If you grew up in Toronto, your relationship with the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) was likely a little strange. At first, hearing adults talk about something called a “TIFF” at the dinner table means nothing. Then, you realize it’s a cool thing called a “film festival” that happens in your city. Eventually, though, you find out that it’s not just any film festival, but a world-class one of considerable size that plays a large role in generating buzz for the upcoming Oscars season.
Together with the beginning of the school year, TIFF ordinarily imbues September in Toronto with a lively and unpredictable energy; however, in 2020, the festival, though technically hybrid, ended up essentially online due to limited availability of in-person tickets to the general public.
This year, though, there were more than enough tickets to go around.
That’s not to say things were as before—popcorn wasn’t sold, theatres ran at 50 percent capacity, and you had to show your vaccine receipt to bouncers in tuxedos who were far more imposing than the usually cheerful festival volunteers.
I had the chance to catch three screenings at the festival. At the Cinesphere, I saw Indian director Ritwik Pareek’s Dug Dug, a satire about the religious worship of a motorcycle. Then, at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, I saw Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s English/Spanish-language debut, Memoria, a slow arthouse film starring Tilda Swinton about a mysterious noise in Swinton’s character’s head. Finally, also at the Lightbox, I saw this year’s Wavelengths shorts program, Present, Tense, which featured two hours’ worth of experimental short films.
All three screenings were embellished in their own way by the in-person TIFF experience.
In Dug Dug’s approach to satire, instead of setting up punchlines for individual jokes, the ridiculousness of the situation creates an atmosphere that is comedic throughout. As the film employed fast-paced montages to rapidly barrel through the exposition, waves of laughter rippled through the theatre as a collective acknowledgement of the absurdity of what the audience had gathered to watch.
Memoria has an opposite pace, employing long, motionless takes to build up the emotional world of the film. With a film so slow, many audience members would have likely paused to pee or check their phone if they had watched it at home, but the age-old social custom of sitting in darkened silence to view a film helped the audience get through the film as Weerasethakul intended it—boredom and all.
Finally, the Wavelengths program featured films projected from 35mm film, so the filmmaker’s experimental exploration of the physical qualities of filmstock were far more perceptible. Additionally, in the case of Daïchi Saïto’s earthearthearth, the booming speakers helped foreground Jason Sharp’s explorative score, which featured heartbeat-synced saxophone playing.
Even though TIFF is, on some level, all about the films, it is also not at all about the films. It’s about the shared rituals of viewing, from pre- and post-show chats to audience callbacks to suppressed giggling with a friend about an inside joke that happened to be featured in a film. So, in my books, TIFF is back.
