Sarah Polley‘s Stories We Tell, a doc about memory, family and lineage, is nearly as good as what everyone has been teling me since Telluride. It goes on a little too long, but thoughtfully and probingly — certainly not in a criminal way.

There was criminality, however, in the tech crew at the Scotiabank plex allowIng the lower 40% screen to be tinted with an amber-red exit light, which was coming from behind the screen.

This red-amber effect diluted the purity of the image, partly tarnished the color and, in my view, diminished the pleasure of the film by roughly 20% to 25%. If Polley had dropped by she would have hit the roof. I told a couple of senior volunteers about this and requested that the red-light effect not reoccur with any more films during the festival. Something like this is strictly bush-league — the kind of thing you might see in a rural plex in Dingleberry, New York. Is this a first-class festival or not?