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Movies & TV

TIFF 09: Managing expectations

These are tough economic times, and nobody wants to look terribly glitzy or decadent. So the Toronto International Film Festival – North America’s most opulent, self-consciously glamorous assemblage of cinematic talent, and Hollywood’s launching pad of choice for its Oscar hopefuls – finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place.

It can’t go too big, because that would be seen as tasteless on the other hand, there’s no point in pretending the festival is a scrappy little underdog when it’s busy building the Bell Lightbox complex at King and John.

And so, at a press conference this morning at the Hyatt Regency hotel just next door to the Lightbox construction site, TIFF director Piers Handling and co-director (and former NOW film writer) Cameron Bailey found themselves walking a fine line between communicating excitement and keeping it modest.

It was the shortest, smallest press conference I’ve ever attended, and I’ve been covering TIFF for 21 years.

They reminded the assembled journalists and industry players of the relaunched TIFF brand – check it out at www.tiff.net – and introduced the models for the new poster campaign. The annual announcement of corporate sponsors was kept to a quick introduction of new partners like Blackberry and Porter Airlines, with none of the usual speeches from vice-presidents. And though a few new titles were announced in a press release handed out on the way into the press conference — including Ricky Gervais’s directorial debut The Invention Of Lying and Steven Soderbergh’s whistleblower comedy The Informant!, both of which will be screened as Special Presentations – only one title was talked up: TIFF 2009’s opening-night gala, Jon Amiel’s Creation.

Creation is a biographical drama about Charles Darwin’s struggle to write On The Origin Of Species and its impact on his relationship with his wife Emma. Real-life couple Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly play the Darwins, which is kind of an interesting hook. More interesting, though, is the fact that the film is the first TIFF opener to have no Canadian connection whatsoever – not through financing, or a cast member, or anything at all.

Handling says Creation was chosen to mark both the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his theory of evolution Bailey observes that many of this year’s films explore the long-standing divide between faith and reason, and Darwin’s story embodies that theme. These are all reasonable explanations, though TIFF has never seemed terribly concerned with commemorating British scientists before now.

It seems more likely that Creation’s selection reflects the current fallow period on the Canadian cinematic landscape: There just aren’t many homegrown projects from which to choose. Usual suspects like David Cronenberg, Denys Arcand and Bruce McDonald are all between projects, Vincenzo Natali’s sci-fi thriller Splice isn’t exactly the kind of movie you show your big corporate donors, even if it does star Sarah Polley, and Atom Egoyan’s Chloe – which everyone half-expected to be announced as the fest’s opener – is still in post-production.

Splice and Chloe will almost certainly turn up at TIFF, but we’ll have to wait until the festival’s next press conference, in early August, to learn the Canadian lineup. I’d wonder why they didn’t bring any of them up today, just to give people something to talk about … but maybe that’s the way you show restraint these days.[rssbreak]

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