Ten TUFF Years: A Look at Toronto’s Truly Underground Film Festival

If you’re a Torontonian familiar with the TTC subway system, you eyes have probably glanced skyward in many of the stations to catch a glimpse of their in-station screens. While waiting for trains (sometimes for longer than necessary), transit riders will look to these screens for service updates, weather reports, news headlines, sports scores, and a healthy dose of wordless advertisements.

Anyone familiar with Toronto during the month of September is already familiar with the biggest film-going event of the year, the Toronto International Film Festival. But every year around the same time, transit riders over the past decade have been treated and delighted by TUFF, The Toronto Urban Film Festival, which runs from September 10^th to the 18^th.  A once a year chance of pace on the subway platforms from commercials and train delay notifications (although those are still there), TUFF has been showcasing microshorts – roughly sixty seconds in length and which can be told visually without help from the soundless platform screens – from Canada and around the world to entertain TTC patrons.

North America’s first subway-based film festival was the brainchild of Sharon Switzer, a video artist by trade and the festival’s primary curator and director since its inception and headed into its landmark tenth anniversary.

“I worked with Onestop [the provider of the TTC platform screens and advertising] starting back in 2006, and back then the screens were very new. They had very little content on there other than advertising. There was an opportunity there for putting something on the screens that would be interesting to commuters,” she said about the humble genesis of TUFF during a phone interview back in mid-August while preparations for the festival were starting to solidify.

“In 2007 it began quietly. It was really a local kind of festival,” she goes on while explaining how the festival programming has grown and changed. We first reached out to filmmakers, video artists, professors, and no one had really thought of doing a festival like this ten years ago. No one had even heard of a subway film festival. We had a lot of education to do. When we first started, we had really urban themes, so it was really almost all about Toronto. That’s what has changed the most, and even though it’s an urban based film festival, we don’t have that specifically and exclusively urban focus in the films we show anymore in terms of the subject matter. We now get to just look for the best one minute films from around the world, and this year we had sixty different countries submit.”

From those sixty countries and 495 total submissions, 72 features were selected for inclusion in this year’s festival, 31 of which are Canadian, including a special TUFF Ten programme made up of shorts from past festival filmmakers. Like most festivals, there are awards for the best works to be handed out at the end determined by a guest judge. Past guest judges have read like a who’s who of Canadian filmmaking royalty: Don McKellar in 2009, Deepa Mehta in 2010, Atom Egoyan in 2011, Guy Maddin in 2014, and last year, Patricia Rozema. This year’s guest judge is Zaib Shaikh, who isn’t a filmmaker, but would be known to Torontonians as the city’s film commissioner.

Shaikh has a fun job ahead of him, and one that I envy greatly while working through the massive commitment of covering films during TIFF. Who wouldn’t want to be a judge of film festival where one could feasibly see everything in less than 90 minutes? And considering how long some people have to travel throughout the subway on a daily basis it might seem difficult at first to catch everything screening, but certainly not impossible. If one wanted to, they could head to Bloor, Dundas, or St. Clair stations where the screens will be turned at all times to festival programming (at all other stations, TUFF films screen approximately every five minutes or so), or they could head to a select number of Toronto Public Library branches to catch screenings during select business hours.

Each day brings on films of a new theme, kicking off with the aforementioned programme of returning filmmakers on the 10^th, and the range of stories told is exceptional given that filmmakers are essentially making silent shorts. They include films that can contain sight gags, political statements, social awareness, ecological concerns, and a whole range of other diversions, topics, and talking points.

This year, viewers can see films like The Solidier, a brief German animation of a daydreaming infantryman that’s equally mournful and hopeful, The Moment, a Indian drama where a homeless man’s act of kindness makes a young child’s day, and La Demiurge #1, an Italian film featured a choreographed dance number designed to look like a climax to an action blockbuster. Such films help to underline the sea change in what microshorts are now capable of conveying to audiences.

“We used to get a lot of experimental work, interesting video art, and shorter cuts of longer animations,” Switzer begins when talking about how the films for the festival have become more ambitious. “Early on, I think people didn’t know what to expect on those screens from something that wasn’t an ad, and also because a lot of what we were showing was quite experimental at the time. Now, we’re getting a lot more incredibly sophisticated one-minute dramas. People are getting used to telling a whole story in one minute and what that means from the pace of the editing and the kind of stories that can be told in that time and often without sound. The animation has always been a mainstay, but now we get far more live-action work than we used to,”

While TUFF isn’t the only microshort film festival in the world, it is one that offers filmmakers working within the format the largest amount of exposure.

“Filmmakers love the idea that over one million people will have the chance to see their film screened somewhere. That’s the key to the festival. Young filmmakers, established filmmakers, emerging talents, and experimental artists get more of a chance to show their work on a level they might otherwise not have gotten. They’re also reaching people who might not have otherwise attended a film festival. They have an entirely different audience. That being said, it’s still a different experience from being in a theatre and having people applaud for your film at the end of it.”

While the TTC has no control over the direction of the programming, Switzer says they have been supportive and enthusiastic about the project over the past decade. But while it’s nice that the festival’s de facto hosts love what Switzer and these filmmakers are doing, it’s the look on the faces of everyday TTC riders watching films that she loves the most.

“Often when people watch one of these films, one of the things I love the most is that if one person is looking at it, other people will start looking at it and they’ll all start congregating around this film while they’re waiting for the next train. It becomes a collective moment where people are sharing something instead of the solitary act of standing around in the subway. I really appreciate how this can bring people together and take them out of their regular routine. People are in their routines, especially during rush hour, so they don’t always look, but there are those moments where people notice something funny or touching and they laugh or are visibly moved by something. The best thing, and I have seen this, is where people purposefully miss their train to finish the film they’re watching. Then you know you’re really got to them,” Switzer says with a good natured chuckle.

TUFF runs from September 10 to the 18^th, and you can check out their website here for a full list of programmes and details.