The Rocchi Report: Before Toronto

I grew up near here, but at the time it wasn't near at all; Toronto was just stations on the TV, voices on the radio, where the Sunday paper came from. It was an hour-and-a-half drive, or a well-planned afternoon on a terrific transit system, and it was a world away. Coming to Toronto for the Film Festival is, for me, always a bit disconcerting -- I remember how awestruck I felt at age 14 seeing the inside of Toronto's retail landmark Eaton Centre for the first time. Bear in mind, the Eaton Centre is a mall with one thing going for it: It is enclosed during winter. But I was easily impressed. In many ways, I still am, and grateful for it.

And Toronto never leaves my mind. How could it? I watch the trailers for movies I wouldn't watch in a thousand years and, yes, there's Milla Jovovitch running down Toronto 's City Hall building, as it explodes about her. Or I perk up during a dull action film for two things: Brian Cox and the moment Chow-Yun Fat strides by a Toronto Sun box. Or the music of Broken Social Scene playing counterpoint to Ryan Gosling's imploding life in Half Nelson. These things crop up everywhere.

Or they do if you look for them, and all Canadians are cultural critics at heart -- early on you're told That culture is not you. It's not you because it's American, French-Canadian, English-Canadian; spinning the TV dial was an act of cultural roulette. And you went to the movies at a big movie palace, The Tivoli, and for a few dizzy Star Wars-Indiana-Jones-Aliens years, you would be part of a line that stretched down the block past the funeral parlor.

And I'm still lining up for the movies -- waking up before the farmers, as Charlie Farquharson would say, to get to the TIFF public ticket box office on Wednesday morning, when individual tickets first went on sale. In my sights: The Guy Maddin. Midnight tickets for The Host. The Magic Flute (or, as my oldest brother calls it, "Mozart's Masonic conspiracy leak opera.") I'm hoping my dad can meet me for Seraphim Falls -- I'd love to talk about that afterwards with him. The last time I was able to do that persuade my dad to join me at TIFF was for The Four Feathers , and I remembered watching the 1939 Zoltan Korda version on Ontario Public TV with Elwy Yost -- a modest, magnificent entertainment journalist -- in the living room with my dad, lying on the carpet on my side on a Saturday night as he and my mom explained the history of Empire and great British character actors. Is the original better? I don't recall; I think it was, but I think I prefer the film as a dream, not a memory.

I've come up here to watch movies for eleven days, and I'm still excited about seeing movies with my friends and family. Some time in my youth, I watched the CBC documentary Ladies and Gentleman, Mr. Leonard Cohen. At one point, they show Cohen the footage they have and film his reaction. Looking as the screen displays the image of him in sleeping in bed, Cohen says words to the effect that it is a privileged thing to be able to watch yourself sleep. And it a privileged thing to watch other people dream, to hear stories, to share stories. When I grew up, Toronto was the place where stories came from: On the TV, on the radio. All the movies opened in Toronto before anywhere else in -- sometimes even at the same time as they did in New York and Los Angeles !

Toronto 's a movie town -- a location, a place of stories, a nexus of distribution. It's somewhere between all the places movies come from, and it broke my heart a bit to realize that a lot of the movies I grew up with -- from Meatballs to Shivers -- were funded by state money, American dentists seeking a tax shelter or some warped mix of both, thereby combining the worst aspects of European Socialism and American Capitalism. It's an unholy alliance that spat out bad movies and kept Canadian actors employed -- while it's hard not to snicker gazing on The Kids in the Hall's Scott Thompson as a time-machine operator in Millennium, it was work, and I have done worse. No, I have -- a summer spent as a background extra on a straight-to-video horror film. It is a distant memory (although I remember it involved Satan and a rock band, that it was very awkward watching the unexpected nude scene with my parents, and that it is mercifully not on DVD) of the summer when I was 17.

Nearly two decades later, it's the end of summer; time moves on and so do we all. I'm back in Toronto , back to cover the Film Festival for the fourth or fifth time, and it's still a movie town. It's still, for me, where the stories came from first. This is one of the few major film festivals in the world that takes place where people actually live, and it's a wonderful thing that, yes, people who live here can buy tickets for it. I got to the Box Office at about 5:00 Wednesday morning, and there was already a line of people ahead of me. Many films -- Death of a President, Borat, Stranger than Fiction -- were sold out, but there were hundreds more to be discovered. I live far away from here now, but at the same time Toronto is always very close -- every time I connect with family and friends, every time some runaway production shoots the Thornhill Square Mall as the last stand for humanity. This is a great festival; this is a great town.