In the Canada Free Press, Larry Anklewicz offers a few closing thoughts on the festival:

This is an exciting time to be in Toronto. The theatres are full and there is a buzz in the air. As an accredited member of the press, I had access to all the press conferences and all of the other events designed to get the word out about the individual films being screened at the Festival. There are also parties galore. Every night a different studio seems to be hosting an event of some kind.

To me, the films are the main story and as it is, I don’t have enough time to see as many films as I would like. So that’s the area upon which I try to focus my energy.

[Festival Press Release]: With a final tally of 328 films (including 98 world and 81 North American premieres), from 60 countries, unspooling over 10 days, the 29th Toronto International Film Festival wrapped on Sunday, September 19th with its annual Awards Brunch at the Four Seasons Hotel Toronto.

The complete list of winners follows, information provided by the festival.

The closing night party on the Queen's Quay harbourfront in Toronto.
[photo by Eugene Hernandez © indieWIRE]

Dan Brown from CBC reports on the closing night film at the Toronto International Film Festival:

The name of Martin Short's new film is Jiminy Glick In Lalawood. It stars Short as the title character, an interviewer of celebrities who is as clueless as he is corpulent. But here's the thing about the title: it's a misnomer. That's because the film doesn't take place in Tinseltown; it takes place in Toronto during the Toronto International Film Festival.

"I love the shallowness of it all!" Glick gushes while on the red carpet trying to harvest sound bites from the famous. Although it may seem on the surface that lines like this mean we're supposed to laugh at Short's portly alter ego, the former SCTV star is really having a big chuckle at the expense of his fellow stars, as well as the journalists who make a living producing news about them.

The Toronto International Film Festival has developed a status in recent years as the curtain-raiser to Oscar season, when trophy-hungry directors premier their late-season star-studded epics, biopics, and dramas, Cameron French reports in Reuters.

OK so final blog.

Shit, where to start. Well I am back in LA and had an amazing amount of trouble getting out of bed this morning, its friday 12 midday. It really should have been easier to get up seeing as Toronto time it is actually 3pm but apparently my body needed the sleep and it was gonna get it. So where did i leave off? Drag queens, covered that, Diesel party, cover that, my dads best friend and family, covered that, um so wednesday day....

"Incredibly gifted and uncompromising, Penn relishes complex film roles that make the public squirm and think deeply. His newest role, in Niels Mueller's 'The Assassination of Richard Nixon,' is another dark journey into a tortured mind and soul. Like his previous performances in '21 Grams' and 'Mystic River,' this part required Penn to turn himself inside out, and let all his internal organs and wires hang out," Gayle MacDonald speaks with Penn in Toronto for the Globe and Mail.

Tuesday Sept 14th

Tuesday was thankfully a slow relaxing, not much to-do day. We slept in of course til about 2pm, having not gone to sleep til 7am. I must say the day really does seem to slip thru your fingers quickly when it starts at 2 in the afternoon, not long before its dark again.

Producer Ben Barenholtz poses with one of the servers at the Bovine Sex Club, site of last night's party celebrating the debut of "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things." Snack food offered to attendees included grilled cheese sandwiches, mini-burgers, noodles and mac n' cheese.
[photo by Brian Brooks © indieWIRE]

"Their efforts to show up the Hollywood star machine in Toronto are captured in 'Why Can't I Be a Movie Star,' Neremberg's feature-length film, which got its premiere here this week," Etan Vlessing profiles the film in the Hollywood Reporter.

In the Miami Herald, Rene Rodriguez reports on sex and politics on the screen:

Halfway through the 29th Toronto International Film Festival, one trend has become inescapable.

