Word: tiff
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Toronto Film Festival (TIFF) makes its impact each September by showcasing U.S. prestige product with Oscar-encrusted casts and international movies from world-class directors. It doesn't get much ink for its effort to promote Canadian movies, though heaven knows it's got a lot of them: 81 films (most of them shorts) out of the 349 on offer this year, or 23% of the entries. But the emphasis on local product is widely seen as an affirmative action project with little impact beyond its borders...
...Indeed, to many movie critics from the U.S. and abroad, coming to TIFF is like visiting the home of some famous art collector. He takes you through rooms of his Picassos and Pollocks (the U.S., European and Asian masterworks), then leads you down a corridor where some gaudy daubs on lined paper are tacked to the walls and says brightly, "Now I'd like you to see my kid's paintings...
...Fact is, TIFF's rise to prominence over the past three decades hasn't been accompanied by an emergence of Canada as an important national cinema. This country of 33 million has left less of an artistic footprint than, say, Hong Kong (6 million population) in the 80s or Sweden (4 million) in the Ingmar Bergman years. The provinces have produced a few notable directors - David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan from Ontario, Denys Arcand from Quebec, Guy Maddin from Manitoba - but their careers date back to the 60s, 70s or 80s. Other Canadians, like directors Norman Jewison and Paul Haggis...
...Canada's star auteurs have excellent new movies in this year's TIFF: Cronenberg's Eastern Promises and Maddin's My Winnipeg. How Canadian are they...
...Venice, which was launched by Mussolini 75 years ago, begins a week before TIFF. (It ends tomorrow, with the announcement of its Golden Lion prizes.) The scheduling allows festival director Marco Mueller to present the world premieres of many films that will be hot items in Toronto. That primacy makes Venice an important stop on the prestige-movie express for A-list talent wooing international critical opinion - in Europe and Asia. If the festival doesn't register on this continent, it's only because Americans don't much care about, or even notice, what happens first somewhere else...