A still from Dark River. Photo courtesy of TIFF.

Bear with me while I state the obvious: No paucity is more appalling in cinema history than that of women in the role of director—the role most closely linked with creative power and authorial vision. For an industry typically associated with liberal ideals, the movies have remained tethered to a fiercely gynophobic paradigm for its century-plus of existence. The situation is bad for myriad reasons regarding equality, gender perception, and professional integrity. It’s also just bad for movies: They suffer when dominated by the perspective of a single race, culture, class, or gender—and gender, of course, spans race, culture, and class. Movies need women.

This spring, the Toronto International Film Festival inaugurated a five-year commitment to “increasing participation, skills, and opportunities for women behind and in front of the camera.” In keeping with this mandate, one-third of the selected films at the 42nd TIFF, which ran from September 7-17 this year, were directed by women, while exactly half of the dozen films in TIFF’s Platform competition were female-directed. I would be happy to applaud this gesture of affirmative action for its own sake. But the real news is that the vast majority of the most compelling, innovative, moving films I saw at TIFF this year were directed by women.

At 89, Left Bank-French new wave icon Agnès Varda was surely the oldest director to have a film at TIFF this year, though Faces Places was easily the festival’s most youthful, playful selection. Co-directed with a 34-year-old photo-based artist known simply as JR, Faces Places follows Varda and JR as they roam the French countryside in a van that doubles as a fotomat and record their encounters with a farmer, a postman, factory workers, the children of miners, and many others. These individuals become the subjects of enormous photographic prints that are pasted to the facades of various buildings and other surfaces in their respective communities. No other film at TIFF ’17 prompted in me so much laughter and so many tears—often at the same time. Faces Places is about passing through but not passing over, about stopping, seeing, and being truly seen.

Seeing, and, perhaps even more so, listening, are key activities in Zama, the long-awaited fourth feature from Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel. The story of a bureaucrat for the Spanish crown marooned in a South American backwater in the 1790s, Zama is Martel’s first period piece, first literary adaptation—of Antonio Di Benedetto’s eponymous 1957 novel—and first film to feature a male protagonist. Paranoid, obsessed with social status and prone to violent outbursts, Don Diego de Zama is not an endearing character. But he is fascinating. He clearly fascinates Martel, who conveys his fraying psyche through a masterful manipulation of the subjective gaze and unnerving aural effects, such as voices whose sources remain mysterious and descending electronic tones that alert us to Zama’s seismic internal shifts.

Female directors needn’t tell female stories to exude a female perspective: Just as Martel creates a darkly alluring drama out of Zama’s simultaneously male-privileged and geographically disenfranchised desperation, Germany’s Valeska Grisebach produced a transfixing quasi-genre film populated almost entirely by men inhabiting very traditional gender roles. Grisebach’s Western concerns an all-male group of German labourers working on a water facility project in rural Bulgaria, several of whom behave condescendingly or even reprehensibly toward their hosts, the exception being the initially taciturn ex-Legionnaire Meinhard, who every day after work parts with his fellow Germans to spend time with the locals, despite their leeriness and lack of common language. As with Claire Denis’ 1999 masterpiece Beau Travail, Western is an intensely insightful examination of male culture in part because it was made by a woman, one with a profound interest in men that is at once critical and empathetic, distanced and intimate.

Lest you get the impression that TIFF’s mandate automatically equals greater films, allow me to report some significant disappointments. In Saudi director Haifaa Al Mansour’s English-language debut, the strained, expensive-looking, bullet-point biopic Mary Shelley, there’s nary a trace of the vitality that characterized her earlier film Wadjda. Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston & the Wonder Women is a middle-brow, ever-blushing, exceedingly conventional portrait of the unconventional family helmed by Olive Byrne, Elizabeth Marston and William Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, who was the subject of Jill Lepore’s 2014 book The Secret History of Wonder Woman—which if you’re interested in this material is a far better investment of your time. The Hollywood tradition of actors-turned-directors, meanwhile, yielded the usual mixed results. Greta Gerwig made an irresistibly charming, smart and funny directorial debut with the semi-autobiographical Lady Bird, while her fellow Sacramento native, Oscar-winner Brie Larsen, made a fitfully amusing, mostly awkward, Charlie Kaufman-esque fairy tale comedy starring herself as an aspiring artist with a penchant for glitter, rainbows, and unicorns called Unicorn Store.

