Toronto International Film Festival 2008 - Film Selections

Each year as summer comes to an end, the Toronto International Film Festival makes the oncoming cold weather a little bit easier to bear. By far one of the coolest events I have ever been to, the festival showcases hundreds of movies from all over the world that an average person can actually go and see - it's not just industry screenings. The films range from big budget pix with well known casts to small indy releases that will probably never get major distribution. At most of the films the director and some of the cast members attend the screenings so audience members can ask questions about the film. It's so amazing to get the opportunity to see a film and actually discuss it with the people responsible for making it.

I have been fortunate to attend 5 festivals, and I thought it would be a really fun to do a feature on the festival for RuViews. Each screening I attend I will write a review and try to get some pictures of the stars. The festival experience is a pretty intense 9 days, but if it's anything like last year, it will be amazing!

Last night I got my picks book - if you have never festivaled there is an notoriously convoluted process you must go through to make your film selections: first you buy the tickets, not to any of the individual movies, this is just to determine how many films you want to see, I opted for the 10 pack. Then you get the picks book(in the picture to the right) that you highlight all your first choice movie selections and then the second choice selections, which means that I have to pick out 20 movies whose times don't overlap and aren't showing in theaters on opposite ends of the city on the same day. Now, you could try and make some of your picks both first and second choices, but then you may end up getting 2 tickets to the same screening. This is where my inner nerd comes out, because I had to spreadsheet the times and films with color coding to make sure that all my picks worked out.

So after you do all of this work and drop off your picks book, you wait a couple days for the lottery process to happen to see which films you will actually get tickets for. The lottery eliminates the first come first serve fiasco that could happen if only the first people in line got their choices. As you turn in your book it's placed into numbered boxes, once all of the books are processed, they then randomly draw a number from 1 to whatever the highest number box is, and that represents the box number from which the festival starts processing orders. With each step of the process there are lines to wait in, and these aren't your average grocery store length ques, these are serious lines that wrap around endless blocks which translates to hours of waiting. Seriously, bring a book and an IPOD because you're going to need it. It takes serious dedication to go through all of this to see the films and your favorite stars;)

Right now I am still trying to decide which films make the cut, and which galas I can attend (these are the red carpet events that you have to buy individual tickets for). The programing for this year's festival is really solid, so it's hard trying to narrow down my picks. Tomorrow I turn in my selection book, so I'll list the films that I have chosen and then we wait to see what happens. So Exciting!