So today, in this small update to Cinema In Brief: TIFF Shorts, Ramses Madina and Claudia Morgado Escanilla share their experiences from the festival, and their thoughts on the support for short film in Canada.

Claudia Morgado Escanilla's short No Bikini (which I reviewed here on blogTO) played at TIFF before every screening of Breakfast with Scot, and featured a strong and engaging feel-good story about a young girl who decides to become a boy for a few short weeks.

Ramses Madina's short Farmer's Requiem (which I reviewed here on blogTO) screened along with Blood Will Tell and was one of my favorite shorts of the festival, treating the laments of the loss of agricultural space in our country with poignancy.

I asked Ramses and Claudia the same questions I asked Peter Lynch, to find out how they felt about their experiences this past September:

What were the highlights of screening your film at the Toronto International Film Festival this year?

CME: The highlight for me on was the overwhelming response to my film No Bikini. We loved making the film and we loved the final product. It was so exciting to have other people love it also.

RM: After the screening at TIFF I received an e-mail from one of [film narrator] Victor's close relatives... A few of his relatives knew about the film and made the trip to Toronto to see the film and experience Victors voice again for the first time in over two years... and they loved it. Sadly I never got the chance to meet them but it was the best compliment I could have ever asked for. I have invited them to the gallery opening for the film here in Ottawa and hope to meet them then.

Why is it important for Canada to support our country's short filmmakers? What kind of support is available right now?

CME: It is important because talent is developed and found by giving the opportunity to many types of people to explore the artist within. Among the many people that the arts councils support once in a while we may also find brilliance. In general, there is very little support [for short filmmakers] and many of us who are trying to access it. Aspiring filmmakers can occasionally find support at the Provincial Arts Council and of course The Canada Council for the Arts. The local filmmakers co-ops are often good places where one can find many resources.

RM: I think its really important for Canada to support the arts in general including short filmmakers, and I think that the country is doing a great job. I believe that the different levels of government arts funding organizations have recently received an increase in their budgets which is great.

More coverage on short film at TIFF can be found in September's edition of Cinema in Brief. Cinema in Brief is a 12-part look at short film in Canada, with a special focus on the people making, supporting, and watching short film in Toronto. It will appear on the final Wednesday of every month until August 2008.

The title image is a still from Claudia Morgado Escanilla's No Bikini which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival this year.

Toronto is a city that has no shortage of film festivals, which is a great boon to the short film industry in Canada. After all, short films do not necessarily get the same kind of exposure and theatrical releases as their longer, feature counterparts, and so filmmakers are often dependent on the festival circuit in order to showcase their work.

Aside from the regular festival fare in the city such as Hot Docs and After Dark, Toronto also plays home to the Worldwide Short Film Festival — a festival completely dedicated to the art of the short. In the end, however, when people think of film festivals in Toronto, the first thing that comes to mind is the highly popular and world-renown Toronto International Film Festival (that just wrapped up a few weeks ago) because of the prestige that it holds in the greater global film community. Luckily for us, TIFF is also a fantastic place to catch Canadian short film.

The heart of TIFF's short film programming is the Short Cuts Canada programme which was launched for the first time at the festival in 2004. According to the Toronto International Film Festival Group, the programme was created in order to "accentuate the tremendous talent bursting out of Canada's short film scene." Since then, almost 150 short films by emerging and established filmmakers in this country have graced the screen at TIFF, with many of them gaining not only critical acclaim, but awards, accolades, and lucrative distribution deals as well.

This year, TIFF went even further to promote their selection of short films and have them viewed by cinephiles and members of the public. As well as programming five separate Short Cuts Canada sets, they also set up private viewing stations at the Drake Hotel and worked in concert with the National Film Board to allow non-festival-goers to experience the cinematic innovation showcased at TIFF.

In addition to that, the TIFF Group also released a selection of shorts on their website, a nod to the growing trend of making good cinema available to the larger public through the internet.

While the short films may not get the kind of exposure and fandom as some of the other films at the festival, anyone who has had the chance to watch any of the shorts will agree that the Canadian short film industry is pushing the edge of innovation in cinema. After one of the Short Cuts Canada screenings, I ran into a volunteer (who wished to remain unnamed) who was happy to share his enthusiasm about short film with me:

"I'm surprised there isn't more hype for short film at the festival. Most of the people I know don't have the attention spans to sit through some of the three-hour movies that usually make it in to TIFF. The great thing with shorts is that you know they're going to be good: all the filmmakers are fighting to not only tell you a story in a few minutes, but to tell it in a way that could never be told in a longer feature."

