Returning to his Toronto home after chairing the jury for first-time feature-film makers at the Venice festival, Atom Egoyan declared: "The entire film industry is suffering from what you might call the Pax Americana. Films like Pulp Fiction have changed and homogenised the practice of making movies. The production of images on this continent has become incredibly uniform and casual. Independent film-making now is just another version of the American Dream: Get a camera, digital film and an AVID editing suite, and you can strike gold. Maybe you'll find that mystic nugget."
Asked for his views on the Dogme 95 film-makers such as Lars von Trier, Egoyan was firmly dismissive. "Dogme 95 is nonsense," he said. "It's a marketing ploy. Those films have already been made - by extraordinary directors like Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, John Cassavetes and our own John M. Smith, Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault. It's a tradition that came out of our own National Film Board of Canada."
To mark its 25th anniversary this year, the Toronto International Film Festival commissioned the Preludes series, giving a free hand to 10 of Canada's leading directors to make a short film celebrating cinema. These were shown before most of the feature films screening in the festival. However, despite attending 30 screenings, I never saw the films directed by Atom Egoyan and Anne Wheeler - although I was forced to suffer some of the more irritating exercises over and over. Some were not worth a second glance, while others, such as David Cronenberg's Camera, made for satisfying viewing a couple of times but their appeal soon waned.
However, two Preludes comfortably withstood repeated viewing. One was Patricia Rozema's delightful This Might Be Good, set on stage and in the projection room during the festival itself and featuring Sarah Polley and Don McKellar, with cameos from festival director Piers Handling and Rozema herself. The other was Guy Maddin's wonderful The Heart of the World, a breathlessly paced melodrama made in the style of a Soviet silent classic and accompanied by a thrilling Nymanesque score. This is very much a stand-alone movie which would work outside its Toronto festival context and deserves wider exposure around the world.
THE versatile English director, Stephen Frears, was the subject of a special tribute programme at Toronto this year, with many of his former collaborators recalling their experiences of working with him, among them John Cusack, Christopher Hampton and Roddy Doyle. The guests also included Donald Westlake, the thriller writer whose book, The Grifters, was filmed by Frears, featuring Cusack. Westlake said he was attending the tribute because "23 of my books have been made into films since 1966, and Stephen Frears is the only one of those directors I would cross the street to speak to."
THE major prize-giving decision at Toronto, for the People's Choice award, which is voted by audience members, seemed a foregone conclusion even before the festival began. Ang Lee's exhilarating martial arts movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the most pleasurable presentation at Cannes back in May, was the clear frontrunner and it duly took the People's Choice award at the festival's closing lunch. The film is due to open in Ireland early in January.
Awarded second place by the Toronto audience was Rob Sitch's quirky Australian movie, The Dish, a behind-the-scenes take on the broadcast of the first footsteps on the moon. Another Australian film, Paul Cox's Innocence, dealing with the love affair of a sixtysomething couple, shared third place with Stephen Daldry's charming Billy Elliot, which goes on Irish release next Friday.
DESPITE the general seriousness of the discussion at the Toronto festival's press conference for the Beckett Film Project, there were some moments of levity. Aware that the conference was being carried on the Rogers cable channel in Toronto, Conor McPherson suggested that, for the delectation of the television audience, his fellow director, Damien O'Donnell, should stand up on his chair. This presumably had to something do with the fact that O'Donnell had turned up at the press conference wearing a kilt.