Let me close this survey with a film that, it seems to me, didn’t get enough attention upon its TIFF world premiere. British director Clio Barnard made an arresting feature debut in 2010 with The Arbor, a formally provocative documentary about the late playwright Andrea Dunbar. Barnard’s second film, 2013’s The Selfish Giant, also drew accolades and favourable comparisons to the films of Ken Loach. Barnard’s third film, Dark River, might seem on the surface to be her most orthodox, but this taut trauma-drama about a young woman’s return to her family’s farm following the death of her father slips between past and present, between realism and myth, between body and soil, with an eerie, seductive dexterity. A dark horse in the Platform competition, Dark River didn’t take home the prize, but it did receive an honourable mention from the jury consisting of Wim Wenders, Chen Kaige and Małgorzata Szumowska. Though it seemed to have gained little traction at the Festival, I suspect time will be kind to Dark River, because it’s with this film that Barnard has truly come into her own, balancing the dictates of narrative, aesthetics and politics in a way that feels unique to her sensibility. Barnard’s is a voice that’s here to stay, and Dark River will one day be regarded as the point where her contribution to the current cinema begins to truly flow.

I’ve written many surveys of TIFF and other film festivals over the years and have never had an opportunity to write so widely about important films helmed by women. This was not—again, bear with me while I state the obvious—because of any lack of talented female directors. It is my hope that this five-year initiative becomes both ongoing and influential, until such a time when half the human race is no longer marginalized to subordinate roles in what is arguably still the world’s most popular and far-reaching art form.

If you spend time in any of the Maritime arts communities, chances are you’ll meet a back-to-the-lander. In the early 1970s, many artists, hippies and draft dodgers left the comforts of urban life to head east in search of fresh air and cheap land. I’ve heard amazing stories of long-haired painters trying to fit into traditional rural communities, while learning how to milk goats and grow carrots.

Most famously among the back-to-the-landers are American photographer Robert Frank and sculptor June Leaf, who since 1971 have divided their time between homes in Mabou, Cape Breton, and Manhattan. So it makes sense that Leaf and Frank (a surprise, considering his reclusive reputation) should make appearances in Jem Cohen’s We Have an Anchor, a hybrid of live music performance and film that screened this week at Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox.

Cohen’s own East Coast obsession began over 10 years ago when he accompanied pals Fugazi to a 1998 show at Halifax’s Olympic Gardens Bingo Hall (which sources tell me was amazing, and a huge deal for the city), and then travelled to Cape Breton to meet Frank. After last night’s performance Cohen told the crowd how he became “increasingly mesmerized” by the island, making multiple trips to collect footage of the landscape in Super-8 and 16mm film – the grainy, raw-edged format beautifully captures the rugged terrain, more so than his high-definition shots.

That footage made up the bulk of the film, which was presented as multiple projections. A meditative, trance-like collage of ocean, treacherous highways and decaying buildings was interspersed with interviews with locals, historical facts and poetry from Cape Breton’s Don Domanski and Elizabeth Bishop, another American who fell in love with Nova Scotia. Some images worked, but others were puzzling: why follow a Pepsi fountain cup as it rolls around a parking lot? Why the roadkill or the faded “Bible study” sign? Why the extended scene of a black dog gleefully running through the snow? Are dilapidated houses a sign of regional poverty or just cool to look at?

It’s hard to say if Cohen just liked those images visually, or if he thought it represented something of the place. I understand why Cohen says he doesn’t want to show this in Cape Breton for fear people will think he’s making a definite statement about their home. In a region that is accustomed to seeing itself reflected in tourism ads with kitchen parties and lobster feasts, Cohen’s art would come as something of a shock.

