Crowds at smaller city film festivals such as Windsor's are there for the enjoyment of cinema, rather than a possible brush with the stars, Barry Hertz writes.Windsor Film Festival/Supplied
This past Saturday in the heart of Windsor, Ont., I witnessed a rather remarkable sight.
In the middle of the day, with an entire weekend of chores and other preoccupations ahead of them, 150-plus locals gathered inside the Chrysler Theatre, located just steps from the Detroit River, to watch a small French film that will likely never screen in the city again.
The movie, A Private Life, boasted a genuine star in Jodie Foster (speaking fluent French, no less), and a directorial pedigree in the form of respected filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski. Yet it passed through the big players on the film-festival circuit – first Cannes, then TIFF – largely unnoticed. Or at least lacking the kind of must-see Oscar contender hype that might draw such a hearty and enthusiastic crowd.
What’s more: Unlike Cannes, TIFF or other high-wattage fests, there was no promise of a star appearance or red-carpet selfies in Windsor. The crowd was there for one reason: the movie.
This year's WIFF had its biggest lineup of film yet with 231 feature films and 25 shorts.Windsor Film Festival/Supplied
For those who live in the presumed centre of the universe, Canada’s film festival season begins and ends with TIFF. Yet regional festivals across the country have been quietly and doggedly serving their communities for decades and playing that much more of an important role given the increasing scarcity of big-screen space for anything that isn’t a big-budget blockbuster. And the Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF), which marked its 21st edition when it launched on Oct. 23, has come into its own as a committed, even feisty player in the fight to keep cinema alive outside of Canada’s major urban centres.
Not only does this year’s edition of WIFF, which runs through Nov. 2, boast its biggest lineup ever (231 feature films and 25 shorts, nearly enough to rival TIFF’s 292 titles), but it also does so without being built upon the back of celebrity.
A number of Canadian film-industry folks passed through this year’s fest over the weekend, including rising Quebec star Neil Elias Abdelwahab of the wedding dramedy Lovely Day; veteran director Matt Gallagher, whose documentary Prey startled audiences; and Quebec super-producer Sylvain Corbeil, whose Cannes-certified romcom Peak Everything made a victory-lap tour. And I was in town myself for a talk about my forthcoming showbiz book. But mostly, audiences came for the love of film, not fame.
On that front, there was more than enough to keep everyone inside one of WIFF’s main venues – including the beautiful and historic single-screen Capitol Theatre – for the duration of the fest.
There were small and worthy foreign-language films such as A Private Life and the lovely Iraqi drama The President’s Cake; such prestige Oscar hopefuls as Park Chan-wook’s sharp satire No Other Choice; and a wealth of Canadian work that might’ve been missed at TIFF by even the most devoted homegrown cinephiles (including the tense Montreal-shot drama The Cost of Heaven, which played Windsor before it has enjoyed a single Quebec screening).
On the domestic-cinema front, WIFF’s executive director and chief programmer, Vincent Georgie, has puts his money where his mouth is, with the festival awarding $25,000 to the winner of the juried WIFF Prize in Canadian Film.
This year, that prize was captured by Xiaodan He for her tender drama Montreal, My Beautiful, and the overwhelmed look on the director’s face when she accepted the award at a brunch this past Sunday was worth the drive to Windsor alone. (The cash award makes the WIFF Prize the second biggest purse in Canadian film, after the $50,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Prize handed out by the Toronto Film Critics Association.)
Windsor's film festivals comes with a $25,000 jury prize.Windsor Film Festival/Supplied
In the United States, regional festivals on the scale of WIFF or the Calgary International Film Festival have gradually become extensions of studios’ awards-circuit marketing schemes, with such destinations as the Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey and the Middleburg Film Festival in Virginia packed with both stars and impressionable Oscar voters.
In Canada, that’s not nearly the case, so regional events like WIFF, CIFF, the recently concluded St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival, or next month’s Whistler Film Festival exist not to act as carefully calculated awards-season launchpads, but to simply expose communities to a flood of cinema that might otherwise pass local moviegoers by completely.
There are risks, of course, when it comes to balancing community and sustainability, and WIFF’s size and ambitions seemingly put it right on the razor’s edge of that tension – a problem that TIFF has struggled with lately, albeit on a much larger stage and under a much brighter spotlight.
But for a city like Windsor – whose downtown, like so many other municipalities across the country, has visibly suffered in the wake of the pandemic – 11 days and nights of cinema can do wonders. Whether Jodie Foster chooses to make a stop or not.