Canada

The most memorable moments at film festivals are often encounters with other filmmakers. Making non-fiction movies can be isolating, especially during the post-production phase. To emerge from that to re-discover an international community of like-minded artists can be very re-energizing.

The Toronto Documentary Forum is a high-powered, pressurized event that happens alongside the Hot Docs film festival. A couple hundred commissioning editors and broadcasters from around the world gather for two days of project pitching.

Film festivals can be a rollercoaster of highs and lows.

A premiere can be an ecstatic experience, but there’s a bit of a hangover the next day. Now what? Will the movie get in more festivals or is this it? Is this movie going to sell? Will we make our money back?

My film BLAST!, about a group of physicists who travel from the Arctic to the Antarctic to launch a massive telescope into orbit. One of our main characters is Barth Netterfield, an astrophysics professor at the University of Toronto. His department organized a lovely reception for the movie.

Sometimes filmmaking comes down to arts and crafts.

We rushed to get our BLAST! poster done for the festival. So we wanted to make damn sure it was going to get seen as much as possible.

Missing Hot Docs in Toronto was my one big regret when I was on the festival circuit with my last film, Power Trip. It was 2003 and the SARS scare shut down the Toronto Documentary Forum and kept a lot of filmmakers home. I was already at the San Francisco Film Festival, and decided to cancel the trip to Toronto.