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

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW (15 meg MP3 file)

The moviesTO podcast is sponsored by the Canadian Film Centre's Habitat New Media Lab. For more information, check out

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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.

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.

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.

Sure, there may be celebrities everywhere, but often the most interesting people you meet at the Toronto International Film Festival are standing in front of you in line.

Who: Arif Karmali
From: Edmonton, Alberta
In Line For: The Last King of Scotland
Years at the Festival: Two

What are some of your best memories from festivals past?
Enjoying the great movies and talking to great directors and producers. The Q&A's are also a favorite because you can ask interesting questions, and really there's nobody else you can ask but the people who make the movies. That's something I really enjoy at the festival.

What are you looking forward to for this year's festival?
Looking forward to seeing a gala, hopefully. Maybe I'll go to one of the later ones, because there's still tickets available. But yeah, I'm looking forward to going to the big event where everyone gets on the red carpet: really experiencing that part of the festival.

Any other thoughts you have about the festival or Toronto?
I think it's a great city to hold a festival. It brings good exposure to Toronto, and it's an overall great experience. I think they need to reduce ticket prices. Twenty bucks a movie is a little bit high. If it's all about the arts, then it's all about the films and not about the money. Drop the ticket prices for the regular people.

Niki Karimi has built quite the resume in the Iranian film industry as an actress and also working with great directors like Abbas Kiarostami. Her second feature as a director, A Few Days Later..., is a bold film that is centered on repetition and daily routine, and had its world premiere here in Toronto.

There's lots to learn about Karimi on her website, but I had the chance to chat with her just before the first public screening of her movie and ask her a bit about the motivations that came behind it:

Day eight of the festival is usually the day where the lineups are a little shorter, the volunteers and staff are a little less talkative, and everyone is cranky and sick. It's easy to get sick if you're at the Toronto International Film Festival, because watching movies all day (and for some people like me, trying to juggle a full time job at the same time) makes you really tired and susceptible to bugs. Being at the festival, your sleeping and eating habits are usually altered enough to throw you out of your regular groove, and it's also often easy to forget that while you're in a theatre all day, the world is still spinning around you, and people are still living their lives.

So yeah, I'm a little sick. Which means my movie watching over the next few days might be a little light, maybe only about three a day. I hope you don't mind. The festival is bound to pick up a little steam for Friday and Saturday, so if you've got some time to kill this weekend, rest up now because the closing two days are usually full of fun.

Who programs a film about a Hungarian guy hypnotizing a room full of people at ten o'clock in the morning on the seventh day of the film festival? The TIFF programmers, of course! Self-hypnosis aside, the mid-week doldrums are over and done with and it's time to look ahead at the last few days of TIFF '06.

Today's podcast includes:

• Reviews of Shortbus and The Fountain
• Quick picks for Friday and Saturday

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW (12 meg MP3 file)

The moviesTO podcast is sponsored by the Canadian Film Centre's Habitat New Media Lab. For more information, check out

www.cdnfilmcentre.com/training/newmedia.html

Other ways to get the podcast:

iTunes | Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes
Yahoo | Subscribe to the moviesTO podcast through Yahoo
RSS | Add the moviesTO podcast feed to your RSS Reader
Vote | Vote for the moviesTO podcast on Podcast Alley
Search | Search the audio on Podzinger

Gather round, film farts, art aficionados and music maniacs, all! Tomorrow night, Peter Mettler will be dishing out an eight-hour treat at the Berkeley Church. The director, who is being honoured by this year's TIFF Canadian Retrospective, will be presenting Elsewhere, an evening of improvised audio-visual adventure.

With a slew of musical, tech and visual cronies in tow, the Canadian director of Gambling, Gods and LSD fame will be embarking on an "an uncharted live cinema journey through a multitude of interesting places and states." Hold on to them panties, dearly beloved, this is gonna be fun...

Christian Volckman's new film Renaissance is visually like nothing you have ever seen before. He pushes the boundaries of animation and infuses the black and white film with a noir that is perfectly suited to the dystopian society he has created.

I got to talk to Volckman before his public screening in Toronto, and he shared some of his nervousness, but also tipped me off to a great place to find a nice strong espresso near the hotel. Awesome.

The film centers on Tom Verde (Hugh Jackman) who works as a pioneering cancer researcher fighting for the cure to save his wife Izzie (Rachael Weisz) who is slowly dying from a brain tumor. Izzie meanwhile is exploring her own mortality through the writing of a book entitled "The Fountain" about a Spanish conquistador searching for the Mayan Tree of Life in order to defeat the menacing Inquisator and live forever with the Queen he loves.

Coming into the screening there had been almost no publicity. None of the local media (as far as I saw), had reviewed or even mentioned the film. Strange given it stars Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson who along with first time director David Von Ancken showed up to introduce it. Could this be because Icon Productions (read: Mel Gibson) is the financial backer. Is there a Mel boycott in effect?

Or perhaps the real explanation is that Seraphim Falls was a late addition to the TIFF lineup and few media got a chance to preview it. Whatever the reason, once the opening credits rolled I only became more perplexed.

There's something about the rain that makes you want to watch a movie. It's hard to find something better than sitting in a theatre, watching a film that makes you laugh and smile and cry, when the skies outside are cloudy and gray. Of course, with theaters being kept at a ridiculously cold temperature, running straight from being in the rain into a cold theatre is sure to make you sick. I think I'm getting sick already.

With day seven all wrapped up, you can tell there's a kind of blah-ness that's settling in at the festival, with people all tired and all out of energy. I'm sure the energy will pick right up when Friday rolls around.