Brave Films, Wild Nights: 25 Years of Festival Fever

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Brave Films, Wild Nights is a large and lively celebration of the 25th
anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival. In its early
days, the festival drew on other festivals for its programming. In the
golden period of the 1980s, it served up an eclectic menu of Canadian,
Hollywood, and independent foreign films. In the 1990s, the increasingly
role of big business called into question the term “independent.”
Have the core values of the festival survived? On the last day of the
1999 festival, which Margot Kidder likened to the Democratic National
Convention, two critics, an actor, and a director sat in a half-empty
theatre and watched an extraordinary and elegant film by the Belgian
director Claire Denis.

Johnson deftly describes the festival’s history and prods us to
consider the growth of the Canadian film industry. Part of the fun of
the book is witnessing now-famous figures at the start of their careers.
Directors Atom Egoyan and Bruce McDonald showed their first films on the
sidewalk outside the University Theatre, while
actor-screenwriter-director Don McKellar once managed the Uptown
Theatre. Blending history and gossip, glitz and serious criticism, this
handsome, glossy book is a rich feast for all who love movies.
Black-and-white photographs appear on almost every page, and there are
two indexes.