Niv Fichman

Heritage Minister James Moore hosted Ottawa’s premiere of Gunless, starring Paul Gross, at the Museum of Civilization. Below (left to right): Laureen Harper, Heritage Minister James Moore and Paul Gross.

Ghostbusters mogul blesses a gem from Quebec, and our critic skis to a silver medal

One of the maddening things about TIFF, at least for a journalist trying to cover it single-handedly, is that most the action is front-loaded into the opening weekend. That’s when the big, star-driven movies premiere. The Hollywood studios invite a horde of North American press into town for junkets to promote these prestige pictures , and many of those same journalists have gone home by Tuesday or Wednesday. Which means if you want to get maximum media exposure for your film, you need to show it on the opening weekend. Which makes for a hectic time, to say the least. All this is by way of an apology to say it’s hard to find time to see all the absolutely unmissable films, interview all the absolutely irresistible stars and find time to blog on a daily basis. You’re always running to catch up to a festival that seems to be forever sliding through your hands.

Start your engines, and let the madness begin. For the next ten days, TIFF turns Toronto into the Cannes of North America, but rather than promenading down the Croisette by the beaches of the Côte d’Azur, those rushing to premieres will be sidestepping construction sites along Bloor St. in a city so thoroughly excavated it’s beginning to look like a Designer Walk war zone. Never mind. For those on their annual fall search for the cinematic grail, that’s just another obstacle. Navigating a major film festival is always an extreme sport. Scrambling t score a tough ticket or uncover a hidden gem is the name of the game. At TIFF, the stakes are high: no film festival in the world has a richer program. Which doesn’t mean all the films are great, or even good. No, with 312 films—including 249 features—from 64 countries, TIFF can seem like a motion picture paradise, or the industrial outlet mall of world cinema. The trick is to be at the right film at the right time.

On the eve of the 61st Cannes Film Festival, the French Riviera is cool and overcast. The local merchants are doing a brisk business in overpriced umbrellas. (With the over-caffeinated Euro pushing a coffee up to $5 here, French waiters now have a currency to match their attitude.) Tomorrow night a Canadian film will open Cannes for the first time in 28 years. Blindness is a co-production with Brazil and Japan. But despite the global pedigree and Brazilian director (City of God‘s Fernando Meirelles), Blindness was initiated and brought to fruition as a Canadian project —by Rhombus Media producer Niv Fichman and Toronto screenwriter Don McKellar, who spent six years adapting the novel by Nobel laureate José Saramago.