We are less than a week and a half away from the start of the 41st annual Toronto International Film Festival. Last week, I had posted my frustrations about TIFF being one of the only festivals I can’t get media accreditation for. It was a few days later when the TIFF schedule was released and I began my yearly process of planning what films I was going to see. I was a few days into this process when I started thinking about a possible change of plan.
As I stated in my previous post, this year I will be seeing less films at TIFF than I did in recent years. At my current estimate, I’ll be able to see about 18 films, plus a few free screenings. While this is still a decent percentage of films, it is a far cry from the 30+ films I saw last year. With this reduced festival slate, I decided the time has come to change the way I typically experience the festival.
As such, when single tickets go on sale for the festival on Sunday, I will only be getting myself ten tickets. These will be primarily for evening screenings and films that I would like to see the Q&A for. As for the rest of my TIFF experience, I now to plan to use the vouchers I receive as a TIFF volunteer to rush the festival’s Press & Industry screenings. This was a perk that was available to me for the entire decade I have been a TIFF volunteer, however I never previously taken advantage of it, mostly because I have never really been a fan of rushing a film, since admittance is never guaranteed. However, I see this plan as a nice little consolation to not receiving accreditation and it will let me have a little taste of the other side of the TIFF festival experience.
I am venturing into unknown territory for this year’s festival and it will be quite interesting to see how it turns out.