Ah, the last Wednesday in August. It doesn’t quite match the morning I woke up to find a Millennium Falcon under the tree, but the sight of a FedEx truck in late August is just about as good as it gets. The plan is to spend the next few hours poring through the catalog, obsessing over the schedule, and checking titles off of my spreadsheet — yes, I created a spreadsheet — all in hopes of creating the most efficient and dud-free lineup of films possible. I then overnight my ticket requests back to Toronto and hope for the best.
If all goes according to plan, over the span of ten days I’ll get to see new films by Alexander Sokurov, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Laurent Cantet, Atom Egoyan, Michael Haneke, Michael Winterbottom, Francois Ozon, Thomas Vinterberg, Jean Paul Civeyrac, Stephen Frears, Danis Tanovic, David Cronenberg, the Quay brothers, Bennett Miller, Patrice Chereau, Eugene Jarecki, Nobuhiro Suwa, Cristi Puiu, and about twenty others.