The Official MovieSet Blog
From East to Fest
Monday, September 10, 2007
Festival Season Grips Canada by Both Coasts
If you’re a paparazzo or a star-fuc -watcher, the T-dot is the place to be right now. The Big Smoke is playing host to the largest contingent of journalists and celebrities since Career Day at Promises, and somehow TIFF keeps getting bigger every year. But is it getting better, and how come we never hear that much about Vancouver’s festival in the international or even the Canadian national media? Is VIFF forever doomed to play Betty to TIFF’s Veronica?
On the surface, to be sure, the glitzfest that is TIFF and its glitzphobic West coast cousin coming up later this month in Vancouver are an example of two solitudes that combine to underscore the way in which Hollywood North is gaining real Southern-facing clout, beyond mere industry tax breaks and scores of stunning-but-unspecific shooting locales. But although the two festivals, if combined, would surely offer the best possible barometer of the true state of film in Canada, those that would focus on their differences would seemingly have you believe the same schizophrenia exists on the business side. But is it just some old internal jealousies breaching the surface? Is it time to free ourselves from these willies?
While both groups don their silks to jockey for industry (and indie) cred, it’s clear that one event is ploddingly - if endearingly (and necessarily) - cinemacentric, and the other has for the last few years seemed in danger of becoming an unrepentant celebfest. And what could be more gloriously unrepentant than a red carpet teeming with the likes of Brad, Cate, Jude, Kiera, Viggo, Charlize* and Samuel L? The VIFF, by contrast, has… er… a producer who used to be on Stargate SG-1. But, attend the Trade Forum, and you might actually get to ask her some questions, which is certainly more access than most of us will ever get to the likes of Messrs Law and Pitt.
With a screening of the comedy doc Let’s All Hate Toronto, one could hardly accuse the programmers of 2007’s VIFF of latent animosity. And no one should be surprised that folks in the GVRD find all the GTA’s “centre of the universe” crowing to be… well, unseemly. (We get it, TIFF. You’re popular with the cool kids.) But look again at the comparatively dour VIFF and you’ll see a festival that focuses on what it does best (showing many of the same films as TIFF), albeit with tighter purse strings and likely no room in their budget for red carpet essentials like security, luxury swag and superlative suck-uppery. If we built ours to look like TIFF, they might come, but if previous years are anything to go by, we really wouldn’t know what to do with them. Remember, this is an event whose organizers thought it would be a good idea to serve soup to standing party guests at a previous year’s gala. Like the boyfriend who sees nothing wrong with buying you gas station flowers, you probably don’t want to trust them to plan something too posh without a few dry runs under their belt. I mean, she might be practically a Vancouverite after so many shoots here, but it’s a safe bet Jessica Alba would make her first VIFF her last if she ended up dripping minestrone down her Elie Saab.
And celebrity myopia aside, when all is said and done, the importance of TIFF to the film community can’t be underestimated. Besides a well-deserved opportunity to strut their stuff to an audience that up until recent years, didn’t give them much respect, the filmmakers and their representatives at TIFF are indeed doing the hard work of selling their films, and to an increasingly receptive (and with the looming threat of an actors’ strike, as THR points out, an increasingly harried) audience. And when the hoopla has died down, many of the same films that got shunted to lesser screenings during TIFF will arrive at VIFF scarcely two weeks later, often with more than enough momentum and buzz built by simply pinballing between coasts.
I’m as fond of Toronto-bashing as any Vancouverite, but until our festival can do what theirs does, we need them… and they might not admit it, but they might just need us a little bit, too.
And at least we have a sense of humour about our shortcomings. One of the “celebrity guests” at last year’s VIFF closing gala? None other than Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi himself.
(*And don’t forget to check out all MovieSet’s behind-the-scenes extras on Battle In Seattle!)
UPDATE: The VIFF box office is now open!
Posted at 6:25AM by admin