To end off all this talk about short film and TIFF, I had the chance to ask a few quick questions to renown Toronto-based filmmaker Peter Lynch, whose short with artist Max Dean entitled A Short Film About Falling premiered at TIFF this year. (You can read my brief review of A Short Film About Falling on my TIFF Today post here.)

As many of you know, Lynch has gained critical acclaim for his documentary work, including the highly celebrated and Genie-nominated Project Grizzly (Quentin Tarantino praised the film as one of his favorites in an interview with Charlie Rose) which premiered at TIFF ten years ago. Lynch has also been lauded for his work in short film: his short Arrowhead, starring Don McKellar, was awarded the Genie for Best Short Film in 1994.

I asked Lynch two quick questions about his experience at TIFF this year, and his general thoughts on short film in this country:

What were the highlights of screening your film at the Toronto International Film Festival this year?

There were several highlights of the festival for me, including a great article in the Globe on [Dean and Lynch's short] film and a reception for the film staged by art gallerists Nicolas Metiveir and Edward Burtinsky. Another highlight was getting to know some of the other filmmakers in the programme at some of the dinners held by the festival.

Most importantly, I really appreciated the great response from peers and a wide range of people from the cultural community who had the chance to watch to the film. And of course, I enjoyed finally taking out some time to watch work by other Canadian filmmakers.

Why is it important for Canada to support our country's short filmmakers? What kind of support is available right now?

It is important to support shorts on a number of levels and for a number of reasons. Short film is a diverse and important form of cinematic expression, not unlike the short story in literature. It runs the gamut of film-making: drama, experimental, animation, documentary, etc. Short films are potentially a hot bed for filmmaking in general; they are a chance for people to experiment and expand their craft and vision.

While in Canada there are arts councils — and some broadcasters like Bravo, and for some possibly the NFB — that support short film-making, Canadian shorts are largely made with personal subsidy
from the filmmakers and in-kind donations from the members of the industry, close friends, and other supporters.

Cinema in Brief is a 12-part look at short film in Canada, with a special focus on the people making, supporting, and watching short film in Toronto. It will appear on the final Wednesday of every month until August 2008.

The title image is a still from Peter Lynch and Max Dean's A Short Film About Falling which played in the Short Cuts Canada programme at the Toronto International Film Festival this year.

Warner Bros. already took action against piracy and imposed an embargo on all preview screenings of their upcoming movies in Toronto, but are the pirates out there at TIFF as well? Well, according to Thomas Purves' video above, the pirates are not only out there, but vocal as well.

From Thomas' blog post:

On Monday, it started with a few scattered pranksters shouting Arrr at the opening screen of the film premiers at this year's Toronto International Film festival. By week end the meme had caught on.

The Pirate Bay relaunched Suprnova a few months ago with the following message to Hollywood:

This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the internet and the future. Y'arr!

The public's radar, on the other hand, was front-and-centre for the Cadillac People's Choice Award, the founding father of all those godforsaken "Be an original" ads that preceded the feature films this year ("Death Shark!" "Dance Fight!"). First place in the popularity contest goes to David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, with a runner-up prize to Jason Reitman's brilliant Juno.

blogTO's film crew was all over the fest this year with their coverage. Read on to find out what we picked as the best of the festival.

Matt, a.k.a. me:

Best film: XXY. The best film about gender identity I've ever seen. When your kids come to you asking what "gay" and "straight" mean, this is the film you show them to demonstrate that those words mean absolutely nothing. XXY was the third-last film I saw in the 51-film week, and stunned me with its raw, simple power, along with an astonishing lead performance by Inés Efron as a hermaphrodite 15-year-old being told that she must now choose her identity.

Runner up by a very narrow margin: Juno. It's this year's Little Miss Sunshine, only without the enormous feeling of emotional manipulation and grossness. And the single best ensemble cast I've seen in about ten years, lead by the formidable Ellen Page (but a big sloppy wet shout-out goes to the incredible Allison Janney in a supporting role).

And one honourable mention: Catherine Breillat's Une Vielle Maitresse. The director nearly died of a stroke, came back and made a movie that kicks hard French aristocratic ass. And has the best use of blood in a sexual context I've ever seen.