The real highlight of the performance was the live musical score performed by Mary Margaret O’Hara and an indie supergroup of musicians from Fugazi, Dirty Three, The Quavers, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Thee Silver Mt. Zion. Cohen, who has worked with R.E.M. and Elliott Smith, knows how to harness music, and the immediacy of the score with its own rough edges and crescendos, best reflected a geography that is more than just a postcard.

Watch a clip here.

It’s the end of August, and it’s still humid, still sweaty, still volatile. While I am instinctually a creature of fall, I can’t help but feel melancholic about the end of summer and my last lazy Friday afternoon spent on the Island beach, drinking bad wine out of a paper cup, watching a dog named James pick up the same rock over and over again, dropping it in the waves.

Last Sunday I swung by Fire on the Water – named for a time when old boats were lit ablaze and set out to sea for entertainment – a day of art installations, music and dancing at Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion in west-end Toronto. Built in 1922 as changing facilities for the local beach and swimming pool, the top floor of the pavilion, which was originally used as an open-air dancehall overlooking the water, was the focus of most of the activity, and the biggest delight of the day.

The second-floor dancehall is usually closed to the public, but event organizers, artists Marcus Boon and Christie Pearson, AKA The Waves, opened the space, filling it with hammocks, a chipped-ice block to cool your feet and a DJ station, attracting hippies, children, and bikini-topped, barefooted women to dance and twirl freestyle to the loud, heavy tropical bass that made the speakers throb all day long. I am nostalgic to the core (and admittedly not the biggest dance-music fan), which is why I wished the music better reflected the building’s rich history and ambiance.

As an example, here are a few of the big hits that rocked 1922: “Bee’s Knees” by Leo Wood and Ray Lopez;”I Gave You Up Just Before You Threw Me Down” by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby; “On The Gin Gin Ginny Shore” by Edgar Leslie and Walter Donaldson; “You Remind Me Of My Mother” by George M. Cohan and “You Tell Her, I S-t-u-t-t-e-r” by Billy Rose and Cliff Friend.

 Okay, maybe not.

A love of water and nostalgia also drives my obsession with Aquafit classes, which I attend dutifully every Tuesday. The absurdity and joy of choreographed dancing in a pool with old ladies who no longer give a toss is captured so perfectly in Sarah Polley’s film Take This Waltz, in a scene where Michelle Williams, Sarah Silverman and Jennifer Podemski wave their arms and spin to the sounds of the Parachute Club – until Williams, in her giddiness, pees the pool.

Polley made the news this week by revealing the nature of her new documentary, Stories We Tell, an extremely personal tale that discloses some heavy truths about her family. Instead of letting hungry TIFF journalists own her story, Polley proactively explains the film on the NFB’s website. It’s brave artistry, worth a read and some thought.

Next week, when TIFF celeb-stalkers wait for a glimpse of Gosling, I’ll have bigger fish to fry. Leviathan, an experimental documentary by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, offers a “visually and sonically explosive” view of commercial fishing in the North Atlantic. The TIFF website describes images of netted fish plopped onboard, “thrashing in glistening goo worthy of Georges Franju, while predatory seagulls swarm overhead in scenes that straddle real and surreal, beautiful and horrific (and yes, reminiscent of Hitchcock’s The Birds!).”

I no longer have to sit through Discovery Channel’s abysmal and exploitative Shark Week to get my fins fix, thanks to a new free app developed by Stanford University scientists. Shark Net follows a group of great white sharks, tracking in real-time when a one swims within 1,000 feet of a series of detection buoys located off the California coast. The well-designed app also comes with beautiful 3-D models, stories about the individual sharks, videos and maps. I feel better knowing they’re out there.

For 10 days, playing host to one of the world’s largest and most important film events, Toronto—making sure that none of the TIFF-associated signs deviate from the obligatory Helvetica font—dresses itself up as the cosmopolitan city it aspires to be (and sometimes is). Maclean’s was first, but no doubt not the last, to remind its readers that, yes, Toronto is indeed a “World Class city.”