In John Waters' endearingly silly, NC-17 rated A Dirty Shame, Tracey Ullman plays a prudish housewife who turns into a nymphomaniac after suffering a concussion. The underlying message of Bill Condon's Oscar-bound Kinsey, a drama about the life of 1950s sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson), is that when it comes to Americans' attitudes toward sex, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

if you're as sore as TIFF employee mike cameron from all the partying here in toronto, and you're as broke as we are, try getting a friend to walk on your back in lieu of a proper massage. it's free and relatively safe!

assuming no bones get broken, a good walk on the back will produce ecstatic results like this:

"So there we were whooping it up at a gay male strip club Sunday night -- Ladies Night! -- with the 'venereal Messiah" himself (of MTV's 'Jackass' fame), the ever delightfully tasteless director with the pencilled-in moustache, actress Selma Blair, 'X-Men' director Bryan Singer, actor Henry Thomas..." The Globe and Mail's Alexandra Gill spills all the debaucherous details of a celeb-filled night out at Toronto gay strip club Remmingtons. (And we do mean full-frontal).

"Director George Butler says he hasn't seen the ads that attack U.S. presidential hopeful John Kerry's record in Vietnam, noting that his documentary 'Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry,' was well under way before the commercials were first aired," Cameron French reports in Reuters.

A.O. Scott weighs in on a few Toronto festival films:

If you mixed up a handful of different breakfast cereals and flung it in the air, the randomly falling Corn Flakes, Cocoa Puffs and Froot Loops might appear to be arranging themselves, by color and shape, into interesting patterns and clusters. Similarly, if you gathered together more than 300 movies and scattered them across a large Canadian city, a serendipitous sense of order might emerge.

The image of cascading cereal does not come from left field but from "Mysterious Skin," a new movie directed by Gregg Araki that played this week at the film festival here. As it winds on, the festival, which began last Thursday and ends on Saturday, feels both utterly chaotic and at the same time governed by some strange, complex principle of symmetry. As you go from movie to movie to movie, they seem to pair off and bunch together.

The first beer of the festival seems eons ago...

Yesterday, outside the Windsor Arms hotel, a camel is wrangled for a party celebrating the Dubai International Film Festival.
[photo by Eugene Hernandez © indieWIRE]

Tom Long reports from the Toronto International Film Festival, for the Detroit News:

It may be an unusual business, but it’s also business as usual midway through the 29th Toronto International Film Festival, which began Thursday and runs through Saturday. Stars promote their films, publicists coddle the stars and corral journalists, gawkers take pictures of even the most marginally famous and — most importantly — tens of thousands of fans gather to celebrate cinematic efforts, both great and small.

The hands-down indie favorite is predictably “Sideways,” the latest from writer-director Alexander Payne (“About Schmidt,” “Election”), a hilarious and touching story of two buddies (Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church) on a road trip before one marries. Also garnering considerable buzz are “House of Flying Daggers” from “Hero” director Zhang Yimou and “Being Julia,” with Annette Bening as a cunning-yet-strained aging actress.

A pair of deals marked today's biz activity at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival, with Focus Features prevailing for the rights to Pawel Pawlikowski's latest well-received "My Summer of Love." Meanwhile, Newmarket continued its relationship with Lukas Moodysson by nabbing the director's much-discussed "A Hole in My Heart."

On the sidewalk outside Toronto hotspot Pangea, competing Hollywood trade reporters from New York, David Rooney (left) of Daily Variety and Ian Mohr of The Hollywood Reporter, work the phones. Rooney is leaving the film beat this month to become the paper's theater critic.
[photo by Eugene Hernandez © indieWIRE]

A.O. Scott reports from Toronto, in the New York Times:

By the time this year's Toronto International Film Festival ends on Saturday, 328 films will have been screened. Spread over the 10 days of the festival, which began on Thursday, that comes to more than 30 movies a day, which means, according to my bleary-eyed calculations, that to see one movie is to miss about seven others, and that the statistical accuracy of any single critic's impressions of the festival as a whole will be roughly 12.5 percent.

