Film Festival Follies, Part One

Judge Adam Arseneau

September 15th, 2004

Thursday night. After working all day, you have now trudged back into the city, after catching an hour of sleep at home in preparation for the night's activities. You have a map of the city in hand along with a well-worn movie schedule stained with coffee rings, fast food, and unexplainable grime. Squinting in the city streetlights, you try and plan your route to get to the next movie. But after getting off the subway, you find yourself completely lost.

Frantic, you realize you have gotten off on the wrong subway stop and have exactly five minutes to get to the theatre before they bar the doors. You run. Screaming with exhaustion every step of the way, you stumble through the theatre, throw your ticket at the volunteer manning the door, and slump down into the only seat available in the theatre—far left, front row. The man beside you seems amused by your entrance.

When the film ends, everyone cheers and the Oscar-nominated director is invited to come up and do some Q&A. So when the man beside you gets up, takes the microphone, and starts answering questions, you can't help but laugh. You'd love to stay and chat with him, maybe shake his hand, but you have exactly twenty minutes to get yourself across town for a midnight screening. Time to run again.

When you arrive at the new theatre, the line-up stretches all the way around the block and back again, like a snake eating itself. Slowly, it starts to feed into itself, gradually admitting a steady stream of moviegoers all twitching with excitement. When the opening credits roll, five hundred people stand up and cheer at the top of their lungs. The mood is infectious and you tingle with excitement.

The film ends at 2:30AM. You stumble home, desperate to get three or four hours of sleep before you wake up for work and then do it all over again. For the next ten days.

Welcome to the film festival.

Film festivals are an acquired taste, to say the least. They involve a lot of work. If you have never been to a festival, you should be prepared and have a good idea of what to expect, especially with a large festival like the Toronto International Film Festival (which I am attending all week).

Believe it or not, people actually do this all day, every day, for the entire festival. I have met people who travel hundreds of miles, take two weeks off work, book a nice hotel, and see five or six movies a day, for ten days straight. Not only that, but they look forward to it all year: the cramped seating, the pretentious movie crowd, and the never-ending line-ups—they love every second of it. But this passion for movie going comes with a hefty price.

First: the endless bureaucratic nonsense. Months in advance, you must purchase blank tickets in order to guarantee seating. Since the festival program has not even been released you have no idea what movies are playing at all, but unless you buy your tickets now you won't get to see anything. Tickets are only sold in inconveniently large numbers in packs of ten and thirty, so you shell out literally hundreds of dollars for blank tickets to be filled in later, having no idea what you are going to end up seeing.

Months pass. Then, a week before the festival actually starts, they finally announce the line-up. The films are posted on the festival website. which immediately crashes under the heavy traffic. Having no other choice, you go down to the festival box office where they hand you a program guide (which you have to pay for), an order book, and a bewildering and complicated set of instructions that would vex the most hardened patent attorney. Make a mistake, a smudge, or an errant pen stroke, and your book gets disqualified. After 48 hours, if you haven't submitted your book, you can forget seeing your movies.

Scheduling films can be a nightmare since every movie runs only twice—once in the day and once in the evening. The evening shows sell out like hotcakes, so unless you can spare a solid ten days from work to concentrate solely on the festival, be prepared to fight tooth and nail with thousands of other film-goers. Most people are forced to schedule films based on convenient time rather than preference of film, which can be a heartbreaking experience. Plus, if you plan on buying a large pack of tickets and splitting them up between friends, be prepared for a sleepless night or two coordinating this Herculean feat of planning and scheduling.

With a little bit of luck, you get your requests in before the deadline. Then the random draw begins. Orders are not processed by submission—that would create chaos and bodies piled ten-deep around the festival box-office with people desperate to be first in line. Instead, they do a random draw. All the orders are placed into numerical boxes based on the order they are received. Then a number is drawn at random—say the number sixteen. So they start at box sixteen and work their way through the boxes, going back to the start when they run out. You could be the first person to hand in your ticket book on the first day. but if they pick box number two? Box number one will be dead last, and you will be lucky to get a single film. You cross your fingers and try to perform mathematical equations in your head before you go to sleep as an offering to the gods of random probability to bless your ticket order.

After waiting a week, completed orders are returned a mere 48 hours before the festival starts. You hope and pray that you received all the movies you requested—otherwise, you will be sitting on blank tickets, which must be manually exchanged for real tickets in the dreaded SINGLE TICKET line, which, on a clear day, can be seen from orbit. Want to add an extra ticket to your order? Get in line and bring a tent.

Compared to the rigors and complications of preparing for a film festival, buying a home is simple in comparison, and given the state of real estate today, almost as affordable. This is an incredible amount of work to go to the movies, even for the most die-hard of fan. So why do people go through all this hoopla, stand in never-ending lines, cram into crowded movie theatres full of turtleneck-wearing pretentious film snobs, just to see a movie that will be out in every theatre in North America within a month?

Find out in Part Two.