The Diary of a TIFF Newbie. WELCOME TO THE MADNESS.

Friends and family of Midnight Madness,

My name is Nancy Taylor, and I am a TIFF newbie. I am a senior at Syracuse University and will making the trek up to Toronto in my yellow Jeep Wrangler for my first TIFF, and thus my first Midnight Madness! I have already seen two of the films from the highly anticipated line up, including David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows and Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows. They are incredible, enticing, terrifying and satisfying--in completely different ways, so I am beyond enthusiastic to see what the rest of the line up has in store for me.

(Side note: here I am with my good friend Wey and Jemaine Clement after the screening of What We Do in the Shadows at Sundance 2014. )

You may be asking yourself, how does a college student manage to intern at Cannes, Sundance and TIFF? Well, throughout my college career, I have been incredibly fortunate to participate in several of The Creative Mind Group’s internship programs, and I would not be going to Toronto if it weren’t for them.

Creative Minds is an internship program designed to help launch the careers of up and coming filmmakers by setting them up with host companies to intern with at the major film festivals throughout the world. They also arrange housing, festival accreditation and organize networking events with industry professionals, which is where I met Midnight Madness Programmer Colin Geddes. Check out the Creative Minds in Toronto promo video--it's awesome.

Anyway, it was a 9 am breakfast talk on the rooftop of a gorgeous hotel in Cannes. I had never heard of Midnight Madness before, but as soon as Colin casually mentioned his love for Hong Kong cinema and genre films—I had a feeling that MM was for me. 

I am a self proclaimed “genre cinephile,” so it seems that I have found a home in the Madness, before I have even stepped foot in Toronto. From now on, I would like to invite you all to join me on this journey as I chronicle my first experience at TIFF, in what I am calling “The Diary of a TIFF Newbie.”