20 Years, 20 Films: A TIFF Diary (2000-2019)

I never had more fun at a festival than the first year I attended the Toronto International Film Festival in 2000. At that time, The A.V. Club had so little profile that I was denied press credentials and went the public route, which then  involved an expensive shipment of the immense (and quite beautiful) program book and the random selection of “boxes” to determine which pass holders got to see all their first choices and which ones would queuing up at rush lines. (I was somewhere in the middle.) The good news for me was that no one had invented the blog yet—or, if they had, publications had no expectation that writers would file reports at any point during the festival. In fact, The A.V. Club was only posting online once a week, with content that entirely mirrored what was going into the print editions of The Onion. (We were also still publishing in black-and-white! On the internet! Where color costs nothing!)

From a work perspective, all I had to do that first year was see movies in Toronto for 10 days and file the 3,000-word essay that would be the only A.V. Club feature to run that week in print and online. (That essay still exists, having survived the gauntlet of ever-more-miserable corporate parents before landing miraculously at Paste, the site’s current and benevolent caretaker.) That meant 10 days of seeing a lot of great films at about a four-a-day pace—that was the TIFF of Yi Yi, In the Mood For Love, Memento, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Gleaners and I, and You Can Count On Me—and convening every night with my friends at a greasy spoon where we’d chop it up about what we’d seen. The vast majority of those “friends” were cinephiles I’d only met through Usenet and a private Listserv group, and I feel like we took the scare quotes off “friends” immediately. Those memories may be associated with the movies, but they transcend movies, too. Film festivals are still more about people than movies to me, though obviously it helps to have this shared enthusiasm. 

Change was inevitable, albeit gradual. Over time, my responsibilities as a writer expanded as did the festival itself, which moved from the Yorkville neighborhood in the city to the Entertainment District, where an enormous multiplex (with a famously troubled escalator) called the Scotiabank Theatre (once the Paramount) became a more accommodating hub. A lot of the fucking around that happened in earlier festivals—like the No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em tournaments we’d host during the back half of a front-loaded slate—became unfeasible as I started to have less time and more work to do at TIFF. At a certain point, going to TIFF started to feel like a job and not a particularly lucrative one at that, and so it was almost a relief that my 20-year streak at the festival was ended by the Covid pandemic. I haven’t been back since. 

But this year, our own Keith Phipps is going to TIFF for the first time and he’s attending for The Reveal, which will not require him to publish every day and will put him in touch with friends that I’ve had from as early as that first glorious trip in 2000. You will hear about the many promising films he’ll be seeing next week, but my personal hope is that he’ll have a good time and not feel crushed by obligation. With that in mind, I wanted to close the book on my own time at TIFF by offering 20 memories from 20 films I saw—or, in one sadly unforgettable case, didn’t see—during my two decades covering the festival.*  

“The Heart of the World” (2000) 
My first TIFF happened to coincide with the festival’s 25th anniversary, so the powers-that-be commissioned 10 short films from prominent Canadian directors, including David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Michael Snow, Patricia Rozema, and Don McKellar. These “Preludes” would run before every show, which naturally caused problems. Audiences grew tired of seeing the same shorts over and over again—the bad ones would get audible groans—and public screening schedules were thrown into chaos by fattened runtimes. Yet a few of the Preludes, like Cronenberg’s “Camera,” were superb and Maddin’s contribution, “The Heart of the World,” remains my favorite work of his, a beautiful and hilariously frantic five-minute love triangle that he dubbed “the world’s first subliminal melodrama.” That one got a silent fist pump from me the 10% of the time it popped up. 

The Gleaners and I (2000) 
Agnès Varda would have been a celebrated filmmaker no matter what direction her career had taken, but I’d argue her status as a cinephile icon started with The Gleaners and I, her personal and endlessly curious documentary about people, including herself, who find treasures in trash. The digital era was still in its infancy at the time and Varda’s use of a handheld camera to follow her intellectual and artistic impulses represented the best hope for our video future. Beyond that, Varda herself was a humble and magnetic personality, which made her appearance at the film’s public screening particularly special. In support of the film’s ethos, she and a team of volunteers passed around edible treats, still in their plastic wrapping, that had been rescued from the garbage. (I did not partake, alas.) 

Memento (2000) 
No one knew who Christopher Nolan was when Memento played TIFF. The film was tucked away in the Contemporary World Cinema section, which is traditionally a crapshoot of international fare from directors of a lesser profile. But buzz grew quickly around it—my old friend and current Revealer Mike D’Angelo championed it breathlessly, seeing it twice at the festival—and Nolan would not be unknown for much longer. He was also not nearly famous enough to duck from the spotlight like he does now, which made the public screening at TIFF especially memorable. The audience Q&A was mostly people asking Nolan to explain the plot details they completely missed on first viewing.