Andrea, podcastress extraordinaire:

My favorite movie would have to be Sukiyaki Western Django. Maybe it was the atmosphere at Midnight Madness that put me in such a good mood - the smell of booze and cheers in the air or maybe it was the opening Takashi Miike video that just set everything right. The film itself was nonstop laughs and good times. A bonus was the fact that Quentin Tarrantino wasn't as annoying as I thought he would be. He actually stole the show at times.

Runner up: No Country For Old Men. This movie is a masterpiece. Plain and simple. Can I go as far as saying it's better than Fargo? I will. Javier Bardem is the scariest villain to come around in ages, and Tommy Lee Jones deserves an Oscar for his role as Sheriff Bell.

Johnny, film writer and man about town:

More than most times during the year, TIFF is where I see the most arthouse films in a single week. However, my favourite movie at this year's fest is Son of Rambow. It's not an art film, but it's the most original and clever thing I saw all week. Crackling British wit spread across one enjoyable scene after another, Garth Jenning's reverent and hilarious homage to childhood imagination should especially charm those who can remember watching First Blood (or any genre flick from the 80s) for the first time on VHS. It evoked some of my warmest memories of how much fun it was growing up with a simple yet deep love for movies.

Runner up: Mister Lonely is Harmony Korine's best movie. Hands down, it's his most mature and narratively coherent film to date. But still, every now and then that old familiar curiosity of this one-time wunderkind of cult cinema pops into mind: "Where the hell does he get these ideas from?" Regardless, in the idiosyncratic inventions of Korine's storytelling, these ideas work brilliantly.

Sameer, the heart of the team:

Favourite: No Country for Old Men. Let's just say that if you don't think that Javier Bardem is not the most nightmare-inducing character in modern cinema, you really need to get your head checked.

Runners up: Persepolis, My Brother is an Only Child, Juno, and Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame

Tim, supreme commander and master of economic writing:

I loved Persepolis and East of Heaven.

I hated I'm Not There.

In light of this, I've decided to create the blogTO Toronto International Film Festival Most Awesome Awards (TIFF MAAs) which will highlight crowning achievements by people in the film industry — achievements that are often ignored by traditional award juries. Of course, I'll need your help to complete the list, so be sure to put your TIFF MAA winners in the comments below.

Oh, and if you're mentioned as one of the winners of a TIFF MAA, drop me an email and I'll send you a prize — a shiny blogTO button — over your way.

Without further ado, the TIFF MAAs:

Most Awesome Use of a Hammer
Lars von Trier does what we all have wanted to do at some point in our lives in his segment of Chacun son cinema.

Most Awesome Facial Hair
I almost didn't recognize Rupinder Nagra when I met him after he had shaved: such was the power of his beard in Amal.

Most Awesome Performance by a City in a Starring Role
In a three-way tie, this award goes to Sydney in Lawrence Johnston's Night, Halifax in Clement Virgo's Poor Boy's Game, and our beloved hometown Toronto in Ed Gass-Donnelly's This Beautiful City.

Most Awesomely Dressed Celeb on the Red Carpet
Eighteen-year-old Nina Dobrev made heads turn in her red dress on the red carpet for Fugitive Pieces, a far cry from what she looks like regularly on Degrassi.

Most Awesome Celebrity Cameo
George Stroumboulopoulos was on screen for about ten seconds in Bruce McDonald's The Tracey Fragments talking about teenage pussy.

Most Awesome Chess Game
Nobody needs skill when you can depend on deep concentration and the rumble of a train, as demonstrated in the chess game in Madame Tutli-Putli.

Most Awesome Marketing Campaign
Skinny and tall young men in tiny and tight yellow shorts were running around the city handing out orange Tic Tacs as a promotion for Jason Reitman's Juno.

Most Awesome Musical Number
A few tambourines and a two fast-talking Cubans are all you need to make a musical number work, as demonstrated in Chacun son cinema.

Most Awesome Ass-Kicking Sequence
You can always count on Wilson Yip to bring the pain, and he does that very deftly in Flash Point.

Most Awesomely Odd Bathing Suit
Gael Garcia Bernal's friend walks out of the room with a tight, package-revealing yellow speedo-like outfit before the pool party in Déficit.

Most Awesomely Creepy Bad Guy
If Javier Bardem's character in No Country for Old Men didn't give you nightmares for the next week, you have no soul.

