Toronto Film Festival - Picking the Films - A Process or maybe an Amateurcess

-Tammy Sturge- Sepetmber 5, 2001

To read Tammy's post festival recommendations and comments, click here.

The most stressful night of my year is over again. Every year I anticipate the Wednesday before Labour Day with fear and fascination, because that's when our gang hosts the annual Film Festival Pick Party.

The Pick Party is our gathering the day after the program book and schedule are released, when we attempt to form a general consensus as to which films we'll see together. The rules are simple: you must come prepared - which means you've read through the program book and aren't going to interrupt the process with such teeth-gnashing questions as "what's that film about?" - and you must have compiled your top ten film hits for public discussion.

Sounds delightful, doesn't it? A party for god sakes - how celebratory, how jolly. And the Film Festival - wow, picking over the nearly 300 offerings, a cinephile's smorgasbord, how could anyone complain?

I could and will complain. I dread the Film Festival Pick Party when 12 of my closest friends turn into whiney, selfish, inconsiderable savages who have appalling taste in films, would sell my mother to get the film of their choice and, most damning of all, absolutely no ability for group process. I discover hitherto unknown facets of my friends' characters. Anne hasn't chosen a single film that anyone else wants to see, except out of pity for her. Susan and Bruce are late this year - again. Has Julie always been this screechy or it is something new? Why can't Doug talk about his chosen films to inspire us instead of bore us? Why does Lisa always insist on seeing mainstream films that are going to be released exactly five minutes after the Festival closes? And why is Wendy obsessed with going to films where she might catch a glimpse of "stars"?

Mindy is the only person who does not draw any criticism from me, mainly because she has declared that I always pick the best films. Which is, I must say quite modestly, completely true.

I myself am the paragon of film-picking mates. Thoughtful, enlightened and polite. I'll say nothing of my friends' delight this year that I had to take a Tylenol 3 at the beginning of the Pick Party and was quietly anesthetized most of the evening. More than one of them were heard to mutter "maybe we should sedate her every year."

Next year, I am not picking films. I am picking a new group of friends.

Granted, our process is labyrinthine enough to test the nerves of the calmest group facilitator. We arrive, with our fur shining and our eyes bright, having chosen our personal Top Ten and write each one on pieces of paper that are dropped into a metaphorical hat. Then we pick from the hat randomly - no one will benefit from primacy, recency or any other newfangled effects. Whoever wrote down the film has two minutes to sell the rest of us as to why we'd want to spend our precious film coupons and precious time with him or her seeing this film. Then we do a Romanesque thumbs up, thumbs down or waggley hand ("maybe") to give the reader an idea of whether he should congratulate himself on his superior selling skills or throw himself on his sword for having picked such a dumb film in the first place.

We each have our particular selling methods. Kurt likes to read the "reviews" from the program book, which I point out every year to no avail, are not truly reviews - they're pitches written by the very people who want you to see the film. Doug talks about the underlying themes of the film. Wendy tells us which stars are going to be attending the film - not a successful technique mostly since we are largely snobs who wouldn't be caught dead star-gawking. Lisa tries to lure us with promises of future film popularity - "This is going to be a big hit." My own strategy is to mention directors we've seen and loved before, and to read real reviews of films from previous film festivals: "Beijing Bicycle won the Silver Bear at Berlin!" (The only exceptions are any Cannes Palme d'Or award winners, since our group refers to said award as the "Rotten Potato Award.")

Once we have a general idea of whether anyone is going to attend films with us, we narrow down our choices further. Usually I start out with about 40 films that I have a general interest in seeing. The discussion of everyone's top 10 usually weeds out about five, a few side discussions (strictly discouraged but impossible to quell entirely) weed out another five or so, and then usually I'm already bored with a few of my original choices anyway. I'm left with about 25. My plan is to achieve a film-viewing itinerary that is a rough balance of independent ("indie"), foreign, Canadian, avant-garde, serious, and fun films.

Now here's the tricky part. I have to write down each film on a separate piece of post-it paper. (We each chose a different colour, by the way. My choice of lurid purple was hotly fought over but I'd pre-reserved and refused to give way. Latecomers are stuck with taupe. That'll teach them next time.) Each post-it paper has to feature the exact hours of the (only) two times the film will play during the Festival.

Then we stick our post-its on large pieces of flipchart paper, one for each day of the Festival, which are taped on walls around Victor and Wendy's normally stylish living room, and marked out in slots for each hour of the day. When everyone is done, we're surrounded by what looks like a Klimt installation - nine sheets of large paper dotted erratically with 12 different colours of squares.

Victor guides us through each day. "Okay, looks like Barran is a clean sweep on Friday night. Then on Saturday we've got a clean split between Chicken Rice War and Fluffer with one outlier." We cast pitying looks on that person. No one wants to see their film - they'll either have to be assimilated by the collective or, see a film by themselves. You might think that would be a preferable choice at this point; however, we are fiercely extroverted. Films must be experienced in the presence of others. Various lobbying efforts suddenly break out full force. "Hey, if you come to Ignorant Fairies with me, I'll go to How Harry Became a Tree with you." Or - "if we all change to the second showing of the Hitler movie, that means we can see the Danish porn thing on Thursday."

We've made our final choices. Grimly we copy them into the schedule book supplied by the Festival, fill out the order form, fill out the envelope, check and recheck our orders, drop them into the envelope, seal the envelope and hand them to the designated dropper-offers. This year we have two since the Festival has a limit of six envelopes dropped by one person. They don't usually police it too strictly but we're not taking any chances.

Then we're tired. We go home. The Film Festival starts in mere days. We have to rest up. So we can spend ten days … together.