What this suggests is that the Toronto festival, which has become, during the last decade or so, the most important such event in North America, is really 8 or 12 or 35 festivals gathered under one roof. (The numbers are wildly imprecise, and the roof is metaphorical, because the screenings are in shopping-mall multiplexes, college auditoriums and concert halls scattered across this city's sprawling downtown business and entertainment districts.)

[Stunt woman Zoe, featured in the festival doc "Double Dare," is offering her take on the Toronto International Film Festival.]

Zoë’s DOUBLE DARE adventures in Toronto
(read to self with Kiwi accent for full effect)

OK, so as my first entry, I guess the theory is it should be full, in-depth, and informative. You know - creating foundations, setting the scene…I will do my best, but the truth is, I have a hangover and 25 minutes to shit, shower, shave and write before I head to a drag queen bar with one of our press guys to promote the movie. It’s hard, the life of a star, a documentary Diva…

John Waters ("A Dirty Shame") with filmmaker Bruce La Bruce ("Rasberry Reich"), taking a moment to pose at the Fine Line dinner last night. Later the night took a truly trashy turn at a local male strip club (read more below).
[photo by Eugene Hernandez © indieWIRE]

Today's Trigger Street Independent party at Amber in Yorkville. Guests mingled with Kevin Spacey and others over lunch and drinks on the outdoor deck. More to come on the party in iPOP.
[photo by Eugene Hernandez © indieWIRE]

Toronto's trendy Drake Hotel was the setting for an all-night party promoting two of the festival's weekend Gala premieres, "Clean" and "Childstar", on Friday night. The band Metric, who are adoringly portrayed by director Olivier Assayas in "Clean", made their stage appearance at 2:30 in the morning, and rocked well into the 4am last call. The festival lives down the star-studded event -- which included many of the films' stars, as well as directors Gus Van Sant and Harmony Korine, and cinematographer Christopher Doyle.

The "Jesus March," as one festival attendee called it, was a parade of Christian groups that made their way through the heart of the festival on Bloor street today, including a life-like Jesus, carrying a cross but not as bloody and beaten as the Christ depicted in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ."
[photo by Eugene Hernandez © indieWIRE]

In an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Rebecca Caldwell talks with local Chris Cooper, about the actor with the same name:

Where's the best place to catch Chris Cooper during the Toronto International Film Festival? Ensconced in the members-only Spoke Club? Holding court during press conferences at the Four Seasons? Checking out the late-night scene at the Drake Hotel?

Mr. Cooper says he's had to live with some teasing ever since the other Chris Cooper made their name such a marquee moniker.

Last night at the CityTV "Festival Schmooze", a popular annual party that is broadcast live on Canadian television, welcomed many notables to the ChumCity studios on Queen St. West. Pictured here is indieWIRE's Brian Brooks, inside the VIP green room, snapping a shot of the cast and crew of the Canadian film "Phil the Alien." More of Brian's pix will be published in Monday's edition of iPOP.
[photo by Eugene Hernandez © indieWIRE]

Glenn Lovell reports on the festival's hot films:

It's never easy to predict which films will become breakout hits. The Toronto International Film Festival (through Sept. 18) is making it doubly hard to play favorites because it boasts such a range of choices this year.

Still, let's give it a shot.

THINKFilm's David Fenkel and Daniel Katz, with indie film publicist and promoter Seth Carmichael at this morning's THINKFilm party.
[photo by Brian Brooks © indieWIRE]

Jim Atkins reports on the South African films in the festival:

David Isaacs is trying desperately to get to Toronto. The Cape Town actor/filmmaker is strapped for cash and this week was still in the process of obtaining a visa for Canada. He barely has enough for his airfare and still needs to nail down accommodation.

Isaacs is among the new breed of actors/filmmakers who are establishing a beachhead for South African movies on the world stage. His determination to rub shoulders with filmdom's movers-and-shakers in Toronto is indicative of the can-do spirit in the South African industry, according to Katherine Roberts, who teaches African film and is program director for the African and Creole Film Festival in Montreal.