That's all I've got for now. Do you have any TIFF MAA categories to add and awards to give? Let me know in the comments.

(Images: 1: Serious ass-kicking in Flash Point, courtesy of TIFF. 2: Nina Dobrev on the Red Carpet, courtesy of TIFF.)

The filmmakers are French, and friends of last year's closing filmmaker, Kim Chapiron (who brought us Sheitan). There's no two ways about it: if their horror movies are to be believed, the French are a deeply disturbed people.

À l'intérieur is basically Panic Room with three significant alterations:

1. Daughter still inside Mom instead of 12 years old and ambulatory
2. Trio of thieves replaced by nigh-unkillable psycho woman
3. SO MUCH BLOOD.

Yup, an about-to-give birth single mom (her husband was killed in a freak car crash, so mommy's a bit on the moody side) is trapped in her house by a psychotic woman who knows her way around a pair of scissors, and mayhem predictably ensues. This flick was billed as being the goriest thing since Dead Alive, and it's certainly in the ballpark. The film starts off slow and spooky, and promptly turns into a seamlessly nightmarish hell-ride featuring a duel of attrition between the mom-to-be and her assailant.

And with the aforementioned scissors being joined by knitting needles, shards of broken mirror, and a home-made harpoon, I must reiterate: SO MUCH BLOOD.

À l'intérieur is definitely not a flick for the squeamish, and its unrepentently grim conclusion smacks of a pair of filmmakers who couldn't figure out how to write their way out of the box they'd put themselves in. But the closing night Midnight Madness films have been waging a war of escalation ever since Saw premiered here in 2004; À l'intérieur is a cunning and capable one-up to the astonishing horrors of last year's Sheitan, and should hold the crown firmly until we see whatever Colin Geddes trots out on us at this time next year.

And so, TIFF ends as it always does - with a thousand fans screaming bloody murder in the dark. See you next year!

Day Ten

The Toronto International Film Festival is officially over; well, it will be at the end of the day today. It has been a crazy ten days, and I'm hoping everyone had a great time. I sure did. Of course, none of the fun and the folly of the festival could have been possible without the hard work of all the volunteers.

Before every film screening, there's an ad by NBC Universal thanking the volunteers for their support during the festival. Most people will lend their applause in thanks during the ad, but there was one P&I screening where I found myself being the only one clapping. The guy next to me glared and said: "Why are you clapping? They're only doing it for the free movie passes, so there's no real reason to thank them."

At that, I intensified my applause to make up for the idiots like the man next to me in the audience. What that man didn't realize is that without the hundreds of volunteers around us, TIFF would be a logistical nightmare and wouldn't be as successful as it is now. Free movies passes are definitely not thanks enough for the people who work tirelessly in order to bring the film festival to our city.

So today, on this last day of the festival, I want to send a huge thank you to all the volunteers on behalf of the entire City of Toronto. You do us all proud.

If you're set on spending your final festival day doing some celeb stalking, here are some of the big names that are still hanging around in town today:

• Keira Knightley
• Michel Brault
• Nadine Labaki
• Richard Attenborough
• Ellen Spiro
• Gael Garcia Bernal
• Jeremy Podeswa
• Nina Dobrev
• Eddie Vedder
• Ira Sachs
• Freddie Prinze Jr.
• Clement Virgo
• Kevin Bacon
• Marcia Gay Harden
• Peter Lynch
• Bruce McDonald

Today's the last day of the festival, so of course, the biggest event of the day is the closing night gala of Paolo Barzman's Emotional Arithmetic at Roy Thomson Hall. Then you can spend the rest of the evening trying to speculate on what's going to be showing at next year's festival — or is that just me?

And now, a short (100-word) look at a short:

Madame Tutli-Putli
Everyone that knows me knows that I'm a bit of a betting man. So write this down: I'm betting that Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski's Madame Tutli-Putli will win the Academy Award for best animated short film come February. By far the best short film showing at the festival, Madame Tutli-Putli is a stop-motion animated film that uses puppetry and very creepy lighting in order to tell a mysterious and compelling story of a woman that faces her demons while taking the night train. The film is visually stunning and the content is much more intriguing than any other short film I've seen this year, Canadian or not.

Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski's Madame Tutli-Putli won't be screening today at the festival, but keep an eye out on the NFB website in the next few months. If my Oscar prediction comes through, I'm sure they'll be talking more about it as February approaches.

