Seed & Spark Workshops
We’re very pleased to be partnering with Seed & Spark this year to offer two virtual workshops to filmmakers. With the highest crowdfunding success rate in the world for movies and shows and loads of free resources, tools and education, Seed & Spark exists to help pioneering storytellers take control of their creative careers. These […]
A Message
As awful as some of the images on the news have been lately, we are encouraged by the outpouring of righteous anger and the desire for constructive change. But the events that incited the protests have been happening for many many years, both here in Canada and around the world, and things won’t change overnight. […]
Expanding Our Reach
We love FilmFreeway. We were one of the first festivals to use this (Canadian!) film submission platform when it launched, and we continue to rely on it for quality film submissions. But we were finding that we weren’t receiving as many non-English language films as we’d like. After conducting a bit of research, we’ve decided […]
Short Com Festival Offers Fee Waiver
Recently I was contacted by Chris Aitken, Creative Director of Short Com, an excellent UK-based festival focussed on comedy shorts. He’s graciously offered a fee waiver for any filmmaker who reads our blog, Twitter, or Facebook posts. Here’s what he has to say: Short Com is a highly regarded short comedy film festival that has […]
Thursday June 21: Short Waves Festival Travelling Programme
This month we’re proud to present the travelling programme from Poland’s Short Waves Festival. In partnership with Ekran, Toronto’s Polish film festival, we’ll be presenting five award-winning short films from Poland, a country with a storied history of filmmaking, including such luminary directors as Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Roman Polanski, and Agnieszka Holland. Thursday June 21st […]
Thursday February 22: Recent Irish Shorts
Our first curated monthly screening is a partnership with the Toronto Irish Film Festival, which unspools its 8th edition from March 2-4th at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Festival co-director John Galway joins us to introduce their 2018 lineup and to present some great recent Irish short films. Lower prices will be in effect and all […]
Thank You Bloomsbury
A special thank you to Tanya Leet from Bloomsbury Publishing in New York for supplying some selections from the excellent 33⅓ series as giveaways for our July 18 screening. These have always been among my favourite books about music, with each writer given free reign to write in any way about their chosen LP. The […]
CityLife Film Project
A few weeks ago, filmmaker Dane Clark (Long Branch, January 2013 screening) contacted me in order to introduce me to his friend Tara Woodbury. Tara is the director of a really interesting program for young filmmakers called the CityLife Film Project. It’s an intensive multi-month workshop for “disadvantaged youth” from 18-25 to help them tell […]
Micro Films and Micro Loans
Back in 2006, I started lending money to small businesspeople around the world with Kiva. Over the past 6+ years, I’ve made 32 loans totalling more than $800. The beautiful part is that I’ve really only spent a fraction of that amount. You see, when these loans are paid back (and research shows that default […]
A World of Shorts: The Finale
At 5pm this Wednesday September 19th, at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema, we’ll lose an important part of the city’s cinema scene. The Canadian Film Centre’s monthly shorts series A World of Shorts will screen for the last time (see the full September lineup here). This is an additional blow to the news that the […]