Sure, there may be celebrities everywhere, but often the most interesting people you meet at the Toronto International Film Festival are standing in front of you in line.

Who: Arif Karmali
From: Edmonton, Alberta
In Line For: The Last King of Scotland
Years at the Festival: Two

What are some of your best memories from festivals past?
Enjoying the great movies and talking to great directors and producers. The Q&A's are also a favorite because you can ask interesting questions, and really there's nobody else you can ask but the people who make the movies. That's something I really enjoy at the festival.

What are you looking forward to for this year's festival?
Looking forward to seeing a gala, hopefully. Maybe I'll go to one of the later ones, because there's still tickets available. But yeah, I'm looking forward to going to the big event where everyone gets on the red carpet: really experiencing that part of the festival.

Any other thoughts you have about the festival or Toronto?
I think it's a great city to hold a festival. It brings good exposure to Toronto, and it's an overall great experience. I think they need to reduce ticket prices. Twenty bucks a movie is a little bit high. If it's all about the arts, then it's all about the films and not about the money. Drop the ticket prices for the regular people.

Niki Karimi has built quite the resume in the Iranian film industry as an actress and also working with great directors like Abbas Kiarostami. Her second feature as a director, A Few Days Later..., is a bold film that is centered on repetition and daily routine, and had its world premiere here in Toronto.

There's lots to learn about Karimi on her website, but I had the chance to chat with her just before the first public screening of her movie and ask her a bit about the motivations that came behind it:

A brief look at the some of the films and events happening at this year's Toronto International Film Festival.

Day eight of the festival is usually the day where the lineups are a little shorter, the volunteers and staff are a little less talkative, and everyone is cranky and sick. It's easy to get sick if you're at the Toronto International Film Festival, because watching movies all day (and for some people like me, trying to juggle a full time job at the same time) makes you really tired and susceptible to bugs. Being at the festival, your sleeping and eating habits are usually altered enough to throw you out of your regular groove, and it's also often easy to forget that while you're in a theatre all day, the world is still spinning around you, and people are still living their lives.

So yeah, I'm a little sick. Which means my movie watching over the next few days might be a little light, maybe only about three a day. I hope you don't mind. The festival is bound to pick up a little steam for Friday and Saturday, so if you've got some time to kill this weekend, rest up now because the closing two days are usually full of fun.

Who programs a film about a Hungarian guy hypnotizing a room full of people at ten o'clock in the morning on the seventh day of the film festival? The TIFF programmers, of course! Self-hypnosis aside, the mid-week doldrums are over and done with and it's time to look ahead at the last few days of TIFF '06.

Today's podcast includes:

• Reviews of Shortbus and The Fountain


• Quick picks for Friday and Saturday

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW (12 meg MP3 file)

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Manipulated image, decontextualized sound, spontaneous art...oh my!

Gather round, film farts, art aficionados and music maniacs, all! Tomorrow night, Peter Mettler will be dishing out an eight-hour treat at the Berkeley Church. The director, who is being honoured by this year's TIFF Canadian Retrospective, will be presenting Elsewhere, an evening of improvised audio-visual adventure.

With a slew of musical, tech and visual cronies in tow, the Canadian director of Gambling, Gods and LSD fame will be embarking on an "an uncharted live cinema journey through a multitude of interesting places and states." Hold on to them panties, dearly beloved, this is gonna be fun...

Christian Volckman's new film Renaissance is visually like nothing you have ever seen before. He pushes the boundaries of animation and infuses the black and white film with a noir that is perfectly suited to the dystopian society he has created.

I got to talk to Volckman before his public screening in Toronto, and he shared some of his nervousness, but also tipped me off to a great place to find a nice strong espresso near the hotel. Awesome.