(Image: Poster of the Toronto International Film Festival, via TIFF.)

With DAINIPPONJIN, I'm not so sure. The flick is a subtle and sharp-minded comedy along the lines of Beat Takeshi's work (Takeshi is in the main body of the festival this year with Glory to the Filmmaker). DAINIPPONJIN is hilarious, a story of a low-key shlubb whose "job" is to serve Japan as a local superhero. Daisato (Hitoshi Matsumoto, who also directed) is having a documentary made about him, in which he describes his seemingly menial existence, while occasionally making detours to power plants to be "powered up" into a gigantic, Hulk-style monster-slayer in purple underwear.

It's a zesty piece of filmmaking, I'm just not sure it's right for this programme.

The humour in DAINIPPONJIN, when its hero isn't beating the holy snot out of a gigantic rubber band man (all of the superhero's enemies take traditional Japanese monster movie form, i.e. they are city-stomping giant monsters), is so subtle as to be almost subliminal. Matsumoto gives a wonderfully sparse, unaffected performance as a guy who is just as freakin' bored with his job as the rest of us are... except that his job happens to be superheroic; the rest of the time, he's really just sort of underwhelmed.

The result, however, is a film where the occasional monster fight is merely a momentary diversion in what is otherwise long tracts of extremely low-energy, high-payoff-if-you're-paying-attention comedy. And after 9 days of festival films (including 5 prior to this one today), my brain just wasn't in it. The sold-out house at the Ryerson seemed to agree with me - the laughs began to die off as the movie progressed and its comic shock value wore down.

Still, a situation like this is just a good example of why Midnight-style content can and should have a place in the mainstream festival. If you feel like trying your hand at DAINIPPONJIN in a state of relative awakeness, it's re-screening today (Saturday) at 12:30 at the Scotiabank.

Day Nine

The Toronto International Film Festival has been around for as long as most of us can remember, but it is still young at 31 years old when compared to some festivals like Cannes. While Cannes is still noted as the premiere film festival in the world, Toronto comes a close second in they eyes of most cineastes, showing how quickly the Toronto festival has grown and evolved in a few years. Which brings me to wonder: what are we, in Toronto, going to do in less than 20 years when TIFF turns 50?

To celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Cannes, noted filmmakers from 25 countries came together to create short films in celebration of the art of cinema. Together, they form Chacun son cinema, a compilation of thirty-four films all talking about movies. While the film isn't quite as good as last year's tribute compilation Paris, Je T'aime, it's still a great tribute to the art form that we all know and love. You can catch Chacun son cinema screens at the Elgin at 6pm tonight.

In other news, I have a friend that bought a condo at the festival towers back before they were renamed the Bell Lightbox. Earlier this week, the festival group invited all the buyers to a special reception where they were given tickets to screenings at the festival and were thanked for their early support of the festival centre. Yesterday, the TIFF group announced even more support for the centre, as they confirmed a gift of more than $22 million from the Reitman family and The Daniels Corporation.

The Daniels Corporation joins Canadian filmmaker Ivan Reitman and his sisters as part of the King and John Festival Corporation, which joins founding sponsor Bell, the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario who have each contributed $25 million, and various other sponsors to create the city's premiere film centre. I'm looking forward to seeing the ways the Toronto International Film Festival changes and evolves once the new Bell Lightbox has been constructed.

If you're set on starting your weekend a bit early in order to do some celeb stalking, there aren't many new celebs arriving in town today, but here are a few that might still be floating around:

• Lisa Ray
• Rupinder Nagra
• Eddie Vedder
• Francois Ozon
• Keira Knightley
• Christopher Plummer
• Guy Pierce
• Jason Reitman
• Freddie Prinze Jr.
• Jennifer Connolly
• Lauren Bacall

The Dialogues programme at the festival is busy today, with Sidney Lumet introducing William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives at the Cumberland at 2:45pm, and Max von Sydow introducing Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring — particularly poignant in light of Bergman's recent passing — at the Isabel Bader Theatre at 8pm.

And now, a short (100-word) look at a short:

Dada Dum
At first, when I watched Dada Dum, I thought that I just didn't quite get it. So I watched it twice more and realized that while the weird floating gyrations of an iris-less woman creeped me out to no end, I just couldn't quite understand what Britt Randle was trying to do with his short movie. There is promise in the way the film is shot, but I could just never immerse in what was going on because it was way over my head.

