The Directors

You know your film festival is a hit when people nearly kill each other to get into the screening of a movie they couldn’t be paid to see elsewhere. At last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, that film was the British docudrama Death of a President, which imagined the assassination of George W. Bush and the tracking of his killer. Outside the theater, people begged to get in as if it were the one and only Beatles reunion. Yet when the film opened in North America a month later, it earned just $519,086. No matter, at least to festival junkies. Toronto — TIFF to its fans — had chalked up another sensation.

A lovelier chaos, because it hinted at a looming cultural phenomenon, came last year with the midnight screening of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Or rather the nonscreening; the movie broke down and had to be rescheduled. Outside the theater, star Sacha Baron Cohen, in character, was dragged to the cinema in a cart by a gaggle of actresses playing Kazakh wenches. Two months later, the film was released, and real people got to see what all the insanity was about. Borat grossed more than $100 million Stateside, and Baron Cohen got an Oscar nomination.

The fomentors and beneficiaries of all this divine madness are the festival’s two bosses: Piers Handling, chairman and CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival Group, and Noah Cowan, TIFF’s co-director. They supervise a team of a dozen programmers who make this sprawling event the world’s best 10-day movie binge. Europe may have those venerable showcases Cannes, Berlin and Venice, but the crazy intensity of Toronto — the too-much-of-a-muchness — makes it utterly American. Or, as Canadians would no doubt gently correct: utterly North American.

For Handling, one major difference between Toronto and the European fests is in the structure. “The films there are competitive — they give a prize at the end — and the festivals compete with each other. You can’t have a film in the Cannes competition if it’s already been in Berlin. But because we’re noncompetitive, we can show everything.”

Yet there is a strenuous competition in Toronto: for the discriminating moviegoer’s time. This year there’ll be 349 films on offer; that’s something like 500 hours of movies, and no one can see even a quarter of what’s available. “We serve so many different masters here, so many different audiences,” says Handling, “that there’s leeway to program the widest range of films, from the most populist to the most esoteric.” So each movie lover scans the list, finds a couple dozen promising titles and creates a personal minifestival.

For some, TIFF is an Oscar reunion party; this year’s 500-plus guest list of actors, directors and producers includes more than a score of Academy Award winners, from George Clooney to Jodie Foster, Sean Penn to Susan Sarandon, Michael Caine and Michael Douglas to Michael Moore. The new hot couple, Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, will show up to promote their politically charged drama Rendition; and perpetual hottie Brad Pitt will light up the city when he appears in support of his western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Rock icons Lou Reed and Eddie Vedder will be there, as will former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, the subject of Jonathan Demme’s documentary Man from Plains.

All that red-carpet glamour, and the hope of a first look at next year’s Oscar finalists, attracts audiences to the big-ticket galas and special presentations. It also lures a sizable number of other power brokers: Hollywood execs, for whom Toronto has become a crucial harbinger of the movie-award season, and U.S. film critics, avid to see grown-up pictures after a fast-food summer diet of action epics with numerals.

The A-list English-language slate is just a small part of the TIFF experience. At its inception in the ’70s, it was called the Festival of Festivals, and that name still applies: all kinds of genres, dozens of national cinemas, play to an equally diverse audience. Indeed, TIFF could split itself into eight or 10 different festivals, run throughout the year, instead of the one smorgasbord from which no one can get his or her fill.

The documentary program alone could occupy and satisfy anyone with an itch to travel to distant lands and the darkest places of the soul. Werner Herzog journeys to Antarctica for Encounters at the End of the World. Kevin Macdonald’s My Enemy’s Enemy considers the life and crimes of Nazi butcher Klaus Barbie. Barbet Schroeder’s Terror’s Advocate is a fascinatingly equivocal study of Jacques Vergès, who defended Barbie and many of last century’s most notorious figures.

The serious TIFFist is a movie Magellan too, searching for quality films from undiscovered countries. Hong Kong’s vibrant action movies of the late ’80s quickly captured a cult audience in Toronto, and the delirious melodramas from Bollywood announced themselves with the festival’s 1994 tribute to India’s director Mani Ratnam. This year, Handling is excited by the richness of Israeli films — “There’s a kind of explosion of creativity there, and it’s about time” — while Cowan finds a consolidation of merit from other nations. “The rich are getting richer,” he says. “The Korean and Argentine cinemas continue to be intriguing. The Germans and Australians have been on fire for a few years.”

The success of Christian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days at Cannes, where it won the Palme d’Or, has many critics hyping the new Romanian cinema. The Mungiu drama will play prominently at Toronto, but Cowan’s enthusiasm for a national Romanian film movement is guarded. He notes that TIFF’s resident specialist on Eastern European films, programmer Dimitri Eipides, “approaches the Romanian new wave with some skepticism. You could barely field a soccer team with all the Romanian filmmakers. Apparently there’s one great teacher at the film school there who has passed his influence to a half-dozen interesting directors.”

Mind you, if there were more Romanian emigrants in Toronto, the festival might find more films to please them. TIFF prides itself on catering to different local constituencies. “If there’s a commitment to a specific cinema from the city and its audiences, we try to address it,” says Cowan. “There’s been a huge rise in interest for East Asian films — not just China but Korea, Japan, Thailand.” The festival is also expanding its coverage of Bollywood directors. “In the last five years,” he notes, “they’ve been seeking a wider international audience, so they’ve been toning down their more risible cultural specificities.” (Translation: fewer wet-sari production numbers.) This year Rituparno Ghosh’s The Last Lear will play in Toronto, with all-time megastar Amitabh Bachchan — India’s Brando and Fred Astaire in one big, bearded package — gracing the event.

These impresarios are still programmers at heart, and they are happy to tip the TIFFist to a few of the films they love. Handling cites Rendition, Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor and It’s a Free World … from the veteran writer-director team of Paul Laverty and Ken Loach. Cowan recommends Penn’s Into the Wild, the Guy Maddin “docu-fantasia” My Winnipeg and Nothing Is Private from Alan Ball, writer of American Beauty, which, in 1999, had its world premier at Toronto on its way to a Best Picture Oscar.

Handling, Cowan and their team must also play the role of efficient concierges for their more demanding guests. In 1996, Jean-Luc Godard, the ageless enfant terrible of the French New Wave, agreed to accompany his film For Ever Mozart to Toronto. “He had only two conditions,” Handling recalls. “He insisted on a video suite to cut his movie, which we got for him; and he wanted to play tennis. So we brought in a tennis pro.”

For the fixers of Toronto, the motto could be: we aim to please. And for over 30 years, they’ve been making good on their promise.