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Your TIFF 2010 Survival Guide
FILM: Film festivals can be intimidating. And TIFF, with its three hundred films over eleven days, can be especially daunting. Unless you are some sort of robot or sorcerer, you can’t possibly see everything. And that’s okay. But we’ve got some handy-dandy tips to make the whole experience more worthwhile.
PARTIES: Acclaimed cinema aside, every Torontonian worth their fleur de sel knows that the Toronto International Film Festival is all about the parties—eleven nights of parties, to be exact. In that spirit, we’ve compiled a list of the top spots to get up-close-and-personal with the stars, exchange festival gossip, or simply be seen (paparazzi not included). Get your beauty rest now—starting later this week, you’ll be living in a city that doesn’t sleep.
FOOD: Whether you’re TIFF-ing hard this year, using up vacation days to cram in as many screenings as possible, or just want to treat some special lady or fella to swanky dinner-and-a-movie date during the festival, you’re going to need to feed yourself. And it doesn’t matter if you’re just grabbing a pre- or post-screening nosh, or treating yourself to a decent dinner, there’s plenty of great eateries in the environs of festival activity that’ll do the trick. These are our picks, organized by proximity to theatres.
STYLE: While TIFF is all about out-of-this-world parties and the outfits to match, the majority of us aren’t working with a blockbuster budget. With our wallets’ best interests in mind, we’ve scoured Toronto for the best fashion and beauty deals to take you from Norma Jean to Marilyn—diamonds not included.
BALANCE: One of the trickier parts about TIFF is figuring out how to harmonize it with the doldrums of your day-to-day, non-TIFF life. You could be seeing as many movies as possible on nights and weekends. Or you could have booked a block of vacation days so you can really lose yourself in the festival whirlwind of screenings, parties, and celebrity-sightings over the course of ten days (well, eleven if you count the electric eve before TIFF as a day of TIFF-mas, which we do). Whatever the case, we’ve prepared a handy-dandy guide for making sure your family, friends, and loved ones don’t think you’ve disappeared or been body-snatched and replaced with some glassy-eyed, film-going space zombie.
SHOOTING STARS: Photographers on the red carpet and paparazzi in the streets are often equipped with some of the most expensive and advanced camera equipment currently available to catch the magic and misdeeds of TIFF. Precision (read: expensive) lenses, high-powered flashes, and fast memory cards aren’t the only requirements—a solid understanding of the equipment in their hands, a dose of serendipity, and good timing are often more important than the fancy equipment. And for those of us on a budget, sometimes all it takes is the tools you already own. So, how to catch the glitter and glam instead of cursing and blaming your camera for missing the moment?
Mock movie poster illustrations by Brian McLachlan/Torontoist.
Want more TIFF 2010? Torontoist’s complete coverage of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival is all right here.