Britt Randle's Dada Dum screens at the Cumberland at 3pm as part of the Short Cuts Canada Programme 2.

(Image: Still from Chacun son cinema, via TIFF.)

Yip was in attendance before the screaming, slathering crowd; he and Geddes had also received an e-mail from the movie's star and action choreographer, Donnie Yen, just prior to showtime, which they read to the audience before letting the mayhem unfold onscreen. Yen promised a new breed of MMA (mixed martial arts) action, and in this regard, he did not disappoint.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie wasn't even in the same zip code as its jaw-dropping final act, which contains two masterfully-choreographed and flawlessly-executed fistfights between Yen and a series of opponents. They are truly a cinematic wonder, blending the balletic grace of a Crouching Tiger with the bone-crushing brutality of a bar-room brawl.

The rest of the film, however, is a stylish, but standard, undercover cop story with few action beats and sparse laughs. At one o'clock in the morning, it's a lot to ask an audience to sit through, even to get to so spectacular a finish.

Still, the crowd didn't seem to mind; they sat quietly through the dull parts and roared their approval every time Yen CRACKED and SMACKED his way through a bad guy.

Flash Point re-screens today at noon at the Scotiabank.

Day Eight

Sometimes, after watching a Canadian movie at the film festival, I wonder about films that have come before it: the director's previous work, the previous attempts at the same story, or just the obscure references that were made in the movie. And while some of us pretend to know it all when it comes to Canadian cinema, it is almost impossible to have seen every film that has graced every screen in our country. This is where the Film Reference Library comes in handy.

For those of you that don't know about it, the Film Reference Library has more than 17,000 book titles and 60,000 film files, and is the world's largest repository of Canadian film-related materials. Now, while the library is open for research purposes all through the year, it has decided to open its doors to the public for the duration of the film festival so that Canadians can look at the great cinematic history of our country.

The Film Reference Library, located at 2 Carlton just outside College Station, is open for the public from 9am to 5pm during the festival, and will be holding special library tours at 10am and 2pm today and tomorrow.

If you're set on skipping school or work in order to do some celeb stalking instead of library hopping, here are some of the big names that will be arriving in town today:

• Vik Sahay
• Romola Garai
• Michel Brault
• Christopher Plummer
• Marcia Gay Harden
• Kevin Bacon
• Lucia Puenzo
• Garth Jennings

Two Canadian celebrities, Michel Brault and Denys Arcand, will be at the ROM Theatre today at 4:30 as part of the Canadian Retrospective programme. Moderated by biographer André Loiselle, the panel featuring Arcand and documentarian Brault will look back over Brault's career, the unique situation of Quebec cinema and the different demands of documentary and fiction.

Lord Richard Attenborough will be on hand to discuss and introduce his 1969 film Oh! What a Lovely War at the Cumberland at 2:15pm. Part of the Dialogues programme, Attenborough will talk about the conception of this humorous musical that purveys an important message about war.

And now, a short (100-word) look at a short:

Latchkeys Lament
The first thing I noticed about Troy Nixey's Latchkey's Lament was that apart from looking great, the film also sounded phenomenal. Every small noise drew me into the part-live-action, part-CGI film and complemented the brilliantly composed score in order to make the film feel vibrant and exciting. It helps that the story is quite a good one, and that Nixey has a knack for the visual flair that makes the inanimate world come alive in miraculous ways. Latchkey's Lament is definitely not a short to be missed.

Troy Nixey's Latchkey's Lament screens at noon today at the Cumberland Theatre as part of Short Cuts Canada Programme 3.

(Image: Still from Michel Brault's Les Noces de papier, via TIFF.)

Day Seven

The Toronto International Film Festival is not only a place for big films to get bought and big filmmakers to gain prestige. It is, as evidenced by the films in the Canada First! programme, also a place for new and upcoming filmmakers to showcase their talents to a worldwide audience. One of those films, Richie Mehta's Amal, was also a previous winner of the Telefilm Canada Pitch This! competition in 2005, a competition where young aspiring filmmakers work with industry veterans to pitch their projects and vie to win $10,000 for the development of their new film.

