While Toronto's other film fest caters to the stars, the Toronto Underground Film Festival delivers visual entertainment to the city's 1.3 million daily subway commuters.
Move over TIFF, there’s a new film festival in town, and it’s capturing the biggest audience of all. Ensuring that festival goers—and ordinary, public-transport using Torontonians alike—won’t be without visual entertainment for their commute, the Toronto Urban Film Festival kicked off today at a subway platform near you.
The concept itself is quite simple: until September 18, the over 300 Onestop LCD screens on TTC subway platforms will be periodically screening short films. The silent films are one-minute in length and will appear on screen every 10 minutes. Three stations (Dundas, St. Andrew and Bloor-Yonge) will also be showing the short films non-stop on their platform screens.
Created five years ago after a successful public photography exhibit at the Contact Festival, TUFF has grown considerably in size and importance along the way. This year, festival organizers received 370 entries from 32 countries and have accepted 63 films to be shown throughout the next 10 days. Impressively, this year TUFF has secured Atom Egoyan as a guest judge who, along with Angie Driscoll and Guillermina Buzio, will review all the selected films and award the winner a $2,500 cash prize from the City of Toronto.
And if you think TUFF is merely a gimmick to capitalize on the popularity of TIFF, you’re only partially right. “Of course, we do try to take advantage of the energy of film-viewing and film-loving in the city during TIFF,” said TUFF Director Sharon Switzer at this morning’s launch at Dundas station. “But we also have some really great material and essentially we are an alternative to TIFF.” And given that TUFF was named one of the 20 coolest film festivals of 2010 by MovieMaker magazine, Switzer might have a point.
With a potential daily audience of 1.3 million viewers, TUFF will undoubtedly be the more widely (albeit, passively) watched film-fest in town for the next week. All the films can also be found online, for those who don’t make a routine of taking the Better Way. And if film fests (or even films) aren’t your thing, just look on the bright side: over the next week, when you get tired waiting for the oft-unreliable TTC, at least you’ll have some entertainment to help pass the time.
TUFF runs from Sept. 9–18. Check out torontourbanfilmfestival.com to vote for your favourite films, which will be screened on Sept. 17. There will also be a panel discussion on Urban Screens at part of the festival at the Drake Hotel (1150 Queen St. W.) on Sept. 14.