7 days to go! Since the schedule and programme information went live 2 days ago we’ve just been pouring over the information available, post-it noting the hell out of the program book, and putting together a list of all the films that are remotely interesting to us. Once that was mostly together (it’s never really complete), I started putting all the available screenings of those films into Google Calendar, colour coding the entries with my top choices as well as Danielle’s.
That of course makes for a messy messy mess to choose from (left) – I probably have 100 screenings on the schedule across 8 days, and we’ll only be seeing about 20 or so. Next I start narrowing things down – I pick another colour for our first choices and start pulling out screenings that we both agree on as our top favourites.
The general criteria I follow from there is no early mornings (hey, this is also a vacation), preference to first screenings (best attendance by cast/crew for stargazing), and I try to limit travel distance between screenings (ie, don’t schedule one film at Scotiabank/Paramount and then the very next one at Varsity 8).
And that’s how we end up with our final list of first picks. It’s a bit of a rough process – lots of movies have to get dropped off, compromises made. I feel like we’ve got a pretty good balance of films from different programmes, some foreign language films, some Canadian flicks, and we managed to keep most of the films at Ryerson and AMC which are both within a couple of blocks of our apartment.
So now we wait to find out if we get all our picks. I think we have a pretty good chance. Typically the ticketing process involves a lottery system where you have no idea what your chances are of getting your picks. This year though, they’ve introduced a (somewhat controversial) policy where donors who make a contribution to the Bell Lightbox fund get their orders processed ahead of the general lottery. We made a donation at the lowest level that would allow us to participate in this program – so I’m hoping that’ll be enough to get us all our picks – there are quite a few donor levels above us that will get processed first though, so who knows. We just wanted to give ourselves the best chance we can get since we don’t get to make it down to TIFF too often.
So without further ado, the final list:
O’Horten
JCVD
A Film With Me In It
Me and Orson Welles
Burn After Reading (GALA)
Un ete sans point ni coup sur
Religulous
Ghost Town
The People Speak
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
Not Quite Hollywood
L’Heure d’ete
Good
The Wrestler
Gigantic
Paris, Not France
Synecdoche, New York
Cooper’s Camera
Control Alt Delete
Martyrs
Je Veux Voir
I’ll do up a page with some writeups for these shortly. For now, we wait…