At the first signs of fall, my husband, a cineaste, starts maniacally planning for TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival. The festival takes place in the first two weeks of September and, to me, it signals the changing of the seasons more than any gorgeous display of leaves. It's one of the only film festivals in the world that's widely open to commoners/plebes like us, not just Robert Redford and an entourage of the next it-hipster-filmmakers. 

This year we saw four films a day. Two days in a row. My husband did that for two weeks straight. 

He's a crazy fucker but I love him. Even if he did drag me to a four-hour Filipino movie shot with non-actors that ends with Raskolnikov-levels of crazy. ['Norte: The End of History']

In spite of that, I associate the festival with falling in love. When I first started dating Will, I visited him in Toronto during TIFF and we waited in lines that wrapped politely around the city streets. The weather was sunny and crisp and there was excitement in the air. We kissed under a metal stairway outside Massey Hall before seeing a Todd Solondz movie, with a Q+A afterwards. He had a lisp. 

That first year, we saw Geoffrey Rush casually smoking a cig on the street outside the TIFF Bell Lightbox, a big glass cathedral to cinema right in the heart of downtown Toronto. The next year, we ran into Chris Pratt leaving the party where we were arriving. "Ran into" like I know the dude. His handlers ushered him to a limo while I arrived with my mother-in-law (a casting director for David Cronenberg) so we could gorge ourselves on free oysters and fancy cocktails. 

I digress. 

The past couple of years, Will's gone whole-hog on pretentiousness and refuses to see anything at TIFF that will eventually get a wide release. So while we could be seeing the films that will win the Oscars months before anyone else, instead we're watching experimental foreign documentaries about pilgrims riding a funicular on their way to the Manakamana temple in Nepal. The film is at turns utterly boring and completely hilarious and breathtakingly beautiful. It's called 'Manakamana' and I doubt it's coming to a Netflix queue near you. 

The highlights this year was 'In The Shadow of Women,' a gorgeous black and white film from Philippe Garrel. Philippe also happens to be father to the super sexy French actor Louis Garrel, who at a Parisian club once approached my old roommate, took one look at her boyfriend, and sneered, oozing sex, "Qui est ca... ton petite frere?" Who's that, your little brother? Louis, you slay me. 

'In The Shadow of Women' is the story of an artistic film-making couple struggling to make ends meet, who both fall into affairs and then slowly discover each others' infidelities. It's sexy and funny and sad and poignant and romantic. It is the equivalent of crack cocaine for girls who love French New Wave.

We saw some duds; one always does. But even the bombs are bursting with the flavor of local character. There was the old Jewish couple who sat next to me during the art-shtetl flick, which they managed to stay awake for while I gently nodded off. Or the strange creature who sat beside us for the heartwarming Palestinian Arab Idol movie ['The Idol'] with his jacket draped over his head the entire film while he nibbled on peanut M&Ms like a burrowing animal. When he left there was weird candy detritus all over the floor and we stifled giggles. The world is a strange, strange place. Also we were cracked out on film four of the day.

Across the city, films screen at every movie theater, in beautiful old ivy-covered buildings on the University of Toronto campus, in gorgeous music halls. The eavesdropping is good; the people watching couldn't be better.

 On our final day, in between screenings, we stopped for Australian meat pies, grabbed some orange Muskoka chairs outside the Scotiabank Theater and enjoyed the procession of the crowds. The weather was grey but not cold. We had dressed up for our movie marathon. We had snacks and two movies down and two to go. A gentle looking woman in the Muskoka chair next to ours asked if she could take a photo. We weren't sure if she was aiming for the Toronto skyline in the background, or just two film nerds in their element. Either way we nodded, smiled and let her snap away.