TIFF 2024: A Recap (Part One)

A recap of my experiences at the 2024 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival.

Photo credit: TIFF

It’s been at least a week. I think I’ve let myself cool down perfectly enough so that I don’t exhaust myself with writing left and right about practically everything that I saw at the festival, because I broke the record that I had set last year in terms of movies seen (including pre-festival screenings) at 51 this year. I thought I’d already done too much last year at 46, but somehow I ended up surpassing that, and I don’t even know how I survived.

Even though this was also the first year of the festival where I had an Airbnb that was close enough to the festival grounds (it was right by Scotiabank Arena, so thankfully not too far a walk away should I have done the Midnight Madness screenings), I also found myself more exhausted than I’ve ever been. Granted, I’ve already come out of many screenings incredibly tired in my previous years where I would commute back and forth from Mississauga to Toronto, but because I had a place to stay with the help of a friend, Jonathan Kirkwood, who was also accredited this year.

To say the least, it was very overwhelming. It was really overwhelming because I found that this was the first edition of the festival, in all my years of having attended the festival, this probably might also be the most exhausted that I’ve felt the moment it ended. Because that might just be appropriate when you’re seeing so many films in theaters left and right, with very little wiggle room in between them given the fixed times for each screening. So by the time the festival ended, I was eating more than I knew I could take.

Not that it’s something I regret in the slightest. I needed time to let each film marinate, especially after the constant note-taking that I was utilizing my own Letterboxd for, right after every movie that I saw, but even to ensure that I could provide adequate coverage for all my dispatches when I was going to even talk about them to begin with. And when you’ve come out of the entire festival with 51 films on your record, things can’t be so easy.

Given the circumstances that TIFF was undergoing, especially after having lost their lead sponsor Bell at the start of the year, part of me was wondering how this festival would fare compared to past editions. Last year was probably the most quiet that it’s been, given the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, but this year, a lot of prominent names have come back and I somehow got really lucky with striking photos with a few celebrities I admire greatly, among them including Johnny Knoxville, Tilda Swinton, Karen Gillan, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mikey Madison, and Sean Baker.

And I think that overall, it seems like this has been a very productive year on my end. But in all my years of having attended TIFF (I’ve been attending since 2014, got press credentials for the first time in 2018, and thus, this is my fifth year on the press), it felt a bit weird. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. I’ll also talk a bit about how I’ve had some issues with the audience Q&A’s in the past, especially with the fact that last year, at a moderated conversation with Lee Byung-hun and Park Seo-joon, someone used their Q&A slot to ask for a selfie.

If you’ve ever had that experience of feeling secondhand embarrassment from a really bad audience Q&A, that’s what said moment feels like. Something especially terrible happened at the Q&A for the Midnight Madness screening of Joseph Kahn’s Ick, and given the fact that it followed a rather muted reception from that same crowd compared to what the vibes there are like, it only felt like it was adding greater insult to injury. Someone was using a Q&A slot to debate Joseph Kahn about his music taste, which was immediately shut down by Brandon Routh - and I think it was especially painful for the people whom I was around at the time.

Still, there’s a whole other thing to be said about the relationship that TIFF has with TikTok, because it ended up resulting in having some influencers who specialize in film moderating the Q&A’s. Which I shouldn’t be too hung up about, particularly when TIFF has been trying to find ways to boost engagement from younger and budding cinephiles from within the city and beyond. Yet I think that this might have been the wrong way to go about it, especially when there are so many journalists who are struggling to acquire such recognition who could take the Q&A’s in a more interesting direction than just the basic “what was your process like” or “can you describe this or that” moment.

Alas, that doesn’t even cover the biggest elephant in the room: Ticketmaster. Being the source of constant frustration for this festival for so many years, and with all their attendees being bound to a system that has locked out moviegoers, members of the press, and left us beholden to scalpers among many other things. As many of my friends have seen, I was fighting with Ticketmaster day in day out in order to get even a single ticket for The Substance (I was eventually successful in getting one the day before the screening). There’s a lot of things wrong with Ticketmaster, but I think that deserves its own article in the future.

Either way, it’s always a great time. In the next article I’ll be writing more about what films I viewed to be the best of the festival - this will be one of two that I’ll write about the festival overall. At the very least, among some personal records that I’ve hit at this year’s festival have included:

• 51 feature film screenings

• 8 Midnight Madness screenings

• One film seen twice, due to a lack of distribution (The Life of Chuck)

• 14 films directed by women

• 4 Canadian films

• The Golden Lion and Palme d’Or winner were covered this year (The Room Next Door and Anora)

• 1 film projected on actual film (The Brutalist)

• A second selfie with the Palme d’Or winner (Sean Baker)

To cap this off, it was a good festival overall, and I think the way things were handled has me awaiting what will come next year.

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P.S. - Friday’s Five Films comes back this week. I know it’s been a while since I last wrote one of them, but I think now’s the perfect time for it to come back.