Thom Fitzgerald, the director of 3 Needles, shares his film fest experience in a series of diary entries. Here's his first "September 8, 2005: Festival Day One"

Uh, Dear Diary.

I'm on the plane from Halifax to Toronto, already exhausted, excited, euphoric and worn down. I'm off to the world premiere of 3 Needles. A diary is for secrets, isn't it? Here are a few that the public may not know.

The party starts today for many of you but for me it started weeks ago. The hopes, the politics, the disappointments do happen in the public arena at TIFF but often they happen before we even get there. You submit your film and you wait. You hear that one programmer likes it -- but you still wait. Will it be in a "good" programme? A "good" theatre? Then the politicking starts. You get the red carpet if your movie stars commit early to showing up, you get the multiplex if they don't. Will I get laminated party name tags? It seems in the weeks leading up to this festival, my worries have been consumed by troubles that already sound absurd.

All week my email box was "overflowed," my cell and office phone is "full" at the end of each day. Everybody called. Even Disney -- not Michael Eisner, but his junior assistant's secretary's assistant's European assistant. Or something like that. Distributors from around the globe. It's a frenzy. My own assistant told me he can't do his job because of all the calls… None of this indicates success. There are hundreds of people in the movie biz whose job it is to "track" new films, nobody wants to miss out. Every film is hot today.

Here's another secret. TIFF is as scary as it is great. The limelight burns if you're used to dark editing rooms. TIFF is a particularly scary place to premiere a Canadian film. Canadian critics aren't so fond of Canadian movies and it always helps to have a stamp of approval from somewhere abroad first. The cultural cringe is real -- I hope that doesn't offend anyone. But I've seen the word "Canadian" used as an insult in Canadian movie reviews so often it's just nuts. Reviewers will poke and prod a film to kill what's Canadian about it. I used songs by the 1970s Canadian group Lighthouse in my last film and the national paper questioned it … but having grown up in New York where those same songs were Top Ten, how the hell was I supposed to know they were Canadian? 3 Needles was shot around the globe including Africa and Asia, and so far I have seen one advance review of the new film and it voiced only one specific criticism: The Canadian accents. So screw it. I declare:

I. AM. NATURALIZED. CANADIAN. And damn proud of it.

I expect many celebrity sightings. What a banner year for films -- new Cronenberg, new Egoyan, Mehta's trilogy triumphantly completed, Gunnarson's epic. The international films look amazing. Hope I get to see some. I've never seen a movie during my four visits to TIFF.

I'm looking forward to seeing some of the actors in my film. Chloe Sevigny will be arriving, Shawn Ashmore is taking the red-eye. Sook-yin Lee will be on hand. Lucy Liu and Olympia Dukakis called wishing luck. It feels better to face the industry surrounded by friends.

I spotted my first celebrity. Not Viggo or Kevin. "Survivor" nudist Richard Hatch is sitting nearby on the plane. My celebrity radar is as finely tuned as ever! The plane has landed 90 minutes late due to rain in Toronto-which I think bodes well for tonight's opening film, Water.

I am giddy about one thing despite all my nerves. See, there is one reason why I keep coming back here to TIFF. One very good reason to have your world premiere here. Not hype, not sales, not the market opportunities. Come tomorrow night I will be face to face with that reason -- the good people of Toronto. They love movies.

Thom Fitzgerald's credits include writer, director, and producer on "The Hanging Garden", "Beefcake", "The Wild Dogs", "The Event". In 1997 "The Hanging Garden" won four Genie Awards and was the first English-Canadian film to win the most popular film award at the Toronto International Film Festival.