Word: torontos
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...fomentors and beneficiaries of all this divine madness are the festival's two bosses: Piers Handling, chairman and CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival Group, and Noah Cowan, TIFF's co-director. They supervise a team of a dozen programmers who make this sprawling event the world's best 10-day movie binge. Europe may have those venerable showcases Cannes, Berlin and Venice, but the crazy intensity of Toronto - the too-much-of-a-muchness - makes it utterly American. Or, as Canadians would no doubt gently correct: utterly North American...
...Handling, one major difference between Toronto and the European fests is in the structure. "The films there are competitive - they give a prize at the end - and the festivals compete with each other. You can't have a film in the Cannes competition if it's already been in Berlin. But because we're noncompetitive, we can show everything...
...there is a strenuous competition in Toronto: for the discriminating moviegoer's time. This year there'll be 349 films on offer; that's something like 500 hours of movies, and no one can see even a quarter of what's available. "We serve so many different masters here, so many different audiences," says Handling, "that there's leeway to program the widest range of films, from the most populist to the most esoteric." So each movie lover scans the list, finds a couple dozen promising titles and creates a personal minifestival...
...that red-carpet glamour, and the hope of a first look at next year's Oscar finalists, attracts audiences to the big-ticket galas and special presentations. It also lures a sizable number of other power brokers: Hollywood execs, for whom Toronto has become a crucial harbinger of the movie-award season, and U.S. film critics, avid to see grown-up pictures after a fast-food summer diet of action epics with numerals...
...serious TIFFist is a movie Magellan too, searching for quality films from undiscovered countries. Hong Kong's vibrant action movies of the late '80s quickly captured a cult audience in Toronto, and the delirious melodramas from Bollywood announced themselves with the festival's 1994 tribute to India's director Mani Ratnam. This year, Handling is excited by the richness of Israeli films - "There's a kind of explosion of creativity there, and it's about time" - while Cowan finds a consolidation of merit from other nations. "The rich are getting richer," he says. "The Korean and Argentine cinemas continue...