Being a global city, however, means that you also have global problems. As much as the flashes flare, the gossipers chatter, it remains true that the entire spectacle rests on tremendous amounts of work: much of it grossly underpaid, excessively strenuous and unjustifiably tenuous. So it’s exciting to see the workers of one of Toronto’s premier hotels (the Fairmont Royal York) walk off the job today in a strike action organized by Unite Here, the same union that led the G20 hotel workers’ strike. The injuries, the poor-pay, the long hours, the mounting workloads, the tyrannical bosses today proved too much to bear (all of this while the employer harvests a windfall from the festival).

That celebrities and the local actors’ (ACTRA) and set workers’ (IATSE) unions immediately joined them reminds us that films are not just art, and film festivals not just parties, but also work. Hotel workers, actors, and on-set workers have all taken a beating these past few years and seeing them join together injects an important note into Toronto’s celebration of film: that despite the very well put together show things really aren’t going so well for a lot of people. But they’re working to change that.

Update: Monday September 13, 11:35 am

The strikes continue.  Workers at the Hyatt regency walked off the job yesterday for 24 hours.  I wouldn’t be surprised if these short strikes continue throughout the film festival.  What caught my eye most, however, wasn’t Martin Sheen but the following from one of the strikers:

“As TIFF celebrates the new Bell Lightbox with a street party for Torontonians, and the Hyatt boosts its profits with film guests this week, we continue to be treated like second-class citizens by the Hyatt owners,” said Althea Porter-Harvey, a Room Attendant at the Hyatt Regency. “We deserve better than that. We’re joining the street party today.”

The last time a hotel service workers’ labour dispute and that ol’ showtime razzle-dazzle collided, it resulted in the “Bad Hotel” video, seen below. We can hope today’s strike results in a similar explosion of social justice and jazz hands:

Leila’s Birthday — playing as part of the Toronto Palestine Film Festival, Friday Oct. 2nd Bloor Cinema at 7:00 PM

While most Torontonians know about TIFF—the hugely publicized Toronto International Film Festival—very few have heard about TPFF, the Toronto Palestine Film Festival. Unlike TIFF, the TPFF isn’t attended by Hollywood stars, doesn’t receive much mainstream media coverage and has no paid staff.

Despite these challenges, TPFF is an ambitious film fest that features over 40 films and documentaries about Palestine and the Palestinian Diaspora. By showcasing the diversity of Palestinian culture and people, the film fest attempts to dispel stereotypes of the victimized or violent Palestinian.

According to Dalia Majid, a TPFF spokesperson the aim of the festival is “to support Palestinian filmmakers and artists, because they often face major challenges in getting their films made and screened.” Another aim is to showcase “Palestinian culture, aspirations, humour, satire—the range of emotions all people feel, including Palestinians.”

Some festival highlights include the Canadian premiere of Amreeka, the North American premiere of To My Father (Tuesday, September 29, 7:00 PM), Checkpoint Rock: Songs of Palestine (Wednesday, September 30, 7:00 PM), and Laila’s Birthday (Friday, October 2, 7:00 PM), a film screened at last year’s TIFF. This year’s festival also includes an art exhibit, three discussion forums, a film and food brunch program, and will be attended by seven directors.

Majid says that the response so far “has been very positive. Last year people attended the film fest out of curiosity and left very impressed. We have big expectations for this year’s film fest.”

When asked whether the TPFF has an official position regarding the controversy that raged at TIFF this year, Majid explains that the TPFF has “welcomed the discussion that followed the petition and boycott” because “at the very least it got people talking,” which she said was better than silence and indifference.

The second annual TPFF started last Friday and ends this Friday, October 2. The programming guide is available at the fest’s website.

"Celebrities have power, and with it comes responsibility": EcoSanity founder Glenn MacIntosh. Photo courtesy EcoSanity.

[Editor’s note: EcoChamber is back after a short break while Emily Hunter was on assignment in the Alberta Tar Sands to see the devastation first hand. Her observations will appear at This.org and in the print edition soon.]

The show must not go on. That is what activists are saying about the Toronto International Film Festival. Not for a lack of money or the worldwide attention it provides—but for its connections to environmental crimes like the tar sands.

