TIFF 2022 - Return after the Pandemic and a Look Back

I have been attending the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) for over 20 years, but my level of participation has changed radically over the decades.  My first TIFF experience occurred in the early 1990s.  Someone had given me a ticket (they were much cheaper and easier to secure back then) and I went in blindly without really knowing what I was in for.  I don't recall much about the movie other than sitting there dumbfounded for what felt like forever, watching laundry sway gently in the wind while a cow mooed in the background.  There may have been shots of the grass rustling as well. I think it was a foreign film but am not sure, since there was no dialogue and nothing happened before I got up and left.  Following this experience, I stayed away from the film festival for years, feeling that it was too artsy and esoteric for my tastes.

In 2001, being older, wiser and more knowledgeable about how the festival worked, I decided to try again--this time accompanied by my husband Rich, who is also a movie lover.  That year, we watched one Dutch and two French films.  The only one that I remember well is Amélie, which went on to be nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar and has even been adapted into a stage musical.  

Buoyed by this more satisfying experience, we continued to attend TIFF annually, ramping up our movie consumption each year.  As the festival became more popular with tickets becoming more difficult to secure, we quickly realized that the way to go was to buy an advanced ticket package, which gave us the opportunity to purchase our movies before the people buying individual tickets.  During the earlier part of this decade, the process for fulfilling the ticket package was all manual, involving several trips down to the festival site and much standing in line.  If memory serves, the process went something like this:

1. Decide some time around July or early August how many tickets you want (without having any idea what movies would be available to choose from) and pre-pay for these tickets (at a slight volume discount)
2. Wait for the movies to be announced and the booklets with the synopses and schedules to be released (around the last week of August)
3. Trek down to the festival headquarters to pick up your booklets
4. Return home to peruse the movie synopses, making a list of must-sees vs "maybes".  Include alternate choices in case your first picks are sold out by the time your package is fulfilled.
5. Juggle the scheduling to make sure you have enough time to travel between back to back movies
6. Once your selections are made, mark up the schedule guide using a green highlighter to indicate your first choices of movies, dates and times and a yellow to indicate your second choices
7. Package up your selection book in the envelope provided and return to the festival headquarters to drop off your picks
8. Your envelope will be placed into the next available numbered box that starts at 1 and increments up to as many boxes are needed to handle all the packages purchased
9. About a week or so later, there is a random draw to determine the starting box number.  The ticket packages are then fulfilled beginning with the packages in that box number, continuing to the last number, then wrapping back again to the first box until all the boxes are processed
10. Yet another visit to the headquarters is required to pick up your physical tickets.  This is already the third trip down, and it is not even a guarantee that you receive all your desired movies
11. If you happen to get get a bad draw resulting in your package being processed towards the end, then it is likely that some or most of the movies you selected are already sold out.  In this case, you will be given vouchers to redeem your tickets for whatever movies are left

I remember how nerve-wracking it was waiting to see which box number was drawn, relative to the one we were assigned.  One year the worst-case scenario happened and we ended up being the LAST box to be processed.   That year we did not get most of our picks and were left to select from the dregs of movies that we didn't really want to see.

By the end of the decade, TIFF had moved to online ticketing which eliminated the first two trips down to the Festival headquarters to pick up the schedule and drop off our picks.  It is still a lottery system to determine what your timeslot was to be able to purchase online.  At this point, Rich and I were both still working and therefore had limited time to watch movies during the festival.  We would usually buy a package of 10 tickets which gave us 5 movies each.  One year, we took a "TIFF holiday" and scheduled a full week of vacation during the festival, allowing us to watched 10 movies each.  

When Rich and I both retired in 2012, we celebrated by jumping full-throttle into the festival-going scene.  As luck would have it, our friend Peter had just become a TIFF patron donor, which provided him with a much earlier package fulfillment window,  practically guaranteeing that all selected films would still be available.  I quickly struck a deal with Peter whereby I would use his purchase window to buy both his and our tickets.  This was a mutually beneficial arrangement since I would be the one to put up with the frustrating technical difficulties that continues to plague the TIFF website since its inauguration, and go through the tedious task of searching for and selecting all the movies.  That year and for the next three years, Rich and I were watching 25-30 movies each in the 11-day span of the festival.