This year's Pitch This! competition took place yesterday at the Sutton Hotel, and assembled six finalists who each pitched their projects to a panel of judges with the help of their veteran pitch coaches. The finalists included Geoff Redknap and Katie Weekley for The Auburn Hills Breakdown, Daniel Shehori and Steven Shehori for The Engagement Pact, Jim Goodall and Paul Lenart for Giantland, Adnan Ahmed for Invisible City, Mona Waserman and Peter Reynolds for Senior Year, and Shelly Hong and Soo-won Lee for Swallow.

In the end, it was Goodall and Lenart's pitch for Giantland, a CGI- and puppetry-based animated film about two children that enter a land of giants, that won the competition. I'm already looking forward to seeing their film at the festival in a few years.

If you're set on skipping school or work in order to do some celeb stalking, here are some of the big names that will be arriving in town today:

• Francois Ozon
• Sidney Lumet
• Guy Pierce
• Max Van Sydow
• Michel Brault
• Donnie Yen
• Chris Klein
• Mark Ruffalo
• Lauren Bacall

If you've got some time 1pm today, be sure to stop by the ROM Theatre for a special discussion discussing how musicians, directors and music supervisors work together in order to create excellent films. Entitled In the Mix: Discussing Music and Film, the special panel is hosted by Eye Weekly's Jason Anderson.

For the Scorsese fans out there—and lets face it, who doesn't love Martin Scorsese?— Ellen Burstyn is in town in order to introduce a screening of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore as part of the Dialogues programme. One of Scorsese's first major films of his career, this screening and Burstyn's talk will surely give us an insight into the experience that shaped the director's filmmaking for the past thirty years.

And now, a short (100-word) look at a short:

Farmer's Requiem
As urban dwellers, it's often easy to forget that there's a whole world just beyond our cities: people who grow the food we eat every day. Using black and white shots of sweeping vistas of abandoned farmland, Ramses Madina's Farmer's Requiem retells the story of a man who became a farmer upon his father's death, and the laments of the loss of agricultural space in our country. At moments, the film is poignant, at others, it seems to drag, but in all, it definitely does make you think about how our rapidly urbanizing lifestyles may be encroaching on the spaces we need most in our lives.

Ramses Madina's Farmer's Requiem screens with Blood Will Tell today at 9:45pm and tomorrow at noon at the Cumberland.

(Image: Waiting for the stars to arrive, by Sam Javanrough.)

I hate Takashi Miike. Hate, hate, hate. I've walked out of more of his films than I've stayed in. And yet, every time Colin Geddes programs one of his films for Midnight Madness, my ears perk up - each successive one sounds even more fun than the one before.

This time, it's SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO (capitalized to grab your attention, like most of the movie) - and for the first time, I don't hate Takeshi Miike.

Miike's long association with Midnight Madness packed the house at the Ryerson tonight; tickets for DJANGO sold better than the Argento or Romero offerings and were the fastest sellout for MM this year. Actors from the film were in attendance, and Miike, who was unable to hop over to Toronto for the screening, taped a welcome for the crowd and wished everyone well. He even gave us his e-mail address so we could comment on the film (miike@olm.co.jp).

SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO repatriates the storyline from Kurosawa's masterpiece Yojimbo, which, after it was made in Japan in 1961, went on a kind of cinematic world tour. It became Leone's A Fistful of Dollars and Walter Hill's Last Man Standing before Miike got his grubby little hands on it and brought it back to its homeland, albeit carrying every single trapping of the foreign cultures it had visited.

The result is a truly gobsmacking piece of cinema. Japanese actors stroll the streets of a half-Western, half-Edo town, carrying swords and pistols (and one Gatling), and speaking in phonetic English that none of the actors themselves understand. (Even Miike, it is said, did not understand the dialogue he was directing.)

As in the original(s), a lone gunman/samurai arrives in the town, which is ruled by two warring factions. The nameless newcomer seeks to set both sides against each other in a battle royale that will purge the streets of evil. All of the classic components are in place, although Miike also adds a new character - I won't spoil the surprise, but I guarantee that this new hero will be a crowd favourite by the time the show's over.

DJANGO gets occasionally sidetracked, but on the whole is such an exuberantly weird retelling of such an amazing piece of storytelling that it's utterly absorbing from start to finish. This might seem like damning with faint praise, but this is far and away Miike's most satisfying work. A strong recommendation to catch it while you can.

DJANGO re-screens Thursday at noon, and Saturday at 9:30.

