In last month's Cinema In Brief, I had the chance to chat with filmmaker Peter Lynch and ask him about some of his experiences at the Toronto International Film Festival this year. Since then, I've had the opportunity to talk to a few more filmmakers whose films debuted at TIFF, and would like to share some of their thoughts with you.

So today, in this small update to Cinema In Brief: TIFF Shorts, Ramses Madina and Claudia Morgado Escanilla share their experiences from the festival, and their thoughts on the support for short film in Canada.

This month: Short film at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, and a short interview with filmmaker Peter Lynch.

Toronto is a city that has no shortage of film festivals, which is a great boon to the short film industry in Canada. After all, short films do not necessarily get the same kind of exposure and theatrical releases as their longer, feature counterparts, and so filmmakers are often dependent on the festival circuit in order to showcase their work.

Aside from the regular festival fare in the city such as Hot Docs and After Dark, Toronto also plays home to the Worldwide Short Film Festival — a festival completely dedicated to the art of the short. In the end, however, when people think of film festivals in Toronto, the first thing that comes to mind is the highly popular and world-renown Toronto International Film Festival (that just wrapped up a few weeks ago) because of the prestige that it holds in the greater global film community. Luckily for us, TIFF is also a fantastic place to catch Canadian short film.

The other day, a friend of mine told me that he had watched Julie Taymor's Across the Universe — a day after the film had premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Knowing him not to be the festival type, I asked him where he had seen the movie. He quickly replied: "oh, I downloaded it."

Warner Bros. already took action against piracy and imposed an embargo on all preview screenings of their upcoming movies in Toronto, but are the pirates out there at TIFF as well? Well, according to Thomas Purves' video above, the pirates are not only out there, but vocal as well.

On Saturday afternoon, the Toronto International Film Festival handed out its awards, bestowing honours on the usual perplexing array of films from around the world that otherwise spent their time at the festival this year well below the public's radar.

The public's radar, on the other hand, was front-and-centre for the Cadillac People's Choice Award, the founding father of all those godforsaken "Be an original" ads that preceded the feature films this year ("Death Shark!" "Dance Fight!"). First place in the popularity contest goes to David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, with a runner-up prize to Jason Reitman's brilliant Juno.

blogTO's film crew was all over the fest this year with their coverage. Read on to find out what we picked as the best of the festival.

For a non-juried event, there sure are a whole lot of awards handed out at the Toronto International Film Festival. And while I appreciate the fact that TIFF may be one of the few festivals in the world that gets the public involved in the award selection process, I have to admit that the eventual winners don't always reflect the films that I believe should get the most recognition.

In light of this, I've decided to create the blogTO Toronto International Film Festival Most Awesome Awards (TIFF MAAs) which will highlight crowning achievements by people in the film industry — achievements that are often ignored by traditional award juries. Of course, I'll need your help to complete the list, so be sure to put your TIFF MAA winners in the comments below.

Forget parties, forget closing night galas; the Toronto International Film Festival truly comes to its rousing close at the Ryerson Theatre with the final Midnight Madness screening. Songs were sung, beach balls were bounced, we "arrrrrrh"ed our way through the anti-piracy card for the very last time, and rum was occasionally imbibed at the Rye-high tonight, before Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's sick pregno-horror gore-fest À l'intérieur hit us square in the eyeballs.

The filmmakers are French, and friends of last year's closing filmmaker, Kim Chapiron (who brought us Sheitan). There's no two ways about it: if their horror movies are to be believed, the French are a deeply disturbed people.