In 2016, Peter increased his TIFF membership level to Gold Patron status which gave him access to join the Press and Industry (P&I) screenings so that he no longer needed to purchase tickets.  He was allowed to specify a co-member who would have the same access and kindly assigned it to me.  This really allowed me to ramp up my movie watching even further, since I no longer needed to purchase tickets.  With this pass, I was able to watch between 30-40 movies each festival.  Unfortunately Rich did not have the same access, so by the following year, we decided to purchase our own Gold Patron membership and soon, Rich was matching my viewing capacity.

While I have forgotten most of the movies that I've watched over the years, there are a few memorable ones that I recall to this day.  The 2003 French comedy La Grande Seduction (later remade as Seducing Doctor Lewis) is still one of the sweetest and funniest movies that I have ever watched.   The Japanese drama about a high-school girl band who sing the titular song "Linda, Linda, Linda" (2005) created such an earworm that Rich and I still spontaneously start singing the chorus.  Sunshine on Leith (2013), a jukebox musical based on the songs of the Proclaimers is one of my favourite movie musicals and one of the first TIFF movies that I have been at where the crowd leapt up for a long standing ovation at the end.  I can't be sure, but I think we also watched the Chinese gangster/cop thriller Infernal Affairs (2002) at the festival and its jaw-droppingly poignant ending still stays with me.  The Americanized remake The Departed starring Leonardo DiCaprio is a pale imitation.  

Rich and I enjoyed our Patron Gold status for the next two years, waltzing into press screening after press screening, sometimes watching up to 5 movies per day.  It takes a significant amount of energy and concentration to watch so many movies in such a short span of time, so I am not sure how long we could have sustained this pace at any rate.  But in 2019, TIFF made a move without warning to change the Patron member experience that severely limited our access and complicated our ability to get into movies.  This soured the relationship and angered the group of patron members that paid a hefty "donation" to TIFF and expected the promised rewards in return.

Rich was especially incensed and had vowed not to renew our patron membership unless TIFF rectified the situation and restored our previous access. While the festival made a few weak gestures to try to mollify the patrons, they were not going to be enough to keep our loyalty.  We had already decided that for the 2020 festival, we would buy the smallest level of membership instead, which would still let us make movie selections before the non-members.  Then the pandemic hit!

In 2020, there was no in-person festival.  TIFF offered about 50 movies to be screened digitally but the choices were so sparse and not to our taste that we just didn't bother.  The 2021 Festival was a hybrid of both digital and in-person screenings with over 100 films on offer.  Still in the height of COVID, we did not want to brave in-person crowds but tried to dip our toes back into the festival scene by purchasing a 3-pack of digital films.  No longer being members, we had a very late selection time and by then most of the movies were sold out.  We felt deja vu from our early years!  It took some doing, but we finally settled on 3 movies that would not have been our first choices, and actually enjoyed one of them more than we expected.

The 2022 festival is mostly back to normal with over 240 films which would all have in-person screenings, although this was still down from the pre-pandemic numbers that totaled over 300.  The movie stars, gala events and Q&A sessions are all back.  There is still a very minor digital component of the festival consisting of smaller movies with less prestige.  It has been 3 years since we last took part in the in-person TIFF madness and we are a bit surprised to realize that we didn't really miss it.  We have grown accustomed to being outdoors to enjoy the pleasant climate of early September.  So initially Rich and I did not intend to participate in the festival at all this year, or if we did, then at most we would rent a digital movie.

This changed when we got a pleasant surprise from a woman from California that I met in line and struck up a conversation with at the festival years ago. We had kept in touch with throughout the seasons and have become good friends.  Every year we would try to find space within our intersecting movie schedules so that we could meet up downtown for lunch, dinner or at least a coffee.  This year, she was returning to the festival after the same 3 year absence and had a few spare tickets from her advanced ticket package that she could give to us.  So Rich and I jumped back into the festival scene, speed-reading from hundreds of synopses to select a couple of movies to watch.

Our first pick was the South African comedy "The Umbrella Men" which is as much a love letter to Cape Town as it is a caper and heist movie.  Estranged son Jerome returns for his father's funeral and is burdened with the huge debt that is attached to his father's Jazz club.  Faced with the prospect of losing his family's legacy to an unscrupulous land developer, Jerome hatches a plot to rob the local bank during the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival which occurs on January 2 each year.  

