Now we want to hear your experiences of past documentaries at TIFF - whether you're a filmmaker or a fan. Follow the comments link below, log on (it's quick and free!) and share your memories. Once the Festival gets started, you can contribute your post-screening thoughts and communicate on-line with directors.
To get this started, we'll hear from Sarah Price, who's coming to TIFF this year as the co-director of Summercamp! (above). She previously co-directed American Movie about the aspiring horror filmmaker Mark Borchardt and his burned out buddy Mike Schank. The film had financial backing from REM's Michael Stipe...
SARAH PRICE:
A funny memory at TIFF is from 1999 when we premiered
American Movie at a large venue. After the screening, Mark Borchardt's mom was set up in the lobby to sell
Coven tapes and a crowd bum-rushed the table. Michael Stipe got behind the table to help Monica with the sales. Mike Schank didn't know why some guitar dude from some band was helping out.
Here's Dustin Smith, who will be coming this year as an acquisitions rep from Roadside Attractions, the company that released Super Size Me...
DUSTIN SMITH:
In the fall of '99, I needed to see Errol Morris' Mr.
Death. Badly. I was living in Dayton,
Ohio and, despite having neither
the cash nor the time off work, I still COULD NOT miss this screening. I got off
work at 7:30 pm and made the drive to T.O. in a record seven hours. Of
course, I still couldn't afford a place to stay. But luckily the Days Inn
parking garage on Carlton was only CAN$12 a day, back when Canadian Dollars
still meant something.
So there I slept in the cramped backseat of my '88
Taurus under the harsh glare of the garage fluorescents, waking up just in time
for a trucker shower in the Days Inn lobby sink before heading to the Elgin for Mr. Morris' opus.
Nowadays my job at Roadside allows me to thankfully
spend more than six hours at the festival each year and to actually get
paid for the privilege.... Though they still make me sleep in the car.
And from Michael Galinsky, the co-director of Horns and Halos, a 2002 doc about a dissident publisher who ran afoul of George W. Bush...
MICHAEL GALINSKY:
We attended TIFF with one of the subjects of
documentary Horns and Halos, underground publisher, Sander
Hicks. Sander has a big personality and had kind of taken over the q and a's
following our screenings. The day after one screening we went to see Michael Moore speak to a small audience of attendees. He didn't show and the room was getting antsy.
After a few minutes someone a couple of rows away pointed at Sander and said, "That guy was in a film about Bush. Let him speak."
So Sander grabbed my shirt and pulled me on stage and began to detail things like Bush's connection to Bin Laden and
the Nazis. It wasn't
Farenheit 911 but it was close.
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