The celebrity-filled Toronto festival closed on Saturday. But some environmentalists want it shut down for good, claiming the event is unsustainable. Protesters from EcoSanity and the Rainforest Action Network staged a “die-in” at the opening gala, pretending to die after sipping (fake) dirty oil from Champagne glasses a stone’s throw away from celebrities like George Clooney signing autographs on the red carpet.

“Celebrities have power, and with power comes responsibility,” says EcoSanity founder Glenn MacIntosh. “They need to know what they are promoting when they attend festivals like TIFF, because currently they are being irresponsible.”

MacIntosh says TIFF—and celebrities through association—help to further dirty oil’s cause. TIFF’s second-largest sponsor is the Royal Bank of Canada, Canada’s largest financier of tar sands development. Critics say TIFF’s acceptance of RBC’s sponsorship is an endorsement of its policy on furthering climate change for black gold.

George Clooney’s people say there is no association between him and his new film launched at TIFF, The Men Who Stare at Goats, and the tar sands.

MacIntosh retorts: “Appearing to have no knowledge of the second-largest sponsor of an event’s dealings with the largest industrial project on the planet is simply offensive. If celebrities like George Clooney are not aware, they need to become aware and fast—they have a moral responsibility to do so.”

EcoSanity activists claim the Royal Bank of Canada has spent $8.9 billion over the last four years on companies that operate in or develop the Canadian oil sands. The oil sands are soon to become Canadians’ single largest source of greenhouse gases. It will prevent us from meeting our future climate commitments at Copenhagen and has numerous environmental and social costs to Canada. Furthering the tar sands signals a fossil fuel business-as-usual mandate instead of a switch to a renewable and sustainable path in the 21st century.

There have been numerous protests across Canada this summer against the RBC getting in bed, with what many call, the greatest eco-crime on earth. Such protests include RAN activist, Eriel Deranger, scaling a pole last July at the RBC’s headquarters to drop a banner that would embarrass the bank.

Deranger says: “The RBC is the ATM to the tar sands. This needs to be stopped, we need to hold our banks accountable.”

But never before had this message been taken to the Toronto film fest until the “die-in” protest at the George Clooney gala. While some onlookers called the stunt “out of place” at the festival, MacIntosh says the protest served a purpose. For him, a former assistant director in the Toronto film industry, he believes festivals like TIFF are the root problem to many wrongs in our society and need to be stopped.

“TIFF represents an imbalance of power, the inequality in the world, our reverence and investment in all the wrong things financially and morally.” He also says that TIFF has no environmental policy, promotes a culture of excess and uses thousands of SUV’s, limos and private jets to truck in the film industry top dogs from around the world. “This is not an environmentally sound festival.”

In an age of climate change where we are supposed to be reducing our polluting ways and moving towards a path of sustainability—do festivals like TIFF really have a place with us any longer? All in name of watching a few more movies and gawking at a few more people—is it really worth the oil it uses?

An Indian surrogate mother takes her first, and last, look at the child she has carried for another couple in this still from Zippi Brand Frank's film Google Baby

I saw the future of outsourcing at TIFF this week, and it’s not pretty. The award-winning documentary Google Baby follows Doron, who sees the need for affordable, outsourced babies after he and his partner spent $140 thousand having a baby in the United States. He forms a team of like-minded entrepreneurs across the globe and we get to watch them make a baby.

Couples come to him with their egg donor requirements, from skin colour to education level, and he helps them navigate an American egg eBay. He ships sperm to the United States for fertilization and follows most of the action from Israel via Skype. When the four-cell embryo arrives only weeks later, Doron packs his trusty liquid nitrogen tank in a suitcase and jets off to India to hand deliver it.

Dr. Patel finds Indian women willing to carry a baby in return for enough money to buy a small house for their own children. While she is kind and understanding with the women who live in her clinic for the better part of a year, she’s quite clear that this is a business, and they are her employees. The parents fly in for the delivery and then leave with the baby.

I’d always thought I was pretty open minded when it came to reproductive rights: your body, your choice, none of my business. But this movie has me thinking. Eggs harvested and then bought and sold online. Women with the most in-demand traits designated “premium” donors, while women without a place to hang their saris rent their wombs for $4,000 to $6,000.