This festival has a long history in Cape Town.  It features a lively musical parade where troupes of performers and musicians (i.e. minstrels) sing and dance down the street with painted faces, dressed in colourful, flamboyant costumes while carrying umbrellas, with some playing musical instruments.  Also known as Kaapse Klopse or once shamefully as the "Coon Carnival", the festival dates back to the 1600s when slaves were given one day of freedom to celebrate and party amongst the Dutch colonists.  In the current day, the festival continues as a celebration of the end of slavery and includes competitions between the troupes.

Just like Cape Town, the Carnival acts as a character that is integral to the plan for the bank heist.  Despite being billed as a caper movie, the film is fairly slow and low key for a good portion of the run time.  When the planning and execution of the heist finally gets going, the details are rushed and a bit convoluted and confusing to follow.  A few plot points are left hanging as well.  Putting all that aside, you can just appreciate the beautiful cinematography that highlights the city's charms and fill your senses with the vivacious, joyful sights and sounds of the festival.

During the Q&A, South African director John Barker talked about how it took him over 15 years to make the movie, which he needed to film during the actual Carnival so that he could use the actual minstrel groups as background rather than needing to recreate the festival using extras.  Due to loss of funding and other factors, the film continued to be delayed.  He mentioned how at one point, they had South African actor/comedian Trevor Noah all lined up to star in the film but that was the exact time when Noah was named as host of the Late Show.  When Noah's name was mentioned, the entire audience gasped, causing the actual lead actor Jacques De Silva to mockingly protest as if to say, "You didn't do so bad to end up with me!"  Given his smouldering good looks and sexy demeanor in the movie, I don't think anyone in the audience was really complaining.

We picked our second movie from the selections that our friend had already made, so that we could watch a film with her.  Our choice was the American movie Susie Searches, a comedy/thriller about a shy, geeky, "Nancy Drew wannabe" college student who hosts a true crime podcast on which she documents her progress as she tries to solve cold cases.  Hoping to increase followers, Susie sets out to find a popular fellow student, Jessie, who has vanished.  When she succeeds in locating him while the police have failed, both she and Jessie are propelled into "Insta-fame" and notoriety, leading to unforeseen and unfortunate results.

We didn't know much about this movie and were not sure what to expect.  As the movie starts with sunshine, bright tones and a peppy, enthusiastic Susie flashing her large smile that is covered with colour-striped braces, you think that you are in for a light-hearted young-adult afternoon special.  This soon changes as her investigations lead to darker scenes.  Suddenly you feel like you are in a horror movie with creaking doors and ominous music that is laid on a bit thick.  The movie plays as a bit of a satire, warning of the unhealthy need of today's society for fame, recognition and popularity.

This movie has a smart script and excellent acting by all the cast, but especially actress Kiersey Clemens, who plays the role of Susie perfectly, subtly showing all the complexities of her personality.  When asked how she developed all the quirks and ticks in Susie's behaviour, Kiersey replied that director Sophie Kargman (who also wrote the script) incorporated many of Kiersey's own natural tendencies, but that the braces were the key.  When she put on those braces, she suddenly became Susie. 

We thoroughly enjoyed Susie Searches, finding it a lot of fun to watch and all the more gratifying since we did not come in with any preconceived expectations.  One of the joys of TIFF is being able to watch a smaller, lesser known movie that might not normally cross our paths, and discovering a hidden gem.

It has been a few years since Rich and I have been back at TIFF in the midst of the general public, as opposed to watching screeners with the press and industry crowd, or digital movies at home.  There are some aspects that I have missed and others that I don't miss at all.  I definitely do not miss the long waits in line in order to able to secure a seat towards the back of the theatre where I like to sit.  I whiled away the time working on my crocheting while Rich did puzzles on his phone, but my poor back did not appreciate all the standing.  I also didn't miss being forced to repeatedly watch the same commercials prior to every public screening.  I only did it twice this year but already found it annoying.  I don't know how I endured this when I was watching 20+ movies.  I must be getting less patient as I get older.

Yet, I found that I did miss the buzz and excitement of watching an enjoyable film with a large audience, as well as the witty repartee and insightful information that you can sometimes receive from an especially good Q&A session. (Unfortunately, this is not the case for all Q&As).  I think our days of watching 30+ movies over 11 days are over, but I have reignited my desire to be part of the festival scene again.  Let's see what next year brings.