These were the big films the first year I came to the Toronto International Film Festival – or, as it was known at the time, the Toronto Festival of Festivals:

Dead Ringers, Earth Girls Are Easy, Far North, Miles From Home, Memories of Me, Criminal Law, Women On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and Madame Sousatzka.

Quick, now – can you guess what year it was? (No fair going to imdb.com!)

Congratulations if you guessed 1988—in fact, congratulations if you recognized more than two or three of those titles.

 

This year marks my twentieth anniversary with TIFF. Has it changed in all that time? No more so than, say, Times Square in the same period. Or the world economy.

Back then, you could get a pass for Toronto—press or public, you all went to the same screenings—and, if you wanted, simply sit in the same theater all day and watch whatever they put in front of you.

If you were to have done that in 1988 you may well have discovered a lot of excellent films, as I did. Not so much the Gala films, but gems like Claire Denis’ Chocolat, Tom Waits’ Big Time, Decline of Western Civilization 2: The Metal Years, Catherine Briellet’s 36 Fillette, Red Sorghum, the Chet Baker documentary Let’s Get Lost, The Thin Blue Line, and too many more to list.

The New Visions New Voices series offered films by such as yet unheralded filmmakers as Krzsytof Kieslowski, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Bela Tarr, Manoel De Oliveira, Monika Treut, Mira Nair, and Todd Haynes, whose short “Superstar – The Karen Carpenter Story” would soon be enjoined from public screening. There was even a whole special section of films by Finnish directors Aki and Mika Kaurismaki, the first time their quirky films had been presented to an international audience.

Well, I was hooked. I’ve been to TIFF every year since then to gorge at the trough (one year I managed to see 60 films).

 

In those two decades I’ve seen a lot of skyscrapers go up, and the dollar come down. (For awhile in the 1990s you could trade your US dollar for $1.50 Canadian; now it’s barely worth going to the currency exchange.) Most of the theaters once used for screenings are gone. Yonge Street, the longest street in the world, which flows through the center of the city and the Festival, has changed its coffee shops and takeaway pizza parlors for Asian food of many varieties, much of it good, fast and cheap—just what you need when you have 15 minutes between movies.

 

In those ways, TIFF is better. (A ten-day diet of pizza and coffee is about as good for you as the diet Morgan Spurlock documented in Super Size Me.) But I have to tell you, it’s not as much fun as it used to be. For a film fanatic like myself, the Toronto Festival has become a victim of its own success. I’ve watched as the number of media in attendance rose every year, and so has Hollywood. The studios realized that it made much more sense to bring their films to this place where so many journalists were congregating than to pay to fly them to junkets. This year there are 1300 accredited journalists here, and it seems like all of them are chasing the same handful of films, all of which will be in US theaters in the next month or so.

It’s gotten to the point where trying to schedule what you want to see at TIFF is a mind-boggling proposition. The press screenings are so numerous as to form a separate festival away from the main body. (Which is a shame, because I would much rather attend the public screenings of films: the Toronto audiences are smart, receptive, and generally a joy to experience a film with.) Many of the studios set up screenings of their own to accommodate the overflow; some even have screenings in Manhattan prior to the Festival.

 

Saddest of all, the once-egalitarian atmosphere has eroded. This year TIFF introduced a policy of “priority” press screenings, where some journalists get precedence over others. We’re all created equal, but some are more equal than others.

Well, I’m not going to let all the ink-stained wretches jockeying for an interview with Jodie Foster or Brad Pitt or the Coen Brothers ruin this Festival for me. I’ll have lots of chances to see their movies and a lot of the other “big” titles that are here. Face it, a lot of these movies will be in your home town theaters in a few weeks, on DVD in six months, and on TV next year, where you’ll probably ignore them to watch a rerun of “Scrubs.”

 

There’s so much more to see here, so many movies I’ve never heard of and know nothing about that are just dying for me to discover them. And as much as possible that’s what I plan to do in my 10 days here.