Cameron Bailey, who is co-director of the TIFF, said "We have over 300 films at the Festival. About 260 of those are feature films, 122 of them are world premieres and they are from over 60 countries." Bailey heads a team of 20 programmers who scour the world every year for new films from veteran directors and first-timers. Bailey says they stress the "international" part of the festival title and it is something Canadian audiences welcome:

"I think we pride ourselves on being open-minded and curious about the rest of the world. We are not as inward looking as, maybe, some other countries …partly because, I think, particularly Toronto is such a diverse city. The majority of the population is people who were not born in Toronto, so we are outward looking. We are curious to see what the world is bringing to us and I think we pride ourselves on being engaged with the world, being fair minded, having a kind of ironic sense of humor about things (and) certainly never taking ourselves too seriously. I think you'll find that in the audiences at the movies here at the Festival," he said.

Irish writer-director Juanita Wilson was particularly moved by the audience response to her film "As If I Am Not There," a heartbreaking drama about women forced to be sex slaves during the war in Bosnia.

"There was a Bosnian couple who came up to talk to me. They had left because of the war and the woman was saying that she couldn't even listen to music from home because it was so sad and so upsetting. Yet she felt coming to this film was going to open a new chapter in her life. Things like that matter so much to me; and you make films for this reason, not for the awards and not for the reviews. You actually make it so that you can touch the hearts of real people and when you do it is such a privilege that you can do that when people are open to it. It just reaffirms the power of cinema," she said.