The festival continues to be better organized every year. You can park your car outside of town and take a shuttle (they run every 15 minutes) from venue to venue or restaurant to restaurant. The quality of the films continues to impress. And there are panels on most film-related topics if you need a break. Seven venues show films six times a day. There are hundreds of films, heavy on the docs but that seems to be what most of the movie goers like. Lily Tomlin was the special guest this year and lots of the directors and actors were there to introduce their films.
People come from all over the country, hungry to see movies but also to talk to like-minded people. I saw 15 films--not all were great but none were awful. My favorites were MOTHER'S INSTINCT (a Hitchcockian Belgian film), THE PURITY OF VENGEANCE (a film based on the Danish Jussi Adler-Olsen novel), C'EST LA VIE, ( a French film about a wedding planner), BALLOON, a German film about an escape from East Germany) and ROSIE, an Irish film about a homeless family. Two films I missed--one because Michael Moore talked so long at another venue it had already begun when I got there and the seats were gone.
So clearly I go for the foreign films. We were lucky enough to be able to stay with friends or the cost would be exorbitant. The weather was great-mostly in the seventies although it was in the forties one night. Lots of good restaurants. A good time was had by all.
6 comments:
Glad you had a good time. Looks like you got to see a lot of films that you never would have otherwise. A lot of foreign films don't get picked up for distribution in the States anymore.
Sounds like fun! I'm tempted to attend the Toronto Film Festival, but the crowds (and traffic) give me doubts.
I have always wanted to go to TIFF but have never made it. They take a group from the DIA each year. The crowds are manageable in TC but they begin standing in line an hour before the start time. I don't know why.
I'm so glad you went and had such a good time. I remember going with a friend to an early (I thought it was the first, but the titles are off) New York Film Festival. It was probably something by Godard, and at the time I didn't like it at all.
t's Very easy to dislike the more self-indulgent Godard films...and More Self-Indulgent is a low bar with Godard. Or Michael Moore.
Foreign films do well now, as always, in the art-house circuit, and they are one reason to continue to patronize cable tv...some of the stations will thrown them on rather more readily than even Netflix...and Netflix, even more than Amazon and such, is very hungry, along with PBS and such offshoots as the World Channel network, for documentaries, along with them generally being easier to break even with than even low-budget indy dramatic film. Probably more grant money handy, still, as well. But festivals are great concentration points for alla that. I do miss the migration away from such things on the part of IFC and Sundance Channel.
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