The distribution rollout for short form work remains a tenuous enterprise, at best. Aside from throwing it up on Vimeo or YouTube, and hoping it catches the eye of a curated site like Short of the Week, many filmmakers end up sitting on their shorts for months after their festival premiere. Vimeo is shaking up that paradigm by offering 17 shorts from the Toronto International Film Festival’s Short Cuts program — which the streaming site sponsors — online through September 19. These include the Jury Prize winning A Single Body, which offers insight into an earnest male friendship; the Shane Carruth-starring everything & everything & everything; the sci-fi Entangled, from […]

Following the announcement of its Special Presentation and Gala selections last week, this morning TIFF released the Documentaries, Masters, Midnight Madness and Vanguard programs for the upcoming festival. That just leaves Mavericks, Discovery, Wavelengths, Contemporary World and several others to go. 17 world premieres have been added, along with Cannes (Godard, Sissako, Zvyagintsev, Polsky, Wiseman, Mitchell) and Venice (Andersson, Oppenheimer, Hong Sang-soo) holdovers. You’ll note that the ‘Canadian Premiere’ asterisk likely indicates a Telluride bow. Artistic Director Cameron Bailey spoke to the LA Times about the new ruling on premiere statuses, as a result of the immediate media narratives that take shape on Twitter moments after credits […]

In a press conference this morning, Cameron Bailey and Co. released the Special Presentation and Gala selections for the upcoming edition of the Toronto International Film Festival. Lots to parse through as the slate boasts world premieres from Christian Petzold, Mia Hansen-Løve, Noah Baumbach, David Gordon Green, Hal Hartley, Liv Ullman, Barry Levinson and several others. There are a few of the requisite Hollywood entries (Jason Reitman, Chris Evans’ directorial debut, two Reese Witherspoon vehicles, for starters), alongside Cannes entries Wild Tales, Force Majeure and Whiplash, but the festival looks to be off to an auspicious start. Let the Venice speculation begin. SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS 99 Homes. Ramin Bahrani, USA, […]

“Who the fuck are you?” Fueled on booze, Flamo was raging. Someone had told the cops he had stashed guns in his house, and so his mum and brother were handcuffed and led away. Craving revenge but thinking better, Flamo phoned Cobe (pronounced KOH-bay), someone he met years earlier in the county jail who was now a violence interruptor, counseling young gangbangers like Flamo to chill out and stop drawing blood in Chicago’s crime-ravaged South Side. When Cobe arrived, Flamo was stunned to find some white man filming him. Luckily, Cobe knew how to vouch for the white man to the youth he […]

Shortly before the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, Vimeo issued an offer to attending filmmakers. Let us have exclusive digital rights to your film for 30 days via our distribution platform, Vimeo on Demand, and we’ll give you a $10,000 advance. After that window — or until we recoup the $10,000, whichever comes first — we’ll provide our standard 90/10 revenue split, and you’re free to take your film elsewhere. I remember thinking it was a bold move, ripe for the “best of both worlds” scenario so many modern independent filmmakers desire. But would anyone be game? Turns out, more than […]

“Love & Anarchy” may have been the motto of the 26th Helsinki International Film Festival, which took over the Finnish capital the last ten days of September, but hospitality and order ruled the three-day Finnish Film Affair. The industry event, which takes place during the fest and is now in its second year, was created in 2012 to highlight Finnish films and connect international professionals (mostly sales agents, distributors, and programmers) with the Nordic country’s surprisingly robust film scene. To that end, works in progress were presented alongside prestigious festival hits. And an abundance of networking opportunities at nightly parties […]

When he was 16 growing up in Montreal, Jeff Skoll saw Gandhi and it changed his world. “Here was a way of talking about an exemplary figure who touched the world and spread a message to millions of people.” Skoll would go on to build eBay, amass a fortune currently estimated at $4.5 billion, then use his wealth to launch Participant Media, a film company whose mission is to change the world through movies. Skoll was the keynote speaker at TIFF’s industry series recently. He was in Toronto, where he studied business as a young man, to open the festival […]

At the end of a one-hour chat held on the first full day of TIFF, an audience member suggested that the Mexican director of Pan’s Labyrinth be renamed Guillermo del Toronto. The sentiment behind this fanciful idea lay in the fact that del Toro keeps returning to Toronto to film here, most recently the $250-million mega-actioner, Pacific Rim, and is now prepping the horror flick, Crimson Peak, before cameras roll next spring.  “I’ve lived in L.A., Madrid, Budapest,” del Toro recalled before an invited audience at the Trump Hotel. “[A filmmaker] lives in a suitcase.” The Canuck version of the […]

The Toronto International Film Festival is overwhelming. Following the more rarefied Telluride and Venice Film Festivals, it’s a large, populist event that mixes red-carpet premieres with new filmmaker discovery and highlights from Cannes and other earlier events. As I usually do, I’ve concentrated on premieres and American independents for this preview, largely omitting films you’ve heard about because they’ve already been praised at other festivals (like, for example, Telluride hits 12 Years a Slave and Prisoners). Here, selected from the feature films, is what I’m hoping to catch at the festival this year. Beneath the Harvest Sky. The documentary team […]

In Canadian writer/director Ruba Nadda’s elegant and oddly topical thriller Inescapable, Adib Abdul-Kareem (Alexander Siddig) is a computer operations manager at a Toronto bank who fled Syria some 30 years ago. Married to a Canadian with whom he’s fathered two pretty teenage girls, he’s kept his checkered past a secret from his family the whole time, but after the disappearance of the older of his two daughters (Jay Anstey) during a clandestine visit to Syria in order to find out where her father is from, Adib heads to Damascus despite the possibility of repercussions for long ago sins. With combative ex-flame […]