TIFF Has a Whole Festival Happening Outside the Theatres – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The 51st Toronto International Film Festival is bringing the party to King Street West, and my friend from New York is about to discover what happens when TIFF spills out of the theatres

By Ross

I have spent an entirely unreasonable amount of time planning what my friend from New York is going to see at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (and admittedly not much else). Films have been circled, tickets have been purchased or arranged, restaurant reservations made, and everything mapped out around the complicated mathematics of getting from one thing to the next. But one part of TIFF doesn’t require a ticket, a reservation, or a carefully constructed spreadsheet. It is waiting right there, outside the theatres.

Festival Street returns to King Street West from September 10 to 13, turning the first weekend of TIFF into its own giant cinematic playground. Nearly half a million people are expected to fill the stretch between Peter Street and University Avenue, where the festival spills onto the street with live music, DJs, food trucks, public art, outdoor movies, community organizations, partner activations and all the glorious chaos that happens when a film festival decides it wants to be seen from the sidewalk too.

And this is the part I am particularly excited for my New York friend to experience. You can spend all day disappearing into dark theatres, emerging blinking into the September sunshine and immediately finding yourself surrounded by something completely unexpected. Maybe it is a disco-ball installation. Maybe it is a dog looking for a forever home. Maybe it is someone spinning records. Maybe it is a giant public artwork, a free outdoor screening, or a sudden encounter with something you absolutely did not have in your TIFF plan.

The Festival Street Art Market brings together organizations including Inside Out, Reel Asian, imagineNATIVE, Reel Canada, Workman Arts, Regent Park Film Festival, Toronto Public Library, and LIFT, while installations such as Naomi Jaye’s SLOW, MattCreates’ Disco Speakers, and the Tree of Cinema give the street some very good reasons to stop walking and start staring. There is also the Little Free Cinema, Fellini Forever, food, the TIFF Shop pop-up and enough partner activations to make wandering around feel like an event in itself.

And then there is Cinema Park at David Pecaut Square, where TIFF Cinematheque and Next Wave will offer free outdoor screenings, including City Lights, The F Word, Madagascar, and Now You See Me. There will be DJs across three stages, including Nino Brown, Young Teesh, Classic Roots, Big Sound Barbie, and Paul Chin (not that these names mean much to me). In other words, there is a pretty good chance that the soundtrack to walking between movies will itself become part of the TIFF experience.

This is what I love about the first weekend of TIFF. The festival has a way of escaping the theatres. It gets into the streets, into the crowds, into the food, the music, the photographs, the conversations, and the completely unplanned moments that were never on the original itinerary. Last year, I found myself sitting in the park, late into the night, watching a free screening of “Ghost” on a big screen, and it was glorious. My friend may come to Toronto expecting a film festival. But I’m hoping King Street gives them something they never knew they were coming to see.

Because I have spent all this time figuring out which movies we can possibly squeeze into those first days. The funny thing is, once we step outside, I have absolutely no idea what we are going to find.