It’s that time of year again—time to spend approximately ten hours straight making first and second choices for the fifty or so films we’ll each be seeing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

We’ve been going since the mid-eighties, and have learned to think of certain filmmakers as quintessential festival directors. A good chunk of each year’s schedule is given over to these core filmmakers, but this year it really seems like old home week, with nearly every perennial name, old and new, represented: Chabrol, Greenaway, Hou, Kitano, Miike, Sayles, Loach, Oliviera, Rohmer, Arcand, Cronenberg, Maddin, McDonald, van Sant, Wang, Babenco, Jordan, Ozon, Broomfield, Im, the Coens, Armstrong, Gitai, Bodrov, Schlondorff, Breillat, Ratanaruang... The list goes on and on. The few stalwarts who aren’t represented by a feature show up as contributors to an omnibus film called To Each His Own Cinema. Many of these regulars either are sure to see their films released, or have earned spots on my moratorium and LTS lists.

(Moratorium: this director has bored me in the past, but I might put him or her back in rotation after watching and liking something on DVD. Until then, they’re not getting any more of my precious festival slots. LTS: Life’s Too Short to ever watch another movie by this filmmaker again.)

We won’t know until Labor Day whether we’ve won or lost the lottery that determines the order in which passholders’ ticket requests are processed, so I hate to jinx things by listing any must-sees at this point. However, I am stoked for the Wilson Yip/Donnie Yen follow up to SPL, a parodic take on Ultraman, and the Stuart Gordon movie based on the real incident of the woman who left a crash victim to die agonizingly in her garage, stuck in her car windshield. Thse are all Midnight Madness titles, the descriptions for which were released early. I’m sure I’ll identify plenty of other must-sees now that I have the full program firmly gripped in my trembling hands.

And sorry, on program book day there's no time to white balance...

Tags: cinema hut, toronto international film festival

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