TIFF 2006 draws to a close. Best festival ever?

Today's podcast includes:

• A look back at the best and worst of the Toronto International Film Festival


• TIFF hands out its awards

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Handing out awards at a film festival is always a controversial and often-tedious exercise, where politics often has as large of a role in the decision-making process as the actual art of filmmaking. That being said, the awards handed out yesterday at the Toronto International Film Festival were quite deserving for the most part, despite the fact that I don't quite agree with most of them.

The full press release with all the award winners and honorable mentions is available on the TIFF website, but here's a quick look at what won and a few of my thoughts on each award.

It's all over.

So the screenings are all done, the celebrities are leaving town, and all the exhausted festival-junkies are waking up to the fact that they've missed a whole lot of work during the ten days of vacation they took to watch movies.

The awards have been handed out, the tired volunteers are going home to take a much-needed nap, and I'm here to make a confession: I haven't reviewed every movie I watched during the festival. It just got a little too tiring to write a review on every single film I watched, so I only focused on the films that I thought I could quickly and adequately write about.

So Yong Kim's first feature film, In Between Days, is a film that has Toronto at its heart. Shot and set in our city, the film tells a story of the immigrant experience that is so relevant in a city like ours.

Director So Yong Kim met me at the Sutton Place Hotel to talk about the film and her experiences in Toronto:

Strongly suggesting that the "audience choice award" at the Toronto International Film Festival is not based on the actual ballots filled out by audience members, news of this year's winner, Bella, leaked almost an hour before the final screening of the film had even begun this afternoon.

Festivalgoers have long suspected that the ballots handed out at every screening at the festival were being shovelled into the nearest convenient furnace as soon as they are turned in, and TIFF's awkward timing with the Bella news may have inadvertently conceded the point. I was literally in the rush line at the Varsity with audience members hoping to get in to see the film when a Bella booster came around to announce the film's win and hand out celebratory postcards.

A brief look at the some of the films and events happening at this year's Toronto International Film Festival.

One more day left in the festival, and I thought I'd venture out in the city to see how much the festival is actually impacting everyday Torontonians. And while most people I met were very excited about the economic and cultural impact of all the filmmakers and film enthusiasts meeting in our city, I realized that almost everyone I've spoken to were in the Yorkville area of downtown. In the interest of doing some research, I branched out into Etobicoke, North York, and Scarborough to see what everyday people there thought of TIFF this year.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a good number of people were barely aware of the festival, and several did not know — or even care — that it was happening for the past ten days. Apparently, the festival really only attracts a very niche crowd, and that crowd can usually be found in the box between Dupont, Spadina, Queen, and Yonge, at least during the festival. Maybe the festival needs to do some more marketing? Or maybe, as one person told me, they just need to drop some ticket prices.

Ah, and I'll be wrapping up the festival in tomorrow's festival watch post, with some of my highlights and major disappointments.