A TIFF Life: Chris Knight Looks Back on 27 Years of Dark Rooms and Filmic Revelations

By Chris Knight

I can’t remember the first film I saw at the Toronto International Film Festival, but I can narrow it down for you. The year was 1996, and my girlfriend (now wife) and I had tickets to five screenings that year.

There was Gray’s Anatomy, directed by Steven Soderbergh, a monologue about eyes by the great humourist Spalding Gray that  we still quote to this day. Ilona Arrives with the Rain had two screenings, at the Cumberland fourplex and the sprawling Uptown — meaning that wherever we saw it, the venue is no more.

We saw a short by Nanni Moretti, The Opening Day of Close Up, paired with La Seconda Volta (The Second Time), in which he starred. Snakes and Ladders was an Irish comedy in which a marriage proposal throws a friendship into turmoil. And there was the documentary Trinity and Beyond, tied to the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Bill Pullman and Irene Jacob played spies in the ‘90s Finnish film History is Made at Night

My diary from 1999 recounts a few festival dates from the tail end of the analog age. Aug. 31, head down to College Park to pick up the program guide and schedule - paper, of course - and start to map out our choices.

Sept. 3, back to drop off our choices and alternates. “Under a new system this year,” I recounted, “choices will be processed in a random order, which meant it no longer mattered if I arrived at 4 a.m.” Though I do recall having to listen to some guy try to explain how being at a certain point in the line helped, even though it was random. Innumeracy; ugh!

Between those dates, I worked at what was then a contract gig at the newly launched National Post, helping put together the paper’s first big festival package. Then on the 8th it was back to College Park to pick up our tickets - errands were so much work in the 20th century!

Our films that year included History Is Made at Night, a Finnish comedy starring Bill Pullman, who I wrote “appeared briefly at the premiere, raved about Finland’s great Nokia phones and then had to take off for Calgary, where he’s making another film.”

Spalding Gray in Steven Soderbergh’s Gray’s Anatomy

We also saw Reg Harkema’s A Girl Is a Girl (excellent) and the French film l’humanité, which honestly we found a little too French for our palates. Chacun à son goût, chacun à son cinema!

All of which is to say that TIFF has long been a part of my life. When I started covering it for the National Post a few years later, it would take over my life, and my family grew used to living with a friendly ghost, one who wafted in late at night to wash a few dishes and take out the garbage, before slipping away at dawn the next day to interview Penelope Cruz or Dustin Hoffman or whoever else was in town.

This year’s festival feels a little different, and not just because the writers’ and actors’ strikes have cast a pall over attendance and red-carpet events. I’m no longer a full-time National Post film critic (though I do still work there) and so I’ve decided to take a busman’s holiday and just see what I can see, and write for anyone willing to take my ramblings. (Thank you, Original Cin!)

Also, I haven’t been to Cannes since the pandemic, thus losing my leg up on the festival. In years past I would often see 10 or more films in France before they came to Toronto. I recall the year I saw No Country For Old Men in May at Cannes, then had to wait four long months for all of Toronto to get a chance to catch up with this Coen brothers masterpiece.

And yet — so far, so good this year. My first pre-festival screening, The Royal Hotel by Australian director Kitty Green, proved nail-bitingly good, as I kept expecting its tale of two broke female travellers working in a rough Aussie mining-town pub to turn into a full-on horror. It didn’t, which somehow made the story more terrifying, because you could imagine it happening to you, or to someone you know.

My second, The Zone of Interest, came highly recommended from Cannes, whose jury awarded it the Grand Prix, second in stature to the Palme d’Or. Jonathan Glazer has adapted a novel by Martin Amis about the lush domestic life of the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp near the end of the war. Evil has never been so banal, and so chilling. It’s a vital, intensely powerful piece of storytelling.

Those screenings also eased me into the festival atmosphere, in which Toronto fills up with American critics and journalists, and the chatter in the seats shifts from the regular topics - traffic on the 401, housing prices in Oshawa - to a new and alien argot; traffic on the 405, housing prices in Brentwood.

This is also a time when Toronto critical stalwarts like Peter Howell, Richard Crouse and Jason Gorber start losing their preferred seats (which we all know and avoid) to out-of-towners who don’t know any better. Ah well; as long as they don’t light up their phones during the movie!

And so I’ve gone from civilian attendee to highly placed film journalist to somewhere in the middle.

But I guess I don’t mind, as long as I can keep showing up and watching great movies. This year my dance card includes the opening-night feature, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, the documentary The Contestant, Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins, and films from actor/directors Michael Keaton (Knox Goes Away), Viggo Mortensen (The Dead Don’t Hurt) and Anna Kendrick (Woman of the Hour). And since I’m on holiday, I might even hit up a few parties this year.

You know, for old times sake.

Wondering what else Chris Knight and O-C team is keen to see this year? Check out our top picks!