TIFF Schedule Redux

What was I saying about unlucky box number 13? How the Film Festival advance draw works is that orders are placed in boxes as they turned in. Once the deadline passes, they pick a numbered box at random and start filling selections from there, and then move on to the next box in order. There were 40 boxes this year, and #22 was selected. So yeah, our picks had to wait until they came back around to #13.

I still ended up with most of my first choices, but understandably the more in-demand films were scarce by that point. Here’s what I didn’t get from my original schedule: Borat, Brand Upon the Brain!, The Last Kiss, The Fountain, Kurt Cobain About a Son, Jade Warrior, and Cashback. If your first choice is sold out and you’ve specified an optional second choice around the same time, they’ll try and fill that. From that process I picked up Candy, King and the Clown, Short Cuts Canada Programme 3, and Princess. Any unused tickets are given as vouchers to be exchanged for real tickets later on, and I ended up with 6 of these.

On Monday morning, a holiday here, I got up early and arrived at the box office to pick up my order at around 8:15 am. It opened at 10, and there were probably about 150 people in front of me. Once they started handed out the packages, it only took 15 minutes to get to the head of the line. The real reason for getting there so early was because we then had the chance to exchange tickets & vouchers — a nice little bonus before individual tix went on sale to the public early this morning. This lineup took about 90 minutes, but at the end of it I was able to get:

• tickets for the second showing of The Fountain for Sven, Mandy, and I from 3 of the vouchers
• switched up showtimes of Monkey Warfare …
• … to use 1 voucher on the same showtime of Cashback as Sven and Mandy
• the same for Mike from his package, except for seeing Cashback

The leaves me with 2 vouchers, and I’m hoping to get use them to get into the original Borat and Brand Upon the Brain screenings I wanted. I’ll give the Rush lines a shot for the first time … I’m anticipating both will be pretty hard to get into, but hopefully it turns out well.

Finally, it would have been cool to see The Last Kiss early and with a bunch of the cast likely present. But it opens up in theatres on the 15th anyway and I don’t have any movies scheduled that day, so Sakina and I (and possibly Xiaoxin) are planning on just going then.

So all told, besides whatever happens with the last two vouchers, my schedule now looks like this.