In all my years of working film festivals, I’ve never spent so much time sitting at a desk. Or at my dining room table. Or at the desk in my childhood bedroom. Or, once in a while, on the sofa. It was not just a symptom of the work-from-home life, although that was certainly a benefit when unexpected circumstances took me across the Atlantic for a chunk of the summer. Yet, it is a symptom of what we termed the “hybrid” festival – a balancing act of in-person and digital screenings that made up in public audiences what it lacked in the usual swarm of industry delegates.

Without industry delegates, I had no venue to build. I had no large building to run around all day, nor DIY jobs to undertake, nor corners to hide in when I’d had just about enough of everyone and their questions. Instead, I had a desk, and I had emails, and if I was very lucky, I had a quick hello with one of my filmmakers from behind our respective masks.

Last year, when I was merely a spectator to the festivals without a job of any kind to go to, I wrote about how I worried for the industry. This year, my worries have been appeased. And while much of what I missed last year has still not returned – not once this year did I get stuck in a corridor holding a heavy box because so-and-so actor needed to find a washroom – the wealth of film that the world has to offer has. Perhaps even more importantly, the audiences have returned to seek out those films that could otherwise be so easily lost to the wind.

As I sat in a socially-distanced theatre on opening night, the rows of masked faces spilling out behind me, I caught the eye of a guest slipping through the wings to the backstage area. He paused, just for a moment, and kept going, disappearing into the shadows behind the screen. As the credits rolled, I spied the director hovering by the edge of the stage, peeking around at this audience before her – not quite like normal, no, but people nevertheless. This one was not like the others.

A return to in-person screenings, but not quite like normal.

It is odd for all of us, whether filmmaker or staff or audience member. It is familiar and yet wildly different. The way I get a little misty-eyed as the festival’s opening sting rolls is the same, bringing me back three years to my first time at TIFF, still green to the city. The cramming in films back-to-back, in an effort to see as many as possible, is the same. Except that most of those take place in my living room, no mad dash from one venue to another with a muffin stuffed in my pocket as rocket fuel for the coming hours.

I didn’t stand in a single queue and, as anyone who has been to TIFF will tell you – Torontonians love a queue. I walked through deserted lobbies and thought fondly on the days when I couldn’t hear myself think through the crush of screenings weaving their way around one another.

The power of the films themselves came back to me, a rush to my gut in a way I needed more than I could realise. A good film – let alone a good slate of films – sends my creative wheels whirling. It gets my fingers itching to create, to write, to bring the stories I want to tell to screens like the ones I am watching. This summer has left me tired, frankly burned out, between working odd hours and storming my way through Europe. My creative well was dried up, forgotten, as I tried desperately just to keep going from one day through to the next.

I’m still tired. My legs burned and gave up through a measly 2KM run this morning and my head is heavy by noon. But the itch is there. My eyes flicker to my stack of notebooks, my brain fidgeting at which project it wants to work on next.

Coming out of TIFF 2021, I feel the most myself I have felt in a long time. This lifestyle is in my bones, whether it is at a desk or hauling furniture up three flights of stairs. I suspect the lack of physicality to this year’s role won’t have done me any harm, given the warning I was given two years ago by a masseuse that, “whatever it is you’ve been doing, you need to stop”.

Sitting in the TIFF building on the opening day of the festival in a quiet lounge, my old department head wandered by. I asked him how things were going and he shrugged a shoulder.

“I’m glad we’re doing it,” he said. “But I can’t wait for next year.”

I think I know what he means.

For reference, the films/events I’ve watched as part of TIFF 2021 are:

Mothering Sunday
Huda’s Salon
Compartment No. 6
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
In Conversation with… Benedict Cumberbatch
In Conversation with… Kenneth Branagh
I’m Your Man
Violet
The Worst Person In The World
France
Medusa
Attica
Silent Night
The Guilty
Dug Dug

This One Was Not Like the Others