Ian Barr: Introduction

“Where Indie Meets Epic” - the chief tagline that adorns street posters all over town for this year's Toronto International Film Festival; “Where Popcorn Meets Pate”, “Where Profane Meets Profound”, “Where OMG meets WTF” among others providing less-than-clarifying support. It's the party line for most major film festivals, where tracks are covered and the tendency toward crass commercialism is spun into proudly-trumpeted diversity and all-inclusiveness. Admittedly, it's hard to tell the difference between the two. Which isn't to say that a film festival ideally should be dedicated to hard-assed celebration of cinema's cutting-edge; Jeonju or Rotterdam or Locarno (among many many others) provide just that.

TIFF is more valuable as a warts-and-all snapshot of where cinema is now, rather than a utopian vision of its future (if any festival can lay claims to the latter) – a mixture of everything from anticipated titles playing at the local multiplex in coming weeks, Oscar hopefuls, genre fare best experienced with rowdy crowds (the Midnight Madness section), auteur cinema straight from Cannes and Venice et al, avant-garde and experimental cinema (the Wavelengths sidebar), the latter of which is often slighted even by festivals that fashion themselves as progressive. More to its credit, TIFF's snapshot of cinema on an international scale is exceptionally broad-ranging, and can be overshadowed by the sheer amount of Hollywood star vehicles and blatantly pandering Oscar-bait.

Frankly, most Australian film festivals – which tend to skew middlebrow, and toward an in-built audience of an older generation – could stand to encompass cinema's highs and lows in the manner that TIFF does. It's also a festival where the obsession with celebrity extends far off the red carpet, which is overflowing with big names – seemingly nearly everyone who made or appeared in a film will be there to present it, and the chance of seeing, I dunno, Bruce Willis and Michael Haneke standing feet away from one another this year is relatively un-slim. Even the festival's programmers get to pose like screen icons on their own special posters plastered around the downtown area (“Ooh, that guy!”), heck, even the long Kafkaesque process of getting a ticket on ye olde ticketing system – no mobile scans here – makes you feel kinda exclusive and special in your own right, particularly if you've come from out of town.

Official trailer for The Master

With the celebrity fixation in mind, maybe that makes Brandon 'David's son' Cronenberg's Antiviral the avatar film of the festival, if there is one – a Canadian production, with blatant nepotistic origins, about a futuristic clinic that sells celebrity viruses to their obsessed fans? Or representing the festival's blend of niche and non-niche tastes: Spring Breakers, where longtime indie provocateur Harmony Korine makes his ultimate bid as the pop entertainer his old Letterman interviews always promised he should be, directing an action-comedy starring a host of Disney Channel outgrowths (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens) and James Franco, featuring a soundtrack by Skrillex? Or At Any Price, where Ramin Bahrani, the critically-acclaimed, neo-neo-realist chronicler of America's marginalized, directs a racetrack drama starring Zac Efron and Dennis Squaid? (“Where Efron Meets Bahrani”, indeed.)

More than any other festival, it's the air of cinephilia or just plain old film-fandom intermingling and gone wild that appeals the most. Tickets are not cheap, and screenings are not easy to get into, making each film itself more of an event – the anticipation for each one is thus more palpable, the inherently passive experience of watching a film in a theatre infinitely more active than otherwise. Nearby pubs are packed with heated post-screening discussion and debate, mutual effusion and commiseration (also: drink once for every 'what's your twitter handle?')… only in this kind of environment can one overhear, for instance, a discussion of avant-garde cinema in a late night MacDonald's queue. The pervasive atmosphere, at least on blocks surrounding the flurry of TIFF venues, is one of an unhinged enthusiasm for cinema that I haven't quite witnessed anywhere else. You go back home and try and relate the experience to the uninitiated, and it's only then that the films themselves feel retrospectively peripheral.

Screenings are not yet underway, but the lineup is epic even for TIFF standards. Paul Thomas Anderson's much-anticipated The Master, Terrence Malick's To the Wonder, his second film in two consecutive years, anticipated adaptations like The Wachowski Bros. and Tom Tykwer's epic Cloud Atlas, David O. Russell's The Silver Linings Playbook, Joss Whedon doing Shakespeare with Much Ado About Nothing… new films by Michel Gondry, Olivier Assayas, Carlos Reygadas, Rob Zombie, docos from Spike Lee (on Michael Jackson!), Ken Burns, Slavoj Zizek, and plenty more. In true TIFF give-and-take fashion, I'll get around to talking about the films that'll attract page traffic, and the ones that I deem deserving of more attention in dispatches to come.