Sep 04, 2008 - 09:30 AM

By John Foote

By the time you are reading this, I will be knee -deep in the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the 14th festival I have covered as a member of the press.

This year, I hope to see 45 films and have booked interviews with the likes of Ed Harris, Viggo Mortenson, Spike Lee, Anne Hathaway, Jonathan Demme, Atom Egoyan, the brothers Coen, Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, Paul Gross, Peter O'Toole, Ellen Burstyn, Martin Landau, Julianne Moore, Mickey Rourke, Darren Aronofsky, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Renee Zellweger, Colin Farrell, Edward Norton, Jon Voight, and best of all, Steven Soderbergh and Benicio Del Toro, the director and actor of Che, the massive four films about the life of the great revolutionary.

The film festival is a marathon event that makes serious physical and mental demands on the body. On average, I will see four, sometimes five films per day, with one or two interviews crammed in there. The screenings begin at dawn with more than 20 theatres going from 8 a.m. through to midnight for the world media and industry.

Armed with my fat program book, which lists and describes the more than 300 films from around the globe, I will spend the week before the festival choosing what I am interested in, nailing down interviews and answering e-mail requests from the U.S. movie studio reps asking me to interview the actors and directors. Some I will turn down simply because the films are the No. 1 priority here for me. If it comes down to interviewing Brad Pitt and seeing a film, the film always wins. Sorry, Brad.

On Sept. 4, I move into my digs for the festival run. I am covering the festival for several outlets, the largest the Los Angeles-based website, www.incontention.com, which gets more than five million hits per day, 87 per cent going to me.

My girls will come and visit for the weekend, Ariana thrilled to be able to swim and do some shopping at the Disney Store, Aurora happy for time in the city and Sherri happy for the break. After the year we have had, with Sherri's ongoing struggles with brain cancer, any sort of break from the routine is nice. I gave some serious thought to not doing the festival this year, but Sherri would not hear of it, insisting I go and not feel guilty about it.

"It is what you do" she told me.

The week before the festival we received some good news from the oncologist at the Odette Cancer Centre in Sunnybrook. They have made the decision not to start chemotherapy at this time as it appears that the radiation has done its job well enough for now. The eight-centimetre tumour is now just six centimetres and appears inactive at the moment. That is the news we were hoping for; chemotherapy meant we were in trouble. So now we enter the monitoring stage, still a waiting game, but a good place to be. To celebrate this news, Sherri decided to join my mom, sister and good friend Sue for a trip to Cuba in January. Go, with my blessings.

And while I will be enjoying the festival, the brightest lights I will see will be when my girls arrive to spend the weekend with me. I may not see much of them -- Daddy's working -- but when I come back to the room to utter chaos (assured), shopping bags and smiling faces, I am at home away from home for a few days.

So much has happened this past year: Sherri's brain cancer, my sister's illness that nearly took her from us (she's fine), the book deals, it seems one thing after another. Belief and positive thinking really can take you through some times . . . that and unconditional love.

So, yes, I am at the film festival doing what I love, seeing the films that I love, and waiting for those three girls I love best to arrive to make the festival complete.