In the past, this has meant very early mornings camped out on Cumberland or at College Park, waiting for the box office to open. Over the past few years and as the organization of the festival has moved online, the need to be there at the crack of dawn has diminished, but there's still been a small charge in arriving at the box office and lining up with fellow cinephiles.
I arrived at the Lightbox just before 9:00 this morning and found the following:
Did a quick check with one of the staff to confirm that, yes, the box office was going to open at 10:00, so I had a seat and chatted with a couple of the early birds until 10:00.
There's always a change or two in the TIFF ecosystem each year, sometimes good; sometimes less so. This year they made the decision to not print a separate schedule for the festival, which put all the films on a calendar grid for easy viewing. In its place is the opportunity to download a CSV version of the schedule or to work with a third-party site called TIFFR. Not sure why they decided to dump the printed schedule, but they didn't announce this until a day or two before today. I don't think a smart thing to do from a communications perspective and I suspect that a consequence of this will be that the contingent of the TIFF audience that aren't comfortable with tech will head straight to the box office and, as a result, queues there could increase. We'll see how this plays out over the next few weeks.
With the launch of the schedule, it's time to dust off the blog and try to capture the fall of 2019 in all its splendour (or, at least, the splendour that presents itself to me).
