Silent Films on Display at Subway Stations During TIFF

As the city revels with all the buzz around the Toronto International Film Festival, another film festival is treating subway commuters to short films on TTC subway platform screens.
Silent Films on Display at Subway Stations During TIFF
A screen at the Bloor-Yonge subway station displays a thank you ad from the organizers of the Toronto Urban Film Festival which runs Sept. 9-18. (Jeffrey Thompson/The Epoch Times)
9/14/2011
Updated:
10/1/2015
<a><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/TUFFScreen.jpg" alt="A screen at the Bloor-Yonge subway station displays a thank you ad from the organizers of the Toronto Urban Film Festival which runs Sept. 9-18.  (Jeffrey Thompson/The Epoch Times)" title="A screen at the Bloor-Yonge subway station displays a thank you ad from the organizers of the Toronto Urban Film Festival which runs Sept. 9-18.  (Jeffrey Thompson/The Epoch Times)" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-1797756"/></a>
A screen at the Bloor-Yonge subway station displays a thank you ad from the organizers of the Toronto Urban Film Festival which runs Sept. 9-18.  (Jeffrey Thompson/The Epoch Times)
As the city revels with all the buzz around the Toronto International Film Festival, another film festival is treating subway commuters to short films on TTC subway platform screens.

The Toronto Urban Film Festival, or TUFF, features urban-themed films from across Canada and around the world, playing every 10 minutes at 60 subway stations across the city on their more than 300 subway platform screens. All films are exactly 1 minute in length and are all silent.

The annual public festival is now in its fifth year. Sixty-one films were chosen for screening from 370 works submitted from 32 countries.

Sharon Switzer, executive director of TUFF, says the biggest change in the festival this year is how the films were chosen.

“This year we opened it up and just asked for anything that would be of interest to an urban public, so we got a big range of things,” says Switzer.

“In fact this year we got a lot of experimental films and animations.”

In addition to the subway system that sees 1.3 million commuters daily, the films are also shown in a screening room at the Drake Hotel in downtown Toronto as well as online where viewers can vote for their favourite films.

A guest jury selects the TUFF films each year, then a special guest judge chooses the winners of the festival’s top awards. There will also be a Viewers’ Choice Award.

Some of the highlights of this year’s selection include “a minute,” a silent film with a visual beat; “Courtship,” a watercolour animation based on family photographs; and “Hang Tough,” a snapshot of Queen Street West filmed on a 1960s 16mm Bell & Howell motion picture camera.

The festival started on Friday, Sept. 9, and will run through Sunday, Sept. 18, when it will conclude with the awards ceremony. Three winners will be selected by the guest judge and another award will go to the film voted by viewers.

This year’s guest judge is critically acclaimed director Atom Egoyan who will be giving out the awards.