Now is the time in the festival when everyone is starting their ‘best of the fest’ list. How anyone can really tackle this is a little beyond me. There are over 300 feature films at the festival and even if you average four films a day that means you’ve seen 40 films by the end of the fest – so something does not add up.
However, please indulge me as I provide a few things I think would make the Toronto Film Festival a little better.
1) Standard rules for red carpets and press conferences. For example, they have started to restrict flash photography to the first minute of each press conference but it’s extremely distracting to have the monster lenses clicking away around you while the press conferences are going on.
2) Some people get the status of ‘Priority Press’. I’d like to know what that means and why they undermine other members of the media by doing this. We should all be living by the same rules in this case. I can understand if they don’t want certain markets to review films for distribution reasons but there are other ways to streamline this.
3) Let’s make this festival 8 days. Even though there are complaints about how much is packed into the 10 days already, the festival can cut down the number of titles, hours of programming and gala events into a nice two-weekend/one-week extravaganza.
4) If a film is selling well, ADD ANOTHER SCREENING. There were a number of films that were barely full this year, so why not add screenings to the films sold well and that people want to see. In fact, on the final weekend, why not screen the 5 contenders for ‘Audiance Choice’ and let even more people enjoy the festival.
I do have my list of faves – films and festival moments – that will be in tomorrow’s post. For now I’m off to meet up with Bollywood princess, Priyanka Chopra to ask her to be my second wife.
