Designed by architect Bruce Kuwabara, the Lightbox has five screening auditoriums, galleries for exhibitions, an enhanced Film Reference Library and educational facilities as well as restaurants and bars suitable for social events. In 2003, TIFF announced a partnership with filmmaker Ivan Reitman and his two sisters, whose family had for years owned the site (a former parking lot and one-time car wash) and the Daniels Group, a developer specializing in condos. TIFF’s five-level podium is part of a complex that also includes a 46-storey residential tower. Reaching its fundraising target of almost $200 million (including $129 million for the building itself plus money for operating costs and endowment) proved to be much more problematic than first anticipated.

The 35th edition of TIFF (September 9-19) includes 28 Canadian features and 40 shorts in its Short Cuts program. Having dumped its all-inclusive Perspective Canada some years ago, the Canadian features are now spread out over seven separate programs. While selecting what to be included in the Gala, Special Presentation, Canada First! and Midnight Madness programs makes sense in a blunt sort of way by ranking the features in importance, how the rest are selected for the Contemporary World Cinema, Visions or Reel to Reel programs seems arbitrary at best.

The opening night gala is Michael McCowan’s Score: A Hockey Musical, starring the aging Australian songbird Olivia Newton-John (!), Noah Reid and Marc Jordan. McCowan previously directed One Week, one of the better Canuck flicks of 2008. Richard Lewis’s Barney’s Version, the prestigious production of the year from Robert Lantos, based on the Mordecai Richler novel with an all-star cast including Paul Giamatti, Dustin Hoffman, Minnie Driver, Scott Speedman and Rachelle Lefevre, would have been the logical choice for the opening night, except for the fact the opening night this year falls on the Jewish high holiday of Rosh Hashanah and Lantos knew most of his Jewish audience would not be attending.

Other galas include Jonathan Sobol’s A Beginner’s Guide to Endings starring Harvey Keitel, which seems an odd choice given the fact that it is Sobol’s debut feature and therefore more logically should be in the Canada First! program, Steven Silver’s The Bang, Bang Club, a Canada/South Africa co-production about a group of gung-ho photojournalist during the dying days of apartheid, and George Hickenlooper’s Casino Jack, starring Kevin Spacey as the American superlobbyist and convicted felon Jack Abramoff.

The Special Presentation program includes Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies. Villeneuve is proving to be the best of the new generation of Quebec filmmakers, a natural heir to the great Denys Arcand, and Incendies follows his multi-award winning Polytechnique. It’s shot by his good friend André Turpin, one of Canada’s top DOPs, French or English. Vancouver’s perennial festival favourite Carl Bessai returns with Repeaters, Jacob Tierney’s Good Neighbours is his follow-up to last year’s The Trotsky, the 21-year-old Quebec phenom Xavier Dolan (I Killed My Mother) returns with his sophomore feature Les Amours imaginaries (Heartbeats), which debuted at Cannes, veteran Sturla Gunnarsson is represented by his latest documentary, Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie, and the ever-popular homeboy Bruce McDonald is back with Trigger, another bite of the rock ‘n’ roll apple starring Molly Parker, Don McKellar, Sarah Polley, Callum Keith Rennie and the late Tracy Wright.

Contemporary World Cinema features Louis Bélanger’s Route 132, which opened the Montreal World Film Festival, and a second Quebec film, Robin Aubert’s À l’origine d’un cri. Also included are producer/director Ingrid Veninger’s low-budget MODRA, Terry Miles’s A Night for Dying Tigers with Jennifer Beals and Gil Bellows, and Ed Gass-Donnelly’s Small Town Murder Songs. Gass-Donnelly previously had This Beautiful City (2007) screen at TIFF.

The Canada First! program, devoted to first-time feature filmmakers, includes Deborah Chow’s The High Cost of Living, Ryan Redford’s Oliver Sherman, Daniel Cockburn’s You Are Here, Katrin Brown’s Amazon Falls, Mike Goldbach’s Daydream Nation and Patrick Demers’s Jaloux. The Visions program has Nicolás Pereda’s Verano de Goliat (Summer of Goliat), a Canada/Mexico/Holland co-production, Catherine Martin’s Trois temps après la mort d’Anna and Denis Côté’s Curling. Reel to Reel includes Jody Shapiro’s quirky How to Start Your Own Country and William MacGillivray’s documentary on Newfoundland’s Ron Hynes, The Man of a Thousand Songs.

And last but not least in the Midnight Madness program there is Michael Dowse’s FUBAR II, a sequel to 2002’s FUBAR, his popular ode to Canadian headbangers everywhere. FUBAR is a military acronym for F**ked Up Beyond All Recognition. Whether this description aptly applies to TIFF, which began 35 years ago as a small but joyous celebration of cinema and is now an unrecognizable multi-headed corporate monster tucked away in its shinny new lair, I’ll leave for others to decide.






With nearly 40 years of experience writing about Canadian cinema, Wyndham Wise, formerly the editor-in-chief of Take One magazine, is currently the editor of Canadian Cinematographer, contributing editor for Northernstars.ca, and Canadian film consultant to The Canadian Encyclopedia online.