Doron uses the word “production” so often you can’t help but wonder if he’s completely detached himself from thinking about the people involved. Patel spends most of the movie on her cell phone, even taking a call while stitching up a surrogate’s Cesarean incision.

While everyone in the film makes his or her own decisions, and gets what they want out of the deal, be it cash or a baby, it all seems a little too brisk for comfort.

[Editor’s note: This Magazine columns editor Eva Salinas will be reviewing films and rounding up news about the Toronto International Film Festival over the next week. Visit us online next week for more of her dispatches.]

And so it begins. This year’s edition of the Toronto International Film Festival kicked-off last night, a little later in the year than usual. By doing so, it opened on the eve of September 11th, a day which many are marking for events not long past. But just a few blocks from Hollywood North, not far from where, already, celeb-gawkers gape, security personnel stand tall and Starbucks baristas break a sweat, Toronto’s Latin American community is commemorating a Sept. 11th many have forgotten — the 1973 military coup in Chile.

I have Chile on the brain, having just returned from the country and regretting that I will miss its public remembrance of lives lost, of rights violated and of expression stifled during Augusto Pinochet’s early reign.

In Toronto, it’s also the start to the Allende Arts Festival, a celebration of everything TIFF won’t be: mostly free, for the people.

During Chile’s coup, the elected Marxist President, Salvador Allende, was ousted and killed. But today, with the country’s first female leader Michelle Bachelet in her last months of presidency, Allende’s spirit is alive; art has been returned to the public.

The streets of Valparaiso, the country’s port city, are splashed with colour: detailed landscapes; romantic poetry; striking designs painted on every house or storefront. Art you can’t buy. Art for everyone.

TIFF may be its exact antithesis (or vice versa). Instead of the nameless painter, it has a famous face. Instead of stray dogs, pampered pets drink filtered water from dishes laid out for them on Yorkville Avenue. Instead of subtlety, extravagance.

I can’t decide whether I find TIFF unappealing simply because it is mostly an elitist event. I’m too young to know it any other way, to remember the “people’s festival.”  I assume, like me, most Torontonians have yet to attend a screening. Once, maybe three, four years ago, I waited in line for two hours, after which I gave up. (And, for context, I am a film lover: a Hot Docs volunteer, an attendee of festivals around the world, from Sudbury to West Africa, etc.)

Quirky Reg Hartt, the cinephile who runs the Cineforum screening series out of his home in Toronto, told community paper The Annex Gleaner last year that the film festival was bad for the city, as people will “save up” their film enthusiasm and spend it on the fest, thus killing business the rest of the year for smaller festival and cinemas.

I’m not convinced. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if the upcoming Toronto Palestine Film Festival and Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Film Festival have a bit of trouble drumming up interest in its wake. But as a promoter of the latter told me: “Of course it’s all about TIFF! But we’re the bargain basement alternative to that!” I agree: different vibe, different audience, albeit one less celeb-obsessed and much poorer.

The festival may be for those with the time, commitment and ultimately, the cash (or star power, which supercedes all), but it’s hard not to feel the excitement in the city, even if we don’t make it to Edward Rogers’ backyard party with Bill Clinton and Matt Damon, Steve Nash’s rooftop soiree or bump into Oprah on Ossington (yeah, right).

And TIFF is, after all, a celebration of film (complete with excesses, controversy, promiscuity, and grotesque celeb worship – last year, I drew the line at Paris Hilton’s party.) And it is at home, making sure Canadian content is in front of eyeballs that wouldn’t see it at, say, Venice, Cannes or Sundance. (Alliance Films picked up Rob Stefaniuk’s Suck earlier this week). And, lastly but of note, the festival has made an attempt this year to make it more accessible to the public, with free screenings at Dundas Square.

So, for those indulging in the festival fit for kings, bon appeTIFF!

Frame from "Picture Start," a video installation screening as part of the Toronto International Film Festival.

