SEE YOU IN SEPTEMBER
TIFF’s Cameron Bailey tells Peter Howell this year’s festival will be leaner and better,
If there’s a new spring in the step of Cameron Bailey, TIFF’s artistic director, there are two good reasons for it.
The first is the happy surprise of the Best Picture win for Moonlight at last Sunday’s Academy Awards. Bailey selected Barry Jenkins’ coming-of-age phenomenon to make its international premiere in the Platform section of the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, brilliantly fulfilling the new program’s mandate to seek out and showcase fresh talent.
Moonlight is screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox, the festival’s HQ at King and John Sts., marking the first time since the facility opened in 2010 that a film’s Lightbox run coincided with its Best Picture crowning.
“It’s still playing!” a delighted Bailey says in an interview in a TIFF meeting room.
“We’ve never had a Best Picture Oscar winner on a run in the building, so that’s amazing.”
The second reason for Bailey’s joyful motion is he’s eager to get TIFF goers back on the good foot. The festival announced major changes last week, among them a 20-per-cent reduction in films shown — more on that in a second — and a farewell to Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema and the Isabel Bader Theatre as fest screening venues.
Hot Docs is near Bloor and Bathurst Sts.; Isabel Bader is near the juncture of University Ave. and Avenue Rd. Eliminating these two locales from TIFF’s theatres map means the festival can once again be conveniently navigated on foot, as it used to be before it moved south from Yorkville to its current spot.
“I’m really trying to make it as much as possible a festival you can walk, so you can get to and from most places on foot,” Bailey says.
“Wouldn’t that be amazing? I mean, it’s how I like to do a festival. If you can walk to most places you need to get to here within 10 to 15 minutes, that’s a dream for me.”
This is a big deal, because Toronto’s traffic chaos increasingly makes getting around TIFF more chore than pleasure. Cannes is a walkaround fest. Sundance isn’t, but its Utah locale Park City is a small town and there are fast and free bus shuttles to all venues.
The farthest TIFF extremity will now be the Ryerson Theatre on Gerrard St. between Yonge and Church, a pleasant walk from the Lightbox. I’d heard a rumour that TIFF might be leaving the Ryerson, too, but Bailey denies it.
It’s still very popular as a home for TIFF’s Midnight Madness program and for other films aimed at younger audiences, say teens to mid-30s.
“Some films just work really well there. They’re the right size. The vibe of the room suits it. So we’re going to keep the Ryerson. I’ve been told by some American sales agents that there are some films for them where the Ryerson is the perfect venue of all festivals, actually.”
Now about that cut to the number of features screening at TIFF’s annual September festival, which have approached the 300-film mark in recent years. A 20-per-cent reduction is planned, or about 60 films.
This decision was prompted not by popular demand — regular moviegoers love the large selection, Bailey insists — but by press and other industry players who found the fest to be too much of a monster to slay.
“Our general public loved the choice that we were offering them, and they had no concerns about the size of the festival in terms of the lineup. But the people who were coming to us as working professionals, particularly ones from out of town, the industry and the media, were having a really hard time navigating it.”
TIFF will be leaner but not meaner, Bailey says. The film cuts will come partially through the elimination of the cutting-edge Van- guard program and his cherished City to City program, which Bailey created and which last year drew good crowds for its showcase of films from Lagos, Nigeria.
Vanguard films can be absorbed by other TIFF sections, and there’s no reason City to City couldn’t one day return as a Lightbox series outside of the September festival.
The intention is to make the cuts judiciously, so that TIFF retains its mandate of being a festival that shows film from many places around the world, not just a few of them.
Countries with the largest presence at TIFF will see the most cuts, Bailey says, while smaller ones will see few or none at all.
“The U.S. does have the largest number of films most years at the festival. Canada obviously is a big number, France, the U.K. — those are probably the biggest in terms of sheer numbers. So they’ll be cut . . . I’m not going to cut any (country) so that we suddenly have no films (from it).”
Expect the trims to happen mainly to the Special Presentations and Contemporary World Cinema programs, which are vast enough to almost qualify as festivals in their own right.
And how about ticket prices for the films that remain? Pricing is always a hot topic at TIFF, but it got even hotter last year when TIFF introduced a “dynamic” pricing system that saw premium tickets go as high as $58 apiece, once fees were added in (regular tickets started at $25).
Bailey argues that TIFF prices are in line with the cost of entertainment in a big city like Toronto, and he has a point — Lady Gaga is scheduled to perform Sept. 6-7 at Air Canada Centre, just as TIFF 2017 is getting underway, and her ticket prices range from $45 to $275.
But he’s aware of the large amount of green that ardent festgoers must fork out to stare at golden films on TIFF’s silver screens.
“If you’re trying to see 20 or 30 movies, that’s a significant chunk of money and it’s a commitment, absolutely. So what I want to do is make sure that if you are making that kind of commitment, that we’re delivering for you . . . we’re also trying to do as much as we can to have a low-price entry point (for people) who just want to taste a bit of the festival.”
One misconception he wants cleared up is the notion that TIFF tickets are extremely hard to get at any price.
There are many tickets available for many films, including ones that go on to become Best Picture Oscar winners.
“There are always tickets available,” Bailey says.
“So just getting that message out and encouraging people to take a chance on films they might not have heard of — like Moonlight, for instance — is something that’s really important.” Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.