John McKay and Megan Leach report on the opening night of the festival, for The National Post:

The latest edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, a "cultural jewel" and the largest and most prestigious film fest in the Western Hemisphere, is underway and bigger than ever.

Beatty was more than happy to take a step back and give his wife the spotlight. "You would never think that a human being would be able to do what this one does at home and still be what she is at work," he said of Bening.

Opening night at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival
[photo by Brian Brooks © indieWIRE]

Angela Baldassarre talks with Noah Cowan, Toronto International Film Festival director:

When the Toronto International Film Festival announced earlier this year that Noah Cowan would become the company's new co-director, there was a sigh of relief within the Toronto film community. Having worked with the festival, first as an intern and then as a programmer, since 1981, the boyish Cowan was the obvious successor to festival director Piers Handling. But when Cowan left the festival in 2001 to devote more attention to his film distribution company, Cowboy Pictures, there were no worthy contenders left for that position.

While at the festival Cowan co-founded the popular Midnight Madness programme, curated "India Now!" (with David Overbey), "New Beat of Japan" and the Kiyoshi Kurosawa Director's Spotlight. His influence at the festival is reverberating to this day. On a personal note, this scribe has been working with Cowan, the film writer and friend, since 1987, and has learned to value the man's knowledge and love of the media. Tandem talked to Noah Cowan about this year's festival and his new role as co-director.

Dan Brown reports on the Toronto International Film Festival for CBC News:

Opening night at the Toronto International Film Festival, as you may or may not know, is always reserved for a high-profile film with a Canadian pedigree. Being Julia qualifies because it was produced by Canada's Robert Lantos, the filmmaker known as much for CanCon classics like In Praise Of Older Women as he is for his prickly responses when reporters ask him about the Canadian-ness of his productions.

The ticket line at the festival box office inside the Manulife Center.
[photo by Eugene Hernandez © indieWIRE]

Festival press and industry screenings kicked off with a bang today, with a large crowd (no doubt drawn by the racy, erotic film description) mobbing the Varsity 4 theater for today's 12:45 p.m. screening of Lukas Moodysson's "A Hole In My Heart." Ten minutes before the showing, only a few seats were left inside and a crowd of at least 100 people were still hoping for a spot.

While Indiewood studio buyers were escorted in to the showing ahead of the line, execs from smaller New York companies were simply shut out (as were we at indieWIRE). Some grumbled that the screening should have been scheduled to accomodate more, given Moodysson's strong following, and a few rejected audience members exchanged angry words with screening staffers. Fest organizers quickly added another P & I showing for tomorrow.

One fest programmer who saw the film reported to us after the screening that a number of people walked out of the graphic, intense film.

Ho Anderson, in the Toronto Star:

Comprising 328 films, 21 screens and 10 days, the festival can sometimes seem unwieldy to people reared on the convenience of the suburban multiplex.

If you've ever felt intimidated by the process, relax - it makes you just like the rest of us. So you want to buy festival tickets. Where do you go? You have choices.

In article for xtra.ca, Shane Smith looks at the short films set to screen in Toronto this year:

Often the most interesting, original and provocative addition to a film festival, a good short is like an Olympic athlete — all muscle, no fat. Untainted by the commercial constraints handicapping many feature films, short film-makers are free to run their own race, resulting in tightly focussed, compact stories that retain the power to surprise, delight and leave you wanting more. And since the Toronto International Film Festival is the Olympics of film festivals, requiring world-class stamina to get through the obstacles (sold-out screenings, super-sized lineups) and hurdles (a program book that weighs more than your head, celeb-stuffed limos clogging the streets) of its action-packed 10 days, here’s a rundown of the mighty, meaty queer shorts that are on offer this year. Take the road less travelled and check out what the new kids on the cinematic block have to offer — you’ll find plenty of winners in these smart, speedy gems.