It’s a familiar ritual in movie palaces and multiplexes all over the country. You find yourself in a lineup for a film that you know nothing about, aside from its reputation as a remarkable new work by a hot young director from the Carpathians, or maybe Polynesia. For sustenance, you have foregone popcorn in favour of an overpriced offering from the gourmet sandwich cart; it is the only food you will eat that day. You sit down among a chattering crowd of movie-industry insiders and/or civilians who’ve taken a week off work to do just this.

When you see the film, it is moving or hard-hitting or informative or not very good. Afterward, there is a stilted Q&A with the somewhat stunned-looking director, who does his or her best to answer questions that are incomprehensible even before they are translated into whatever language is required. You leave the theatre and head directly for the next lineup. The cycle begins anew.

Festival junkies seem to love it. But the trouble with turning moviegoing into such a special event is that it makes going into a theatre on any other occasion seem distinctly unglamorous. What’s more, the ever-shrinking piece of the marketplace for non-mainstream fare is indicative of a less-welcome phenomenon: films that generate buzz and sell out venues at festivals are failing to find audiences upon regular release — that is, when they actually stand to make a buck. And festivals may be hurting as much as they’re helping.

Festival-going is certainly more feasible than it’s ever been thanks to the abundance of events throughout the country. Though the Toronto International Film Festival remains the most prominent as a star magnet, Toronto is the site of dozens of other festivals, each with a special focus — documentaries, experimental movies, movies about music, movies for kids, movies with queer content, and so on.

Montreal has a comparable diversity, including two major fests in the fall. Indeed, it recently had three duking it out—in 2004, the government funding bodies pulled their support from the World Film Festival after a battle with founder Serge Losique and got behind New Montreal Film Fest, only to see Losique emerge victorious when the newcomer flopped.

This fall also features major events in Vancouver, Sudbury, Calgary, and Halifax. Audiences in Whistler and Kingston are not deprived since they get fests later in the winter. In fact, TIFF’s Film Circuit division circulates movies to 200 groups in 164 small towns and communities so that special festival vibe can be simulated just about anywhere that has a room large enough for a decent screen and another room to accommodate a discussion about recent Central Asian cinema.

Robust box-office numbers have thus far spared the movie business from suffering the same hardships as other industries, but the situation was already bad for smaller players before the recession hit. The so-called indie film boom of the ’90s was widely pronounced dead last fall when several mini-studios devoted to specialty titles were shuttered by their corporate parents. One of the movies to suddenly be left without a distributor was Slumdog Millionaire, which was very nearly lost in the shuffle. While hits like Slumdog, Juno, and Little Miss Sunshine have still done big business in recent years, far more titles disappear without a trace. That’s especially true of little movies that don’t happen to feature the same stars as their more heavily marketed Hollywood counterparts.

This year’s been particularly brutal for anything not starring fighting robots — in the first part of 2009, only Sunshine Cleaning, a cutesy dramedy starring Amy Adams, had the legs necessary for a smaller title to do decent business. Many rep theatres that used to specialize in second-run or art-house titles have discovered they’re better off booking double bills of ’80s favourites, cult curios, or even their own mini-festivals.

Programmers, theatre owners, and distributors are understandably flummoxed by the trend that’s emerging. Nearly every city in Canada boasts an increasingly cine-literate and enthusiastic pool of moviegoers who mobilize themselves with program books and flock to their favourite festivals. For example, Hot Docs had its biggest turnout ever in 2009.

And yet those audiences seem oddly disinclined to support the very same titles when they show up at the multiplex without that frisson of excitement only a festival can provide. Yes, Slumdog Millionaire went on to Oscar glory and boffo box office after winning TIFF’s People’s Choice Award last year, but the same fate was not meted out to past winners like Bella or Zatoichi.

Of course, one easy answer is that the festival crowd has seen these movies already and doesn’t need to rush back to theatres when they get a broader release. But even so, they’re evidently not doing much to stoke that ever-important word-of-mouth buzz that replaces a proper marketing campaign for most low-budget films (which, it should be noted, generally don’t earn screening or rental fees for use in festivals).

It may seem wrongheaded to blame festival-goers for their enthusiasm — they who are already three movies deep in a five-movie day, ready to make that next great discovery—but the delicate ecosystem required to support a truly vibrant film culture demands something more of them.