the planet. This is the story of the Toronto International Film Festival…

As Roger Ebert has written, “Nobody ever seemed to know what Dusty Cohl did for a living,” but the man was enfused with the intense belief that Toronto could support a festival, and, along with film producers William Marshall and Henk van der Kolk, he made it happen. By 1976, the trio had raised the funds to launch the first Toronto film festival, which was held in October of that year. Dusty was the schmoozer, Marshall was the impressario, and van der Kolk was in the background, quietly making the machine work.

Hollywood, meanwhile, didn’t even know that the festival existed, and one film critic for a major Toronto newspaper stated that he would take his vacation each year during it. Respect came slowly, but after hosting the North American premiere of “Midnight Express” (1978), a picture written by Oliver Stone and directed by Alan Parker, things began to pick up steam. Hollywood increasingly began bringing its films here — “The Big Chill” (1983) and “Places in the Heart” (1984) were among the more notable of the early years. That raised the profile of the event, but its programmers, to their credit, never lost sight of the fact that the fest was created to celebrate world cinema, and in particular home-grown Canadian cinema.

When Piers Handling assumed the role of festival director in the nineties, the name was changed to the “Toronto International Film Festival,” or TIFF. The zen-like Handling — one of the most brilliant men I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, and a true gentleman in every sense of the word — was the right-hand man of festival director Helga Stephenson for several years before succeeding her. More than any other individual, he is responsible for the growth of TIFF into the first-rate international festival that it is today; for TIFF’s partnership with the Film Reference Library and Cinematheque, through which the festival provides year-round programming for the city’s film buffs; and for the class with which the festival has been run under his reign. (Perhaps his finest hour came on September 11, 2001, when he deciding not to cancel that year’s ongoing festival but banished all red carpets and anything else that seemed pointless and silly in the shadow of the events unfolding south of the border.) This years’ festival will see the culmination of one of Handling’s greatest dreams as TIFF moves into its own, brand new building, the Bell Lightbox.

The most memorable things about Toronto’s annual festival are, of course, the films. I remember the explosion of applause after the first press screening “Juno” (2007), something almost unheard of in such a setting, and the stony silence that met “All the King’s Men” (2006). Movies can arrive here with little fanfare and leave with tremendous Oscar momentum, as was the case with “Chariots of Fire” (1981), “American Beauty” (1999), and most recently “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008). In 2007, four of the five Oscar nominees for best picture — including the eventual winner, “No Country for Old Men” (2007) — were TIFF films.

What I like most about TIFF, though, is the ability it affords to “discover” a film that perhaps only a handful of others are yet aware of. I experienced that the first time I saw Robert Duvall‘s seminal work “The Apostle” (1997), the subtle genius of Sofia Coppola‘s “Lost in Translation” (2003), the beautiful nightmare that was Darren Aronofsky‘s “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), Ed Harris‘s excellent western Appaloosa (2008), and, perhaps most of all, with “Che” (2008), Steven Soderbergh‘s epic, daring biopic about the murdered revolutionary.

Sometimes great films come to and leave from TIFF without a distributor, never to be seen again. At the 2008 festival, I saw one called “Lovely, Still” that featured beautiful performances by veteran actors Ellen Burstyn and Martin Landau in a story about getting older — that was directed by a 24-year-old first-time filmmaker! After that festival ended, I was so sorry to hear that it hadn’t been bought by some little studio that could help it find even a slightly larger audience. Now, two years later, I have just learned of a minor miracle: it has been. After all this time, Monterey Media has decided to release it in the United States next week.

So the countdown begins to TIFF, v. 2010. My bags will be packed Wednesday evening, last-minute guy that I am, and then I’ll be off. My girls will come and visit me on Saturday to break up the weekend, but I won’t see much of them; their presence will be felt by the mess they leave in the room. Instead, for ten days of this year, just like every year, I’ll spend most of my time gazing at a light screen in a dark room somewhere in Toronto, hopefully without the accompaniment of bedbugs. As you’ve probably gathered, I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else in the world.

Photo: A present-day premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Credit: Fest21.com.