Day Six

Clive Owen and Cate Blanchett may have been on the cover of Metro yesterday, but it is fitting that Ellen Page was on the cover of Screen Daily on the same day. Because while many people in Toronto may be abuzz about sightings of Jude Law and Angelina Jolie, the talk in the film world is buzzing about the quality of Canadian content at this year's film festival.

Of course, Ellen Page's performance (alongside fellow Canadian Michael Cera) in Juno is a standout when it comes to Canadian talent, but she's not the only actor from the Great White North that has been receiving accolades for their work this year. Crowd favorite Ryan Gosling turns in a stunning performance in Lars and the Real Girl, and Kristin Booth, who turned in a humorous performance in Young People Fucking, does a complete u-turn and turns in a frighteningly impressive role in This Beautiful City.

While there are some great Canadian films (Eastern Promises, Poor Boy's Game) in various programmes at the festival this year, the Canada First! programme has featured some of the most impressive Canadian cinema I've seen in years. We've written a lot about Richie Mehta's Amal before, but equally of note are films like This Beautiful City, Just Buried, and Young People Fucking. And of course, Juno is directed by Canadian-born Jason Reitman, son of legendary filmmaker Ivan Reitman who has made his home in Montreal for several years.

If you're set on skipping school or work in order to do some celeb stalking, here are some of the big names that will be arriving in town today:

• Denys Arcand
• Koel Purie
• John Leguizamo
• Woody Allen
• Ludivine Sagnier
• Wilson Yip
• Michael Douglas
• Chris Cooper
• Ellen Burstyn
• Eric Bana
• Tyrese GIbson

If you're more interested in film than stars, it's worth noting that the TIFF '07 Screening Room is up and features trailers and clips from some of the most popular films showing at the festival. And just in case you were upset that you missed your quick chance to see Clooney or Pitt talk about their movies, the Screening Room also has video of the various press conferences that have taken place at the festival.

Of particular note, however, is the fact that the Screening Room lets you watch six short films that are screening at TIFF this year. Instead of browsing YouTube on your lunch break today, stop by and watch some great Canadian shorts.

And now, a short (100-word) look at a short:

Smile
Julia Kwan wowed audiences across the country with her first feature film, Eve and the Fire Horse, but fails to capture the same kind of soul in her short film Smile. While Kwan attempts to capture the same kind of family sensibility she so aptly presented in her feature, Smile fails to charm the audience in the same way. Then again, part of this may be because we've covered the territory already in Eve and the Fire Horse, so you can't fault Kwan entirely.

Julia Kwan's Smile screens today at 4pm at the Cumberland Theatre as part of Short Cuts Canada Programme 4.

(Image: Premiere Party for Chaz Thorne's Just Buried, taken by Joshua Tidsbury.)

Tonight's Midnight Madness was the world premiere of Stuck, by Stuart Gordon. As soon as word got out among the Midnight Madness congnoscenti that Colin Geddes was bringing a movie to TIFF about a man stuck in the windshield of a young woman's car (based on a true story, no less), it became the dark horse ticket-to-have for this year's MM lineup - even as Mother of Tears, Diary of the Dead and tomorrow night's SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO garnered more of the attention. Stuck gets cred because it just sounds so darn cool - and you want to see if the director can pull this premise off.

Oh boy, did he ever. Stuck is as rough around the edges as the proverbial piece of broken windshield glass, but Stuart Gordon does a terrific job of capitalizing on every cringe-inducing moment inherent to a story where a guy spends the back half of the film fighting for his life from within a busted-up car.

Mena Suvari plays the white trash dipshit who hits Stephen Rea in the middle of the night and then fails to do anything about it; while she goes about her day-to-day business (including a hysterical full-frontal sex scene that turns into a PTSD phantasmagoria, and an equally-hysterical frying pan fight with her boyfriend's naked mistress), the dude impaled on her windshield has to do his best to elicit aid from a startlingly apathetic public.

Badly wounded and pathetically shlubby, Rea really elevates the picture with his dedication, sense of fun, and willingness to show us the pain.

The entire cast (except, unfortunately, Rea) was in attendance at the Ryerson, including a shorn-haired, pixie-like Mena Suvari and a tremendously engaging Russell Hornsby - who got on the microphone before the show started and proclaimed, "It's midnight, I'm fucked up!" Clearly, the man understands the MM vibe.

Stuck re-screens Wednesday at 4:00 at the Scotiabank.