TIFF 2022: The Experience
This is a two month’s late recap, I know. But it’s still something that I wanted to get out there.
In the nine years that I have attended the Toronto International Film Festival, this year’s edition also happened to be my third year on the press, which also went and made it my first year back following the first lockdowns as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. For myself, it was huge. I’m a film student, within my final year of college, planning to make my thesis film, and something that I’ve already got ahead of myself to where I feel like I’d want to go within the industry.
But I talk about this only in here because I know this was the busiest year I’ve ever had at TIFF. I wanted to celebrate the festival like I had no tomorrow, like my life had depended on it, and trying to mix all of that with the fact that my time at school was going to be where I had to cram so much just so that I could maintain a nice work-life balance. Even then, I have all the confidence to say that in the many years that I’ve been attending TIFF, this has been one of the best festivals that I’ve attended in terms of the overall amount of movies that I saw.
I don’t say this lightly: I saw a whopping 34 films this year, and out of those 34, I only saw two that I can feel confident enough in saying that I disliked. For what essentially was my first festival back in person fully, I’d like to think it was entirely successful: even though I’m still missing the novelty of being able to cover most red carpets that I signed up for, rather than having to wait on another e-mail to confirm I have a spot (unfortunately, out of all the red carpets I was approved for, I got locked out of Women Talking). Not that I’m mad, when I was there for the films, after all — and I got to see a good chunk of what I wanted.
There’s still something that I do lament though, with regards to how the new protocol for red carpets was implemented this year: it’s the fact that some people who wanted to cover a lot of big premieres ultimately were shut out from getting the essential coverage that would have granted some of us the viewership that would have allowed us to go further. For starters, we mostly unable to get accepted into red carpets for many of the high-demand premieres going from Glass Onion, The Fabelmans, or The Whale. Though I did get to see all three of the aforementioned films in some form, I feel like at least being able to get a bit more to show for it would be nice — but I think I might have at least been compensated for the fact I was able to cover the red carpets for 3/4 of the Korean films that I saw there.
Nonetheless, it was a great year for me — and if there’s anything else, I’m looking forward to what next year has to present. So, with that said, since I said I saw 34 movies, here they all are:
The best of the best (or, the ones that I gave 5 stars on my Letterboxd)
The Fabelmans
Decision to Leave
Women Talking
Almost there, but still excellent!
The Banshees of Inisherin
No Bears
Triangle of Sadness
Leonor Will Never Die
The People’s Joker (aka the movie everyone’s been talking about, because it got pulled shortly after the premiere — so I now have some really insane bragging rights too!)
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Very good!
Broker
One Fine Morning
Project Wolf Hunting
Wendell & Wild
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Sick
Sisu
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
Hunt
Pacifiction
Some good, maybe not the must-see type
Walk Up
Emily
R.M.N.
Venus
Corsage
Bros
Holy Spider
Ehhhh…
EO
The Wonder
The Whale
On the Come Up
752 is Not a Number
A Man of Reason
Bad!
Empire of Light
The Son
This has been an otherwise great year — there’s a lot of reviews that I promise going on Cinema from the Spectrum and many other places, but seeing how things went from this festival only has my hopes higher up for future events. This has been a wonderful time, and I look forward to what next year has in store.
Hopefully by then, with me being out of film school, I don’t have to cram so much forward.
